ABSTRACT
This paper reports on advances in the craft of cultivating mycelium-composite materials (myco-materials) reinforced with textiles into lightweight self-supporting structures. Myco-materials are a composite of lignocellulosic substrates bound by fungal mycelium that possess properties that give them high potential to be used in building construction. A sub-topic in this area of research has focused on the integration of textiles and natural fibers into myco-materials (myco-textiles) to improve their mechanical performance, facilitate producing complex 3D geometries, and enable constructing large scale assemblies. This paper presents in-progress research on design and cultivation techniques that enable the production of under-researched formal typologies of myco-structures: polyhedral tents and folded-plate structures. Woven textile sheets and hemp-based substrates inoculated with a fungus from the phylum Basidiomycota were cultivated and assembled into prototype structures at increasing scale. The goal is to present the work to-date by students and researchers in the MycoMatters Lab, outline the ongoing areas of inquiry, detail the limitations of these techniques, and project the architectural contexts in which they may be most appropriate.
