We are living in exciting times: architecture and computation have become more accessible and widely applied than ever before, extending their reach to an endless array of fields, including climate and environmental health.
Technology affords us the ability to look beyond the limits of our senses at other spatial and temporal scales, it can therefore play a key role in prompting us as a species to better understand the ecological systems that we are a part of and how they can be utilized to improve our climate response, and by consequence, our environmental health.
The vision of the Garden City in early 20th century England
WELL Rating system by the International WELL Building Institute launched in 2014
Although designing for health is not a new concept, the term healthy architecture has emerged in recent years as a response to a growing epistemology and application of architectural practices employed to improve public health outcomes.
Then came the global pandemic and this year’s wildfire season. These two phenomena, brought us to a new collective consciousness, where we all realized that our spaces, just as much as our behaviors, create an immediate and massive effect on our personal health and safety.
Masking in public during the Covid-19 Pandemic
Canadian wildfire smoke engulfing NYC, June 2023
While there are many factors in healthy architecture to study, I’m going to focus on indoor air quality. The truth is that both indoor and outdoor air pollution, combined, is the third leading cause of death around the world and for a species that spends 90% of its time inside of a building, how well do we actually know our indoor air quality or attempt to change it?
To learn more about indooor air pollution, such as common pollutants and sources, visit: EPA's Report on the Environment
There have been numerous experiments, both architectural and within the context of technology / HCI, that look at air quality.
Staubmarke (dustmark) by Dietmar Offenhuber
Stuttgart, Germany 2018
C+arquitectos/In The Air (Nerea Calvillo with Raúl Nieves, Pep Tornabell, Yee Thong Chai, Emma Garnett, Marina Fernandez)
Smog-Free Tower by Studio Roosegaarde;
the world's first smog vacuum cleaner
My question is: are there alternate ways to improve air quality using natural building materials?
There has been a lot of advancement in the use of biomaterials for architecture. In particular, mycelium composites have been recognized for their ability to be grown and composted anywhere and sequester carbon. Mycelium composites in architecture have been looked at mainly as a low-carbon alternative for thermal insulation and acoustic insulation.
Hy-Fi is composed of bricks grown organically from mycelium and shredded corn stalks, the bricks were later composted.
A housing facade, fiberglass with a mycelium core will be used in an Oakland, California affordable housing project by the studio The Living.
Alive, a pavilion for the Venice Biennale by The Living is made out of dried fibres of luffa – an inexpensive, renewable and fast-growing vegetable that grows on vines in tropical and subtropical regions. It is speculated that the pavilion can serve as a "probiotic" scaffolding for the microbiome of the space.
Mogu is an Italian startup that makes mycelium-composite acoustic panels for wall covering.
Mycelium composites have already been used as a thermal insulation alternative because the two materials have similar structural qualities, thermal capacity, density and porosity, as evidenced in a side-by-side comparison of their electron microscope images.
By extension, mycelium composites can have similar structural qualities to man-made air filters. In addition, an emerging field of research is myco-remediation and myco-filtration, using fungi to clean up heavily contaminated water and soil. There has been specific research published that suggests mycelium-composite panels are effective at outdoor particulate matter adsorption.
SEM images of a surgical mask
A design-build-test- and -sense system for mycelium-composite wall panels & sensing indoor air quality
Exploring non-visual user interactions using a commercial indoor air sensor (Airthings Wave)
Prototype user interface streaming data from an outdoor sensor:
Lastly, a possible future extension of this work could be making the mycelium itself, at least a live section of it, be the sensor. This is inspired by computational research compiled into a book called Fungal Machines. The research shows it's possible to measure pressure, humidity, and other variables. If reliable, the mycelium would act as both sensor and actuator, creating a living architecture that could tell us directly how it’s interacting with the space instead of having to infer it from external conditions.
Mining logical circuits in fungi, published in Nature: Scientific Reports, 2022
