Posted on 07/28/2014 8:44:31 AM PDT by BenLurkin
A sweeping tower made from over 10,000 bio-waste bricks bound with fungal fibre has been growing in the courtyard of MoMA PS1, an offshoot of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Looking like something between a three-headed grain silo, Zhang Huan's Three Legged Buddha and a Berlin flak tower, Hy-Fi is the winner of this year's MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (YAP), and its organic aesthetic clashes hard with the museum's red-brick frontage and the green-glass Citicorp building behind.
This is appropriate. As the brainchild of environmentally conscious architects The Living, Hy-Fi is no corporate monolith or repurposed temple of high culture. Principal architect David Benjamin calls it a "prototype for the architecture of the future". Grown from local agricultural waste with almost no carbon emissions, Hy-Fi is designed to be composted, save for a few beams made of reclaimed wood and steel. (A side exhibit shows the distinct stages of the bricks' decomposition.) Hy-Fi isn't meant to blend with its human surroundings, so much as with the urban ecosystem.
...
Right now, Hy-Fi is an environmentally friendly chill-tent for urban partygoers. But it is possible, as you wander through this loamy, shady space, to catch the scent of a much bigger opportunity.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
“bio-waste brick”
What do they scoop them out of the john?
I hadn’t hear there was a brick clay shortage.
This is what we have come to?
From building the Empire State Building to piling up wads of garbage.
Mine was more like an Obama.
These are environmentalists? There is no such thing as agricultural waste. All vegetable matter can be composted and used to enrich the soil.
“Mine was more like an Obama.”
Hence the new Oxford Dictionary term, “Taking a bodacious Obama.”
I have to ask just how good the fungal fibre is going to hold up after the first drenching rain. I'm guessing it is not going to smell so good either.
lots of hype, few specifics. my guess is that this wont’ work in the real world...just sayin’
Excellent!
How long before they discover that bio-bricks are toxic and cause cancer?
So, would a sh!^-brick house be more cost effective and environmentally friendly than adobe?
His building looks like a big ginger root.
” Ecovative, the sustainable bio-materials firm partnering with The Living, can grow the bricks in approximately five days from agricultural by-products such as corn stalks held together with mycelium – the vegetative matter of mushrooms. “
These bricks are not made from waste products, but from stuff grown from agricultural by-products. The waste stream discussion is off base.
But the idea of creating bricks from garbage is not a new one. Back in the early 1970s there was a contestant on What’s My Line who had invented a brick product made from super compressing garbage into brick like blocks.
I have always taken my conservatism form the concept of conservation. As an early teenage, I was intrigued by ideas like this. I do not support government funding development of products like this, but I do encourage capitalist to work on these types of innovations.
I suspect they came across the toxicity issue with garbage very quickly.
A favorite saying once was, “If the truth were known, we’d zit a brick”. Never thought they’d be used in construction, must be the Obama library.
“Honey, what’s that smell?”
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