Growing Your House with Mycelium

The Growing Pavillion — a building in the Netherlands made from mushrooms — cleans the air as it grows.

A collaboration between Company New Heroes and Krown Design, this biobased building was built using only materials that grow on Earth, including timber and mycelium, the root structure of mushrooms. First molds were created and then filled with a hemp waste substrate for the mycelium to grow on. It took four days for the mycelium to fill the mold. The material was then pulled from the mold and dried in an oven to kill the mycelium.

The result is a strong, light product, which is shock-absorbing, fire retardant, and insulating. Mycelium helps the environment; as it grows, it captures twice its weight in carbon dioxide.

They believe that natural building materials are essential in the fight against the climate crisis. “Social challenges such as climate change, subsidence, CO2 emissions, and the scarcity of fossil fuels require new, sustainable solutions,” claims Diana van Bokhoven of Company New Heroes. “The call for a more biobased and circular economy is becoming increasingly necessary.”

She explained, “For now, good materials alone are not enough to make large-scale applications possible. Think about scaling up production, appropriate regulations, innovative designers, and conscious consumers.”

You can read the original article at www.livekindly.co

4 thoughts on “Growing Your House with Mycelium”

  1. Fascinating! I wonder how moisture resistant it is, seeing it outdoors. I know the cell walls of mushrooms is made of chitin, the same substance the exoskeleton of insects is made of, and imagine the mycelium would be too. Having seen the undigested wing cases of beetles in fox poo, I would imagine the stuff to be acid proof too. I’ve also seen mycelium being used for growing garments, at least experimentally. And you could eat the byproduct.

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