PHOTO/RENDERING: TERREFORM ONE
“Why grow a surface?” The answer to this question has been successfully pursued by the designers at Terreform ONE, a non-profit design group that promotes smart design in cities, “aiming to illuminate the environmental possibilities of New York City and inspire solutions in areas like it around the world.” With Mycoform, one of their most recent ventures, they’ve created prototypes of a new building material that’s grown from strains of fungi and “added to precise compacted forms of inert waste.” The process “occupies the intersection of parametric CAD design and synthetic biology,” with the curved shapes being digitally cut and the specific segments being grown. The combination of fungal mycelia with organic substrates leads to expansion that’s carefully controlled with prefab molds, literally creating the growth of the structural materials. The main objective of Mycoform is to “establish a smart, self-sufficient, perpetual-motion construction technology,” Terreform ONE says. The result is 100% organic with minimal waste and energy expenditure; plus, it could also be easily transferable to the developing world. And at the end of its life-cycle, Mycoform can be composted, reintroduced back into the environment, and naturally biodegraded.
Credits
Terreform ONE + Genspace
Principal Investigators
Mitchell Joachim, Oliver Medvedik, Melanie Fessel
Team
Maria Aiolova, Ellen Jorgenson, Shruti Grover, James Schwartz, Josue Ledema, Tania Doles, Philip Weller, Greg Pucillo, Shivina Harjani, Jesse Hull, Peter Zhang, Matthew Tarpley, Amanda O’Keefe, Bahar Avanoglu, Ipek Avanoglu, Brent Solomon, Pedro Galindo-Landeira, Yinan Li, Sophie Fabbri
