Spotted: Like many other countries, there is a serious shortage of housing in the US due to the growing numbers of people setting up their own households. According to CNN, once multi-family homes are taken into account, the US is short of around 2.3 million homes. At the same time, there is a supply and demand mismatch in many urban centres as builders find it easier to build homes away from city centres, where demand is highest.
Working to fix this is SaaS company Cedar. The company’s platform uses generative algorithms, along with public and privately available data, to generate a broad array of building designs and predict the development yield on parcels of land. The outcome is that builders can know very quickly exactly what to build where in order to maximise income and minimise time to delivery.
Cedar’s focus is on non-institutional, ‘missing middle’ scale projects, which the company argues are essential to creating a more “economically and environmentally sustainable density” in cities. The platform helps developers pinpoint opportunities for builders and developers in places where housing density can be most easily increased.
The company recently announced a $3 million (around €2.7 million) seed funding round, led by Caffeinated Capital, with participation from Tishman Speyer Ventures, and others. Global venture capital firm Antler was also an early (pre-seed) investor.
Sustainable housing is the focus of a wide number of recent innovations spotted by Springwise. These include bio-based, recyclable, 3D-printed homes and houses made from cross-laminated timber.
This exclusive video published by Dezeen reveals the launch of a new global architecture competition to reimagine affordable housing, hosted by construction-scale 3D-printing company ICON.
The competition is called Initiative 99 and invites architects and designers to submit home designs that can be built for under $99,000 (USD).
Initiative 99 has a $1 million total prize purse and is open to all countries. Firms, individuals, and university students are all encouraged to participate.
The company has committed to building a selection of the winning designs in locations to be announced in the future.
ICON has launched a global architecture competition reimagining affordable housing
More than 1.2 billion people across the planet lack adequate shelter, according to ICON, which invites designers and architects to leverage robotic construction techniques in tackling this issue with their home designs.
By employing ICON’s 3D-printing technology, submissions can depart from more traditional flat walls in order to create “entirely new types of homes”.
The multi-phase, year-long competition enlists the help of a judging panel of architectural practitioners, academic leaders and policy makers.
Among the panelists are Shajay Bhooshan, associate director at Zaha Hadid Architects.
Entry for the Initiative 99 competition is now open
ICON is headquartered in Austin, Texas, where it is currently building a neighbourhood of 100 3D-printed homes, designed by Danish architecture studio BIG.
In 2022, NASA awarded ICON a $57 million contract to develop roads, launchpads and homes on the moon.
Submissions for the Initiative 99 competition are now open. To read more about Initiative 99, visit its website.
Partnership content
This article was written by Dezeen for ICON as part of a partnership. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.
Healthy Materials Lab is a design research lab at Parsons School of Design with a mission to place health at the center of every design decision. HML is changing the future of the built environment by creating resources for designers, architects, teachers, and students to make healthier places for all people to live. Check out their podcast, Trace Material.
Namibia’s diverse ecosystem is in trouble. The main culprit: Acacia Mellifera, better known as Black Thorn or simply ‘encroacher bush.’ This dense, thorny shrub is incredibly invasive and, over the last few decades, has smothered many parts of Namibia’s increasingly homogeneous ecology. Grassy savannas are being choked by the ever-expanding plant and turned into deserts. Namibia’s government has a plan to fight back. They’ve enacted a program to thin 330 million tons of black thorn over the next 15 years. The bush waste is chipped and turned into wood dust that can be used for fuel pellets and energy sources. As it turns out, it is also the perfect food for fungi.
MycoHab, a collaboration between MIT, Standard Bank and redhouse studio, is leveraging this surplus waste and harnessing the power of fungi to address both food and housing scarcity in Namibia. Here’s the basic MycoHab run-down: The wood dust from the Acacia Mellifera waste is used as a substrate to grow oyster mushrooms. The oyster mushrooms are harvested and sold to local markets, grocery stores and restaurants. Then, the waste left behind from the mushroom harvesting, teeming with the rootlike structure of fungi called mycelium, is pressed and fired into blocks that the team plans to use to construct affordable housing. This may sound far out, but allow us to explain. To understand how we get from mushrooms to housing, it’s helpful to know a bit about the life cycle of fungi.
Fungi 101
First, it’s important to understand that while all mushrooms are fungi, not all fungi are mushrooms. Mushrooms are the fruiting body of fungi. A mushroom is like an apple growing on an apple tree––it’s the fruit, not the tree. In the fungi world the “tree” is called mycelium. Mycelium is the living body of fungi. It’s a rootlike structure that is constantly eating, expanding, and connecting in large filamentous networks underground or in rotting trees. Mycelium is the star of the MycoHab project and the key to a future of fungi-based materials.
