theconversation.com: The world of fungi has attracted a lot of interest and seems to be becoming very fashionable of late. A new exhibition at Somerset House in London, for example, is dedicated to “the remarkable mushroom”. No surprise: we’re being promised that mushrooms may be the key to a sustainable future in fields as diverse as fashion, toxic spill clean ups, mental health and construction. It’s in this last field that my own interests lie.
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My first question going into this article was, how on Earth can fungus be anything strong and structural? It’s fungus—it’s soft. But, after reading a little bit more into the article, it made sense that it’s a material that’s created by manipulating the fungus as the initial material. I feel like people are afraid of moving towards more unconventional practices like this because, well, it sounds gross at first. But, with simple education, finding out that it’s just manipulation of fungus fibers makes the material seem a lot more functional. A side note, I notice that as time goes on and creative solutions to problems happening on Earth seem to be being solved by interdisciplinary practice—it’s no longer JUST architects. But now I see, it’s literal microbiologists involved too. It’s actually fascinating that this material grows naturally, and not just that it’s eliminating part of a need for fossil fuels in production, but that it recycles agricultural waste that exists anyways. I was super intrigued by the mycelium material, and found a biotech company in New York that designs ways to use this material for other things (mostly eliminating plastic) such as beauty sponges, shipping packaging, even vegan leather! Since the fibers are a structure, the final product is extremely versatile—from foam to VEGAN MEAT!!! I hope so much that this becomes a conventionally used material across the board of construction, product design, life in general.
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