Fungus gives a whole new meaning to home-grown comforts
Bio-technologists are exploring the use of fungal organisms to grow furniture, and maybe even buildings too
SOME day our home furnishings – maybe even components of the house itself – will be fashioned from fungus.
If that smells a little fishy – maybe we should say musty – take a breath and sniff again: that's because bio-technologists really are looking into the potential applications of fungal life in our built environment.
Researchers at the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment (HBBE), based in Newcastle, are investigating whether textiles filled with fungus can be used to make structures and furniture.
The hub represents a collaboration between bio-scientists from Northumbria University and architects, designers, and engineers from the University of Newcastle.
In a sense, there's nothing new in textiles exploiting the properties of organic materials. Indeed, that's how the industry started in the far-distant past: think wool, cotton, or silk. But fungal organisms are ordinarily not what you want near your fabrics and furnishings.
The BioKnit project urges us to think again. It uses 3D knitting technology to create knitted forms that provide a scaffold. These are filled with a mycelium mixture – the root network of fungus – that grows through the textile.
In so doing, it binds the materials together, resulting in a composite that is said to be light and strong. The mycelium itself can be “reactivated” later to grow again.
“BioKnit emerged from research investigating how the properties of knitted fabrics could be harnessed to create flexible, adaptable, bio-hybrid systems,” said Dr Jane Scott, who leads HBBE's Living Textiles Group.
“We were interested in exploring how the relationship between fibres, yarns and fabrics, fundamental to textiles, could be engineered to enhance the growth of microorganisms such as fungal mycelium and cellulose produced by bacteria.
“This research has led to the production of BioKnit and MycoKnit CompoSITe, prototypes of structures and furniture that have been grown to shape.”
Structure and furnishings that are grown to design sounds like something out of science fiction; generally it is, but where the imagination leads, real world application is known to follow. The BioKnit team are curious to see how their system could shape architecture in years to come.
“A textile scaffold for mycelium and bacterial cellulose offers more than a technical solution to upscale biofabrication, it also provides an alternative vision for the built environment,” Scott added.
“Our aim is to fundamentally change both how and what we ‘build’. We are interested in exploring how this biohybrid textile approach could replace hard, rectilinear buildings with soft curvaceous structures and interiors, and even blur the distinction between structure and interior surface.”
This probably all sounds a little far-fetched; then again, perhaps we shouldn't turn our noses up at fungus-grown buildings. They may be the future.
MC