30 Jun 2014
Eco-friendly mushroom tower installation opens at MoMA, New York
BY Katie Buckley
New York City based architectural firm The Living has completed its winning design for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Young Architects Program, Hi-Fi – a tubular tower made of mushroom and corn bricks.
Constructed to provide shelter and seating for PS1’s Warm Up concert series at the MoMA, the structure is almost 100 per cent biodegradable and is intended to be composted down after its use.
The circular tower is made of innovative materials, with a definite focus on sustainability. The bricks themselves are made of corn stalks, a typically wasted material, and a substance found in mushroom roots, making them very light and easy to mould into what ever shape is necessary.
Crowning the design, the upper bricks - used to mould the lower bricks during the building process - are made of multi-layer film, claiming to have 98 percent reflectivity, making them more reflective than mirrors.
David Benjamin from The Living, commented that the ‘structure temporarily diverts the natural carbon cycle to produce a building that grows out of nothing but earth - with no waste, no energy and no carbon emissions’. By using cutting edge biological technology and showing off it’s carbon-free building potential, The Living hopes to spark an innovation culture, curate a new definition of local, eco-friendly, materials, and build a direct relationship between agriculture and the arts in New York City.
The installation will be in place throughout the summer and run until early September.
To read more, click here.
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