Investigating a Design and Construction Approach for Fungal Architectures

The design research presented in this paper grounds itself in a tradition of seeking new architectural form from the affordances and proclivities of new materials. We report on the developmental stages of a construction concept that involves the growing of mycelium-based composites within stay-in-place scaffolds produced using Kagome weaving techniques. We demonstrate how speculative design is used to generate hypotheses - testable design statements - for directing empirical investigation, and how results drive the progression of the design inquiry and its associated digital design tools. Our core contribution is to expose new design pathways that operate reciprocally between material, tectonic and spatial exploration. We argue that such reciprocity is a prerequisite for supporting the invention of new architectural forms, vocabularies and systems.