- Site-specific cases
"DE ANIMA DE FUNGUS" explores how to grow and transform mushrooms for designing a wide range of sustainable materials, fabrics, and furniture. The abundance of mushroom species offers a limitless experimental platform to bring together the fields of design, fashion, architecture, art, and material science. Surprisingly, mushrooms can offer simple and eco-friendly alternatives to highly polluting industries. We propose to create a research and creation laboratory in an abandoned subway station. These stations, which exist all over the world, are ideal places to grow mushrooms. Our first practical application is to grow Fungi-based biofilters, which offer a simple, cheap, effective, and sustainable sanitation alternative for confined and polluted places. Fungi can be harnessed for other creative and manufacturing processes. We propose to set up the subway platform with educational trails, where both mushroom eco-farming, and the next generation of fungi-based objects will be exposed.
The platform is divided in three parts: the mushroom farm, an art exhibition and a showroom that aims to be all fungi-based. After discovering how the different mushrooms are grown, the visitors are invited to see the result of the manufacturing of those same mushrooms. Firstly with artists works and after in a more practical way with furniture, objects and clothes. Ideally the showroom part would be constructed entirely with materials grown on the platform. The subway tunnels walls are covere
Artists would be regularly inviter to experiment and show new ways of using this material.
The aim is to work with the transport companies to use their ghost stations and offer them a cheap, eco-friendly, and simple way to filter the pollution particules. After researching and improving the manufacturing processes, in partnerships with them, we hope to help them become self-sufficient for almost everything they need to produce, from the workers outfits to the subway interiors.
