Gallery: A 40-Foot Tower Made of Living Fungus Bricks
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The Living, a NYC architecture firm, created the Hy-Fi, a 40-foot tower made from organic bricks.
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It sits in the courtyard of PS1, the MoMA's contemporary art museum in Long Island City, Queens.
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The bricks are made from a combination of chopped up corn stalks and mycelium, the root of fungus.
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It takes five days for the organic mush to solidify.
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Once it's hardened, it has a compression strength of about 30 pounds per square inch, making it resilient and strong.
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10,000 of these bricks were used to build the PS1 structure.
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In theory, the structure could remain mostly unchanged for three years (or even more), but it'll only be at PS1 for the summer. After which, the bricks will be composted.
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The Living believes these bricks could be built with other agriculture by-products like rice, making them customizable to different regions.
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The big idea is that sustainability isn’t just about what happens after a building is built, it’s about the entire process. By creating a material that uses almost no energy to make, a building's carbon footprint could reduce drastically.
