This year, MoMA PS1 young architects Program opens tomorrow (you can see the calendar of events here). Discover how the innovative winning design (a tower of bricks fungal), by David Benjamin of The Living, tested and built with this article, originally published at Arup Connect as "Engineering a mushroom tower."
soft, spongy and delicious on pizza, mushrooms have about as much to do with structural engineering as alligators or lawnmowers. or so we thought until the architect David Benjamin of the New York firm the Living entered our office with a past brick mushrooms.
this brick was the key his concept for a contest entry program for young architects PS1 MoMA. Each year, the museum commission a designer to build a centerpiece for the Warm Up series of popular outdoor concerts.
If the design competition are where the brave new ideas rise to the top, the Living mushroom tower (official name: Hy-Fi) checked all the right boxes. In addition to the novelty factor, mushrooms bricks offer a multitude of benefits for sustainability. The raw materials needed to produce them - mushrooms and corn stover (waste of farms) that spores feed - are as environmentally friendly as they come. The bricks can be grown in just five days, and the process produces no waste emissions or carbon. When the structure is taken down at the end of the summer they can be composted and turned into fertilizer.
New frontiers
inspiration sprang from David Ecovative, a manufacturing company founded to develop practical uses for economic mushroom mycelium spores. A fibrous microscopic fungus mycelium binds to its food source to create a strong, elastic matrix in any desired shape: Packing for Dell computers, for example. Now Ecovative had grown a fungus brick, The Living and wanted our help to understand how to use.
Design competition entries must walk a fine line between thinking and pioneering real-world potential - exactly the kind of challenge that Arup engineers relish. For this particular effort, the pleasure of solving a particularly difficult problem was offset by the pleasure of working with partners like The Living fascinating and Ecovative.
first steps
in this first meeting, we need a test to see that the fungus could brick really do. Was he strong enough to build a design competition winner?
In the initial phase, we have not had the luxury of an official laboratory tests. The great appeal - "Yes, it is possible" - came to stand on a brick and then calculating its strength based on the weight of a structural engineer
With it set the next. big decision was the shape of the structure. If you want to build strong, high walls, the curves are your friend. So we knew that bows, pipes and vaults would be the basic design language. With the memory still fresh Sandy, we knew we needed a broad base to carry wind loads.
using the results of the test-permanent brick-we-we calculated that a stack 40 feet high could function as a basic plan. As the design evolved, fireplace eventually became three, and finally woven round three fireplaces.
At this point, we were convinced that we had a form that could both win the competition and be built in time for the June opening end of the series of concerts PS1.
Making it real
After the jury selected the entry of the Salon as the winner in 2014, it was time for a deep dive into the science. Committed to go 40ft wide, we had to start from first principles to understand how.
Test was the focus of the technical design. The results help us shape the bricks themselves choose how to organize and decide how to connect. More importantly they help us ensure that the structure could withstand a storm.
No person can solve many problems intertwined both. The success or failure of this type of project is based on the way employees work together to navigate unknown, each bringing essential pieces of knowledge that eventually become greater than the sum of its parts.
In this case, the process worked incredibly well. Columbia University Laboratory has provided scientific load testing. Melissa Burton at BMT Fluid Mechanics understood that the wind pressure the structure could be seen during the summer. Desmond Cook at Advanced Metal Coatings provided to accelerated aging tests. Art Works Domantay helped us all on how the tower would be built. Ecovative kept experimenting, production of different types of bricks with varying densities and strengths. Arup turned the data into the design and condition of trust for viability, while seeking opportunities and risks and to provide guidance on what test should be done next. Lead the team and tying everything together, The Living masterfully designed a sculpture of all this information, drawing each brick along the way.
The resulting structure is heroic. Ten thousand bricks biological rising 40ft into the air, creating a cathedral in the experimental construction. Mushrooms bricks easily carry their weight at this height - and, indeed, could go further. Although each brick at the base pretty much carries the weight of a person, which is far from the limit; tests have shown that a single brick can support the weight of most cars.
The final structure can withstand wind gusts of over 65 mph without distress. Although the bricks could carry that force themselves, we left the shapes of wooden construction (scaffolding old boards) inside the tower to limit its influence in the wind. The structure is therefore a composite -. Known and unknown, old and new
Fungi may not replace steel and concrete soon, but Hy-Fi shows that they have a place in the construction market today. Ecovative continues to experiment with products for the built environment, and we at Arup forward to working with them to push the material forward in the coming years.
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