Mycelium Corbelling: Utilizing Environmental-Driven Design and Machine Learning to facilitate biomaterial tending

Architectural obsessions with material permanence and cleanliness have been linked to unsustainable use of materials in the built environments. Furthermore, maintaining aesthetics of ‘newness’ often requires intensive maintenance, repair, and replacement processes that demand high labor and economic resources. The use of biomaterials and bio-integrative design approaches offers novel, sustainable approaches, but also requires a shift in acceptance for more ’unruly’ aesthetics. These approaches will also require new thinking for how to manage such materials and must consider the ageing of buildings as an inherent, dynamic and adaptive aspect of architectural sustainability. This study explores this perspective whereby building ageing, material impermanence and the unruly aesthetics of biomaterial erosion are embedded into the digital design process. It offers an opportunity for a more resilient architecture, through its ability to evolve rather than a need to be maintained to a condition of ‘newness’ or ultimately restored. Central to this is the concept of biomaterial tending. Using mycelium materials as a case study, their rapid degradation in outdoor environments is utilized in this study to promote a digital framework of tending dynamics for future use of biomaterials on buildings.[Attias et al., 2017].