GROWING ARCHITECTURE
04 Jun 2019
An installation of architectural structures grown from mushrooms has been unveiled for Milan Design Week 2019 as part of an experiment that aims to create sustainable and organic construction methods.
Image by Marco Beck Peccoz
The installation by Carlo Ratti Associati, called The Circular Garden, was grown over six weeks and will be returned to the soil at the end of the month. Each of the four structures is composed of a sequence of arches that together comprise one kilometre of mycelium. The project experiments with sustainable structures that can grow organically and then return to nature in a fully circular way.
Developed in partnership with energy company Eni, the structure is located within Brera’s Orto Botanico, the city’s botanical garden. “People have been using mycelium on a small scale, making bricks and packaging and so on, but something at this scale had never been done before,” Carlo Ratti said at the installation’s opening. “The reason we built it with catenaries is that the material hasn’t been studied that much from a structural point of view. Antoni Gaudí discovered that if you make catenaries, and you turn them upside down, you get pure compression structures — that’s where the shape came from.”
Image by Marco Beck Peccoz
The circular garden pushes the boundaries of mycelium, which is the fibrous root of mushrooms. “Mycelium is getting more and more applications everywhere,” continued Ratti. “I believe Ikea is using it for packaging, and people are using it for bottles of wine. But for us it was more to start thinking about what happens when we use it at an architectural scale. During Salone so much waste is produced — I really hate it. Last year we made a pavilion that was all recyclable, but there is so much waste that is produced this week — like any temporary fair.”
Image © designboom
The circular garden engages with Mycelium at the architectural scale, with a series of 60 four-metre-high arches scattered around the botanical garden. “I really love this place, it is one of my favourite places in Milan,” said Ratti, who is also a professor at MIT. “It is a piece of countryside in the centre of the city. Because it is so protected, we couldn’t bring in real spores, so we had to dry the structures in the oven to make sure we were not introducing things to the garden’s ecosystem. So, we had to do an additional part of production, which is not only growing the mycelium, but also drying it.”
Image by Marco Beck Peccoz
The mycelium was grown in the two months preceding the opening of the circular garden with the help of leading experts in the field of mycology — particularly the Dutch Krown.Bio lab. Spores were injected into organic material to start the growth process. “A garden has always been a place where everything comes from the earth, and then goes back to the earth,” Ratti continues. “The broader topic we wanted to explore was: can we do an installation that is like a real mushroom? So that in eight weeks it grows, before being shredded and returned to the earth.
“It was an experiment to try to do that at the scale of architecture. I dream of a future when architecture could grow like a plant. A plant’s code is so much smarter and for us it was a way to explore that.”
Image © designboom
Via designboom