Does living in a house covered with mushrooms feel “damp”?
This cylindrical structure looks like an oversized birthday cake covered in spider silk, like some kind of Ban To Cave or some obscure contemporary art work, but it’s not: the Growing Pavilion is a house. beneficial to the environment made entirely from matter that grows from Mother Earth.
The frame of the structure is made of wood, the floor is made of cattail grass compressed into blocks, and surrounded by autotrophic mushrooms. Growing Pavilion is one of the many highlights of Dutch Design Week taking place in Eindhoven. Two of the many studios behind this work are Company New Heroes and Krown-design; In particular, Krown-design is famous for designing and constructing architectural blocks made of mushrooms.
Jan Berbee, co-founder of Krown-design, explains that the EPS panels that cover most urban buildings emit three times their own volume of CO2 emissions. But when replacing EPS with filamentous fungi, the emissions from a building will be greatly reduced, because mushrooms absorb twice their weight of CO2.
But growing mushrooms is not difficult. Just a frame to pose, fill them with soil, and the mushrooms will grow on their own. The frame is quite large, up to 1.8 meters high and nearly 1 meter wide, but in less than a week, mushrooms have grown in the wooden frame. To protect the fungus from the effects of the environment, the designers sprayed the structure with a protective layer made of biological materials.
Berbee points out that mycelium is similar to a forest, the more it grows, the stronger it is. The mushroom wall also has the ability to isolate between the two environments outside and inside, so it is also one of the candidates for a future human Martian base wall.
But how does it feel to live in a house covered with mushrooms?
“ Mycelium products have a very mild odor ,” says Jan Berbee. ” It’s also hard to say what it smells like. Does champignon mushroom have an odor? Or do abalone mushrooms have a smell? “. It is possible to accurately describe the smell each person smells, but certainly the smell will be more pleasant than the few concrete and plastic things that cover most of our homes.