Nature’s Glue
MycoHab’s mycelium block molds
On a typical mushroom farm, once the fruiting bodies have been harvested, the mycelium would be left behind or composted. At MycoHab, the fungi’s substrate, chock full of mycelium, becomes the foundation for a new building product. While the mycelial network is growing and eating, waiting to sprout mushrooms, it’s filling up any available space in the woody substrate and binding everything together. We spoke to Christopher Maurer, Principal Architect at redhouse studio and a Founder of MycoHAB about how this works in practice. “The mycelium, which looks like roots basically, bonds with the Acacia Mellifera bush at a cellular level,” Chris says. “They create this cellular matrix of material that can be compacted and turned into a building material. It acts like cement or glue in different building products.”
Seeing other creatives working with mycelium materials, notably the mycelium materials company Ecovative in a packaging context, inspired Chris’ own fungi experimentation. “We always wondered, could this be something that could be structural as well? We thought about processes like the creation of plywood or MDF where small bits of wood are combined together either in veneers, like plywood is, or in pulp, like medium density fiberboard.” Chris and his team set about experimenting with heat and pressure techniques inspired by these composite materials and applied them to the mycelium blocks. The results are relatively strong. Chris says, “We relate our block to a concrete block. It has about the same mass. It has a similar compressive strength. But it also has insulation characteristics and has thermal mass to it.”
Constructing Carbon Stores
MycoHab’s mycelium block storage
The potential of the MycoHab blocks are impressive: they could be be stronger than concrete blocks, they are insulating, and they are made from waste two times over. If that’s not enough, they also sequester carbon. Carbon emissions are a massive concern for the future habitability of our planet, and the built environment is one of our worst offenders. The construction and operation of buildings is responsible for nearly half of global carbon emissions. And the materials we use in our buildings have a huge impact on those emissions. Just three materials: concrete, steel, and aluminum account for 23% of emissions worldwide.
The situation is dire, and according to Chris, the materials we build with are the place to start. “We imagine a future where the building industry could be a net carbon store. Because of population growth, we need to double our building area size by 2060. If we’re using carbon emitting materials, that is going to be a huge problem. If we use materials that store carbon then we can actually start to reverse the impact that the building industry and architecture has on the environment.”
Inflate, Deflate, Repeat
An inflatable arch formwork created by Chris and the MycoHab team
In addition to being made from waste, Chris and his team are developing new, waste-saving building methods to assemble the future myco-block affordable homes. Here’s how it will work: inflatable arch formwork is erected on site and the myco-blocks are stacked on top. Once everything is in place, the arch is deflated and is able to be used over and over again. This saves a ton of construction waste because, traditionally, the forms needed to build arch or dome structures can end up creating about as much building waste as the final product.
Next, a mud-lime render is added to the blocks to protect them from the elements and a roof completed. The homes are designed for disassembly and with end of life in mind. Chis says, “The block itself would be fully biodegradable. We designed the building with protective barriers on top of it, but if you were to strip those away and recycle those materials, then the myco-blocks could be broken down and used as compost to augment the soil. That’s the way we look at the life cycle of our project—from the earth and back to the earth.”
Fungi Futures
Ivan Severus holding a MycoHab mycelium block
As things stand, MycoHab Namibia functions as a vertically integrated operation, with profits from oyster mushroom sales funding block production. Chris says that patience in these early stages of the process is key. “As we’re getting started, we want to maintain control over the process and the building so that we can thoroughly test everything and make sure that the materials we’re making are used properly.”
But, according to Chris, scaling operations are not far off. “I don’t think it can be kept a vertically integrated system for very long. It will need to kind of branch out into these different endeavors and then they could end up on the shelves of hardware stores around the world so that anybody can build with them.”
MycoHab’s Namibia-based Team
Widespread access and affordability of myco-materials will be key to realizing their potential environmental impact in the coming decades both in Namibia and around the globe. Chris and his team have crunched the numbers and calculated that if they use just 1% of the biomass that Namibia plans to thin from the encroacher bush, they could house 25% of the population currently living in shacks and informal settlements over the next 15 years. In that time, they would also be able to harvest 2 million tons of mushrooms and sequester 3-5 million tons of carbon dioxide in the process. That is the promise of fungi.
We hope that fungi-based materials like the MycoHab blocks will become a standard rather than an exciting outlier. This innovative approach, looking at the entire life cycle and systems of making a material, while taking responsibility for its origins through to its disposal, is an excellent example for a healthier future of materials and the built environment. It took decades of research, innovation, marketing and systems-building for petrochemical based materials to take over our planet. That same energy, and patience, is needed now. Thankfully, the tide is turning and a healthier future is possible.
To hear more from Chris and the MycoHab team, take a listen to our podcast Trace Material. Our third season is all about the potential of fungi-based materials and Episode 5 “Harvesting Housing” provides a more in depth look at the MycoHab project.
