Stuckeman School

Intro

Working with a living material, such as mycelium, requires a different way of thinking about the design process, one in which you have to work with the material itself and understand what it wants and what it wants to be. Because you may try to do that, but fungi doesn't want that.

Mycelium-Based Composites

So, biomaterials and architecture are a crucial way forward for human societies, because the traditional building materials are unsustainable. Construction is an energy intensive and a resource intensive industry. If we keep doing things the same way, the climate crisis is going to get worse and worse. There's actually a lot of interest in mycelium-based composites from the design and architecture community in the recent years this is mainly because of the sustainable futures of mycelium-based composites. These materials can be grown on agricultural, organic agricultural, waste. And at the end of their life cycle, they are completely biodegradable, so they also don't leave waste. So, I was curious, you know, what this would mean for design. And I thought, I decided, I can teach a course, a seminar, at Penn State. Through that exploration, I learned a lot with my students – together with my students – and I decided that the work that we did in that class with fungi could be very promising to continue as a research line. It coincided with Ali, my Ph.D. student Ali Ghazvinian, joining Penn State. And, you know, we were having these conversations about what he could be working on in his Ph.D. So, that's how this journey started. When I came here in 2018, we started talking about different materials with Benay, and we found out that one of the materials that is a great option for us is mycelium, because it has a lot of sustainable features, and also because we are in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania is producing two-thirds of the mushrooms nationwide. We thought that, yeah, it's a great option, why not working with this material? And I believe, in not that long, future, we will see use of this material for acoustics, for different insulation agents, and for some semi-structural functions in all buildings. So, mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus.

What is Mycelium

It is kind of similar to the roots of a plant. All of our cultivation, material cultivation, takes place at the Mushroom Research Center where they have environmentally controlled growth chambers. We have nine growing rooms at the research center, walk-in growing rooms that have climate control that we can control humidity and temperature. And it also helps minimize contamination, in the way that we're designed and in the way we handle the materials. And I'm very grateful, for first, John's openness for this collaboration. He's a Mycologist, and in addition to providing, like, the facilities and equipment to use, he also provides a lot of input about, you know, what fungi wants and what we can do. So, it's through John's guidance that we advanced in our research.

Challenges

This is a living material, so it's really difficult to work with, if you are not familiar with the way that it behaves. We try to separate its growth process down into parts so that we can predict it. But, there are just some problems that we're still working through. In my case, I had contamination problems, so there are some working protocols that we need to be aware of. For example, we need to sterilize everything. As a designer, another challenge is the time part. Like, you don't immediately see the results, and you have to wait, at least a couple of weeks, and something can go wrong and you have to go back to the starting point to start the experimentation. It's not instant discovery. You learn in a longer period of time.

Collaboration

So, this research is very collaborative in nature, interdisciplinary, I'm talking about interdisciplinary collaboration. For example, we have some people from Department of Plant Pathology and Environmental Microbiology, we have people from Civil Engineering, Architectural Engineering, Agricultural Engineering, and Material Science. And the reason is because it's such a complex endeavor that we really need different perspectives to make forward progress. I come in as director of the Living Materials Center to facilitate and bring together researchers at Penn State from different colleges, different disciplines, that are working towards the same goals. I'm the biologist. I'm the Mycologist. I've done a lot of work over the years, for the last 20 years now, with mushrooms and mycelium. My role is really to assist with understanding relationships between the main producer, the fungi that are making up the bulk of the material that we're working with, and other organisms that may either cause problems or enhance the properties of the fungal material. I see Penn State as a great resource for this research. There's just so many people that can contribute to this research, and I'm getting to discover this possibility the more I delve into this research. They bring faculty together and students together from multiple colleges and multiple units to work at the intersection of discipline. And the intersection of discipline is where innovations are made.