Living Tex'Celium
Sustainable design with mycelium-textile composite
Living Tex’celium offers a sustainable material system created by growing mycelium on agricultural & wood waste to form recyclable composites. It incorporates jute textiles to overcome the structural limits of traditional mycelium composites. The system envisions flexible, transportable modules for on-site, digitally guided fabrication. Mycelium grows & bio-welds, retaining shape & forming strong connections post-curing. A prototype bridge withstood 4.5 times its weight showing load bearing capabilities. Tex’celium units are fully recyclable under 7 days, supporting eco-friendly construction.
Company/Institution
University of Stuttgart
Participants are Students of M.Sc ITECH program. The Integrative Technologies & Architectural Design Research M.Sc. Program (ITECH) at Uni Stuttgart is an interdisciplinary, research-oriented, experiment-based program shaped around contemporary aspects of the built environment and practice. The goal of the ITECH program is to prepare a new generation of students from different disciplines for the continuing advancement of technological and computational processes in development of the built environment through merging the fields of architecture, engineering, construction and natural sciences.
Country
Germany
Designer(s)
Kalaivanan Amudhan, Mahdi Jafari & Ali Zolfagari
The designers, architects from India, Afghanistan and Iran, passionate about sustainable construction, spent a year researching mycelium to explore its unique advantages over traditional materials in architecture. They carried out extensive experiments with substrate combinations, mechanical testing, and prototyping to overcome the material's limitations. By leveraging computational design workflows, they created a fully sustainable and recyclable building system tailored for architectural applications. This project was a part of their master's thesis at the University of Stuttgart, Germany.