MoMA Pavilion PS1 in New York
- Claudia Fuchs
In 2014, the annual Museum of Modern Art competition – for an experimental cultural pavilion at the PS1 Gallery in Queens – was won by the New York architectural team The Living. This “Hy-Fi” object attracted attention not merely for its unusual form, but for the special construction material – cultivated “mushroom bricks”. Standing like a giant archaic sculpture in the courtyard of the PS1 are three “tubes”, open at the top yet nestling together to form a 13-metre-high tower. Its massivity is playfully broken by its flowing form and thin perforated skin. The latter consists of newly developed bricks made of maize straw strengthened by microscopically small, root-like mycelium. The compostable blocks were manufactured in a low-tech process, whereby the mycelium grows through the agricultural waste in just a few days, binding it into a compact, stable mass. The Ecovative company that developed this substance has been using it hitherto for packaging and insulation. In collaboration with the architects, it was developed further and used here as a load-bearing external material. The pavilion consists of 10,000 hand-laid blocks, and the plastic cultivation forms were further used as an upper closure. Although the manufacture and erection of the bricks were largely manual work, the architects designed the project as a 3D computer model to define the form and determine the arrangement of blocks by means of algorithms.
