MoMA PS1 will grow its own summer pavilion
The winning submission to 2014's Young Architects Program incorporates fungi bricks and is 100% compostable
The Young Architects Programme at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York, aims to offer emerging architectural talent the opportunity to present innovative projects; each year it offers one practice the prize of developing an outdoor installation at MoMA PS1 which “provides shade, seating and water.” Beyond architectural innovation, the PS1 competition emphasises recycling and sustainability, as this year's winner makes clear.
Hy-Fi, is a tower-like structure designed by New York architect David Benjamin, at his Practice, The Living. While the stacks, on first viewing, might not look like the most impressive structure you'll see this year, the building material is pretty amazing. Hy-Fi is constructed from a combination of sweetcorn husks and stalks and a specially prepared mycelium - the vegetative part of mushrooms and fungi. This biological mix is poured into a series of reflective, mirror-film moulds, before being assembled into the finished structure.
Once they've formed the organic bricks, the mirror-film moulds are also built up onto the building to form the reflective, upper portions of Hy-Fi. What's more, after the pavilion has served this summer's visitors, it will composted, to give nourishment to more plant life. Pretty amazing, no?
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“This year’s YAP winning project bears no small feat. It is the first sizable structure to claim near-zero carbon emissions in its construction process and, beyond recycling, it presents itself as being 100% compostable,” said Pedro Gadanho, Curator in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design.
“Recurring to the latest developments in biotech, it reinvents the most basic component of architecture—the brick—as both a material of the future and a classic trigger for open-ended design possibilities. At MoMA PS1, The Living’s project will be showcased as a sensuous, primeval background for the Warm-Up sessions; the ideas and research behind it, however, will live on to fulfil ever new uses and purposes.”
For more on this go here. For greater insight into architectural developments around the world, download the Phaidon Architecture Travel Guide App. Meanwhile, for greater insight into how biology and architect might work together in the future, consider The World We Made, a speculative view of our future sustainability, by Jonathon Porritt. And if you're a fan of sustainable and green design and architecture you owe it to yourself to check out Vitamin Green.