Circular Construction Lab

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MycoShell is an installation that exhibits the potential of biological self-growing and adaptive building materials toward a collaborative future of the digital and the analog. Designed to reflect the advancing research of the MycoBuilt project, a cross-disciplinary collaboration of faculty and students in mycology, engineering, and architecture at Cornell University, MycoShell is constructed of structural mycelium-bound composite panels that have been grown from a local fungal strain of the Ganoderma family on regional agricultural by-products of corn and hemp. Additionally reinforced with natural fibers, the result is a bio-based, carbon-negative, and fully circular building component with structural capacities.

MycoShell engages these mycelium-bound panels to form a compression-optimized vault built from individual catenary arches. Analog material lab tests were used to characterize the structural capacity of the material, informing digital form finding and optimization strategies that maximize compression and reduce bending and tension in the final form. Paired with parametric design and digital fabrication, the final vault is optimized to reduce formwork through minimal unit variations. The panels were grown over the course of several months in the research labs at Cornell University, and finally dehydrated with the use of specially built solar ovens to limit embodied carbon emissions from manufacturing.

Resting on timber logs, MycoShell’s individual panels were woven together on site during the 2024 BuildFest using the fabric of its natural fiber reinforcement. The collective activities work to reconsider biomaterials’ role in building and leverage streamlined, prefabricated bio- fabrication processes with on-site communal building activities. The final vault is situated along and reacts to the historic site of the Bindy Bazaar, a counterculture marketplace set up during the 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Fair in Bethel Woods, built within and from the materials of the forest. MycoShell similarly is imagined coming from the trees and returning to nature over the course of the next couple years under close observation to test the durability of the material.

The MycoBuilt project was generously supported by the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and the assembly was supported by the Cornell Einhorn Center for Community Engagement.