The Faculty of Architecture collaborates on “mycotecture” projects in Rwanda

Porcini, Portobello, and Cremini… you’ve probably heard of these types of mushrooms, but what about mycelium? Literally translated as “more than one,” the mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus made up of a network of thin, white filaments intertwined. Compared to a plant, the mycelium is the root structure and the fungus is the flower.

With the right nutrients present, fungal mycelium can grow in a wide range of simple organic materials, including cardboard, sawdust, and some forms of agricultural waste. Once processed, the network of fibrous threads transforms into a lightweight, biodegradable foam or wood composite material, making mycelium-based materials a promising new architectural paradigm.

Over the past two years, Nina Sharifi, assistant professor at the School of Architecture and Daekwon Park, associate professor and undergraduate chair at the school, have studied system-wide innovations, construction methodologies and the design of the entire building. Through Sharifi’s research into low-carbon construction technologies and Park’s expertise in architectural materials and fabrication, the two observed that the unique properties of fungal mycelium – a low-energy, bio-based material with low carbon footprint – had potential applicability in many areas.

“The attributes of working with the mycelium include its enduring material life cycle, as it is grown and not harvested; its ability to take the form of any formwork; and its resistance while remaining light, among other properties that may be of interest to multiple scientific applications, ”explains Sharifi.

In 2020, with support from the Collaboration for Unprecedented Success and Excellence (CUSE) grant program and the Syracuse Center of Excellence (CoE) scholarship program, Sharifi and Park formed the Mycelium Collaborative Research Group (MRG), with experts in materials science. , biology and engineering, to conduct interdisciplinary mycelium-based research in a range of exploratory applications, including architecture.

Building on Sharifi’s previous research in low-carbon architectural systems, his lab worked on the development of modular prototypes, testing and hybridization of materials with an emphasis on design and integration mycelium in low carbon buildings.

Abstract Rwandan motifs are incorporated into interior partition modules with waste plastic, while the frames are constructed with materials that will be locally available on site.

Hearing about the research on Sharifi’s mycelium, Associate Professor of the Yutaka Sho School of Architecture approached her about the development of mycelial building elements for production and use in Rwanda, a context in which Sho and his colleagues at the nonprofit architectural design firm, General Architecture Collaborative (GAC), have been working for twelve years, where several types of buildings, including housing, restaurants and schools, in urban areas and rural areas, were in various stages of design.

“Nina told me she was working with the mycelium and we were both excited,” Sho says. “I was happy to find someone who was committed to developing sustainable and affordable building materials, and she was delighted that I had real projects in Rwanda to which we could apply the research, with locations, needs. and real constraints. “

Through measures of sustainability, energy savings, and constructability, the hybrid mycelium building systems that Sharifi’s lab studied seemed well suited to the unique challenges inherent in Rwanda, a country with few paved roads and materials. of limited local construction such as concrete, wood or steel. What the country has in abundance, however, is the power of the land and the people, which GAC has tried to promote in its architectural research and practice.

“The process of building the modules was designed to be close to packing mud bricks into molds, which most people could do; mycelium hybrids were light; and the material could be produced locally or on site in growth chambers, ”says Sharifi.

Through their research, Sharifi and Sho began to develop two lines of inquiry for mycelium-based building materials in Rwanda: one for the service industry (urban) and the other for the agricultural industry (rural ). The old use of the products is to apply them in offices and restaurants as ceiling panels and partitions, as those currently used in Rwanda are of poor quality, imported and have a high carbon footprint. The latter use is in farming communities where the mycelium blocks can be used to build mushroom grow huts, essentially using mushrooms to create the structure in which the mushrooms grow.

With the parallel aim of using recycled materials, Sho hired Carene Umubyeyi, a civil engineering student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a former architecture intern at GAC and originally from Kigali, the capital and largest city of Rwanda, in the search for local materials and the waste circulates around the country so that the abundant waste can be used as a substrate for mycelium growth.

Mushroom growing bed in Akagera, Rwanda. (Photo courtesy of General Architecture Collaborative)

“In order to remove harmful waste from the environment, we investigated the continued availability of plastic waste, such as single-use beverage bottles and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, in Rwanda,” Umubyeyi explains. “The hope is to collect waste from private waste management companies inside and outside Kigali city, which we can process and use as a potential substrate material. “

Meanwhile, back in Syracuse, Sharifi’s team of interns, including Zoe Quinones ’23 (B.Arch), Morgan Noone G’23 (M.Arch) and Kiana Memaran Dadgar G’23 (MS), have found and started to integrate the same substrate materials in the controlled environment of the laboratory where they can test the performance of mycelium-based building materials under different environmental conditions.

“The goal is to minimize the transport of physical modules to Kigali and only send the initial formwork, raw materials and detailed design documentation and written manufacturing protocols,” Sharifi explains.

The joint efforts of Sharifi and Sho continue as research produces new prototype designs and methods at Syracuse University while fabrication and construction is set in Kigali.