UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The buildings, roads and other structures that form the built environment account for about 42% of annual global carbon dioxide emissions, according to Architecture2030, and building operations are responsible for approximately 27% of those emissions. An interdisciplinary Penn State team is working to decrease those numbers by producing new sustainable architectural materials using mycelium, which is the root of fungi.

Led by Benay Gürsoy, assistant professor of architecture in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School and director of the Form and Matter Lab (ForMat Lab) in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing, the team received $49,995 in funding from the Living Multifunctional Materials Collaborative Seed Grant Program through the Convergence Center for Living Multifunctional Material Systems (LiMC2) at Penn State to focus on finding methods to control and quantify how mycelium-based composites can transform in shape from shrinkage caused by dehydration. Mycelium-based composites are biodegradable materials produced on waste residue and fungi, according to Gürsoy.

“In my lab, we explore sustainable ways to fabricate mycelium-based composite building parts and structures. These are biomaterials that are obtained through the colonization of mycelium on organic substrates,” Gürsoy said. “When the growth is ceased, a lightweight, biodegradable material is obtained.”

Also affiliated with LiMC2 at Penn State, Gürsoy and her ForMat Lab team submitted a proposal to collaborate with researchers at the Cluster of Excellence Living, Adaptive and Energy-autonomous Materials Systems at the University of Freiburg (Germany). The project started on Feb. 1 and will run through May 2025.

Last spring, Gürsoy and her team, including architecture doctoral student Alale Mohseni — who is developing materials, tools and methods to effectively 3D print mycelium-based composites for architectural use as part of her doctoral research — and master of science in architecture alumna Natalie Walter, presented their research at a symposium on living materials at the University of Freiburg with the travel support they received from LiMC2. This initiated the conversations between the Penn State and the University of Freiburg teams.

Collaborating with John Pecchia, associate research professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and Environmental Microbiology and the director of the Mushroom Research Center, the Penn State team handles the fabrication and production — 3D-printing the mycelium-based composites and researching the most effective ways to do so. The Freiburg team works with imaging technology to scan the 3D-printed mycelium-based composites and track changes in their form over time, quantifying their shape changes and analyzing them.

“We’re looking at how we can have more control over these 3D-printed materials and how we can use shrinkage to our benefit to fabricate more complex geometries,” Mohseni said.

Mycelium-based composites are biodegradable — they are generated from organic waste and do not produce waste at the end of their life cycle — and Gürsoy and Mohseni believe they could also make effective building materials.

“The mycelium-based material has some compressive strength — it can bear some load. It also has some acoustic absorption properties and is water-repellant, so it has some good material properties that are exciting for architectural use,” Gürsoy said.

While there’s still some research that needs to be done on the durability, long-term use and performance outside versus inside, “It has potential, and there’s a lot of interest in the architectural community about how best it could be used,” said Gürsoy.