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The House That Spores Built
by Claire L. Evans
Phil Ross may have discovered the building material of the future. It’s sturdy, resilient, and environmentally sustainable—practically inexhaustible, in fact. It can withstand everything from extreme temperature to a hail of bullets, and once it’s no longer useful, it can be easily composted.
There’s only one problem: Some people might not be ready to live in houses built from fungus.
Ross has been experimenting with fungi in his art practice for almost two decades. By introducing mushroom tissue into molds filled with pasteurized sawdust and allowing the fungus to digest the material, he’s built fungal sculptures that have been exhibited in art galleries and museums around the world. He’s grown mushroom side-tables and lounge chairs. But it wasn’t until he built a small teahouse from Reishi mushroom bricks at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf—and then boiled the bricks themselves into tea for gallery visitors to drink—that he realized this material might have life beyond the museum walls.
The teahouse, Mycotectural Alpha, was Ross’ first proper piece of “mycotecture.” A blobby brown building not much taller than a person, it looked more Cronenberg than Le Corbusier. But the fungal bricks used to build it were so strong they broke nearly all of Ross’ woodworking tools. In subsequent art shows, lectures, and projects, he refined his process, and it wasn’t long before companies began to approach him to help develop fungal materials for industrial uses.
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