Materials of Tomorrow is a half day symposium exploring the potential of new sustainable materials within the design & architecture industries.
The event will feature voices from experts and practices that in various ways deal with and relate to circularity and regeneration through the lens of materials.
Partnership: 3 Days of Design Material Matters Office Kim Lenchow SPACE10
Organizers: SPACE10 3 Days of Design
Curator: Office Kim Lenchow
Exhibitor: Natural Materials Studio by Bonnie Hvillum
Hosts: Grant Gibson, Co-founder, Material Matters Helen Job, Head of Research, SPACE10
Speaker shortlist: Caroline Till – FranklinTill, UK Bonnie Hvillum – Natural Material Studies, Denmark Kim Lenchow – Office Kim Lenchow, Denmark Phil Ayres – Chair for Biohybrid Architecture, CITA / FUNGAR / FUNGATERIA Ineke Hans, Studio Ineke Hans, Germany/Holland Fernando Laposse – Designer, Mexico Akanksha Deo Sharma – Designer, IKEA, Sweden Flocus – Material start up, Italy, China and Netherlands
The FUNGAR consortium is delighted to announce the publication of the Fungal Architectures open access book which assembles the sixteen accepted papers for the MDPI Special Issue of the journal Biomimetics.
The print edition of this Special Issue is available here.
When we build today, we extract materials from finite resources and leave behind a landscape of emptied quarries, gravel pits and mines. In a future of sustainable construction, materials are bio-based and part of biological cycles in planetary balance. But must the biological materials necessarily be harvested? Or can we simply build living houses, where the materials are alive and contribute to CO2 storage, natural networks and biocycles? In the debate, we will examine opportunities and challenges for this across research and practice.
Moderator: Natalie Mossin, Head of Department, The Royal Academy – Architecture, Design and Conservation.
Professor Jan Wurm Regenerative Design and Biofabrication in Architecture, KU Leuven
Professor Phil Ayres The Royal Academy – Architecture, Design and Conservation
Natalie Mossin Head of Department, The Royal Academy – Architecture, Design and Conservation
Against a context of resource depletion, resource scarcity and projections of a surging increase in material demand over the coming decades, fungal materials offer a promising realm for expanding our material base. In this rapidly developing field, research has predominantly focused on the protocols of production and properties of denatured fungal materials. This remains a rich field of investigation with many emerging perspectives that promise to enhance and expand potentials for application.
In addition, new research perspectives are enriching the field of fungal materials by drawing upon understandings of the role fungi have played in the shaping and maintenance of Earth’s ecosystems; the roles they play as regulating networks for interspecies communication within forests; and of the fact that fungi demonstrate a high degree of proto-intelligence and show evidence of long-distance communication within their extended bodies, including decision making. This nascent research territory is predicated on working with and maintaining the living organism, with early studies focusing on the sensorial physiology of fungi and the analysis of the computational potential of mycelium networks.
In this Special Issue, we seek to bring together current research trajectories, with the anticipation that this can stimulate cross-over and the further enrichment of the field by exposing interfaces and methods for linking these efforts. We invite biologists, mycologists, material scientists, computer scientists, engineers, architects, physicists, and those from other disciplines to present results of their research within the field of fungal materials.
This Special Issue will open new horizons and research perspectives relevant to bio-fabrication and provide a body of insight that can spur developments in the design and synthesis of intelligent fungal architectures.
Topics considered include but are not limited to:
Chemical, mechanical and optical sensing of fungi;
Communication and information transfer in fungal networks and ecosystems;
Fabrication of pure mycelium materials and mycelium-bound composites and their applications;
Construction approaches for large-scale structures;
Functional grading and tuning of properties in mycelium-bound composites;
Modelling and simulation of fungal dynamics and/or fungal materials;
Methodologies for characterizing living fungal materials;
Enhancing the durability of fungal materials;
LCA of fungal materials.
This special issue is guest edited by:
Prof. Andrew Adamatzky Guest Editor Unconventional Computing Lab, Department of Computer Science and Creative Technology, University of the West of England, Bristol BS16 1QY, UK Interests: unconventional computing; fungal computing; reaction-diffusion computing; cellular automata; physarum computing; massive parallel computation; applied mathematics; collective intelligence and robotics
Prof. Dr. Han A.B. Wösten Guest Editor Microbiology, Department of Biology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands Interests: mushroom formation; fungal materials; fungal cell factories; fungal
Prof. Phil Ayres Guest Editor Centre for IT and Architecture, IBT, Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen, Denmark Interests: bio-hybrid architecture; living architecture; integrated design; computational design; bio-fabrication; kagome weaving
Why fungi could be the future of environmentally sustainable building materials
As the construction industry struggles to deal with its impact on the climate, a new crop of people with big ideas are looking for alternative materials to build with.
Phil Ayres (CITA / KADK), an architect and associate professor of architecture in Copenhagen, says the future of building materials might not be high tech polymers or specialty metals — but mushrooms.
Ayres joined Sparkhost Nora Young to discuss how he and his team are looking at how mycelium — the fibrous network that exists underneath a fungus — might be used as an environmentally sustainable building material.
Podcast page here – find the podcast under 466: Living Buildings Streaming option here