Dezeen teamed up with PlasticFree to present its interdisciplinary forum of talks focussing on the climate crisis in New York City. Watch the talks here.
The event brought together creative professionals across various disciplines to explore why the issue of climate change continues to be discussed at length instead of being addressed practically with the many proposed solutions that currently exist.
Featured speakers included chief innovation officer of Pangaia Amanda Parkes, Slow Factory founder Celine Semaan, and Birsel + Seck co-founder Ayse Birsel, among other designers and climate specialists.
The event followed the launch of the PlasticFree database, an online platform created in a bid to help architects and designers source plastic-free materials for their projects and avoid misinformation around more sustainable alternatives.
The subscription-based service provides detailed reports on more than 100 plastic alternatives that have been vetted by scientific advisors, highlighting their properties, production and sourcing in order to offer reliable and trustworthy information.
Creative professionals from different disciplines discussed the climate crisis
The platform’s advisory council comprises scientists, business leaders and industry figureheads including Stirling Prize-winner David Chipperfield, designer Tom Dixon and curator Aric Chen.
Partnership content
This competition is a partnership between Dezeen and PlasticFree. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.
Designers need to stop feeling guilty about making products and start using their creativity to become part of the climate solution, writes Katie Treggiden.
Eighty per cent of the environmental impact of an object is determined at design stage. This statistic, which is usually credited to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, often gets bandied about in discussions about sustainability, and it is absolutely true. From material choices to end-of-life considerations, by the time an object goes into production its fate is largely sealed from a sustainability point of view.
But when designers hear that statistic, what they often hear is: “80 per cent of this mess is my fault.” And it really isn’t.
By the time an object goes into production its fate is largely sealed from a sustainability point of view
A report published in 2017 found that 71 per cent of industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1988 could be attributed to 100 fossil fuel producers. Much like the tobacco industry before it, the energy industry has not only contributed to the problem but worked hard to curb regulations and undermine public understanding.
Oil and gas giant Exxon conducted cutting-edge climate research decades ago, and then pivoted to “work at the forefront of climate denial, manufacturing doubt about the scientific consensus that its own scientists had confirmed”, a 2015 investigation by Inside Climate News found.
In 1989, then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher gave a powerful speech at the UN. “It is mankind and his activities that are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways,” she warned. “Every country will be affected and no-one can opt out. Those countries who are industrialised must contribute more to help those who are not.”
These arguments were not new, even then, but coming from her they gained traction and environmentalism went mainstream.
However, Thatcher’s position was short-lived. In her autobiography, Statecraft, she writes: “By the end of my time as prime minister I was also becoming seriously concerned about the anti-capitalist arguments which the campaigners against global warming were deploying.”
And so, in a perceived trade-off between planet and profit, she chose profit.
The climate crisis might have been resolved before many of today’s designers were even born
Her policies in the UK led to urban sprawl that threatens biodiversity, to prioritising investment in roads over rail and bus services that could help us all reduce our carbon footprints, and to the privatisation of water companies that results in polluted rivers and oceans to this day.
But her influence in the Global South was even more profound. Under her leadership, Britain, together with the US, led World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation moves that forced more than 100 indebted countries to undertake now widely discredited “structural adjustment” programmes. These programmes pushed for deregulation and privatisation that paved the way for transnational farming, mining and forestry companies to exploit natural resources on a global scale.
In her autobiography she credits books by Julian Morris, Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer for her dramatic U-turn. All three authors were members of free-market think tanks receiving funding from the fossil fuel industry.
Had Exxon acted ethically on the results of its own research, had Margaret Thatcher stuck to her guns instead of being lured by the temptations of free-market economics, and had the momentum she galvanised continued, the climate crisis might have been resolved before many of today’s designers were even born.
If we’re looking to apportion blame, let’s look to enterprises making excessive profits while caring for neither people nor planet
It might well be their fault. It is certainly not yours.
But what about that statistic? If 80 per cent of the environmental impact of an object is determined at design stage, doesn’t telling designers that it’s not their fault let them off the hook? Quite the opposite.
Think about the last time you had a brilliant idea, solved a problem, or came up with an innovative solution. How were you feeling at the time? Guilty? Overwhelmed? Hopeless? I’m guessing not, because those feelings are not the soil in which creativity thrives. I’m guessing you were feeling curious, optimistic and collaborative – all the impulses that draw designers to our industry in the first place.
To design is to solve problems and this is the biggest problem humanity has ever faced
We need designers to stop feeling guilty, so they can reconnect with those feelings, tap into their creativity and become part of the solution.
The climate crisis is a “wicked problem” – a term coined by design theorist Horst Rittel to describe social or cultural problems that seem unsolvable because of their complexity, their interconnectedness, their lack of clarity, and because they are subject to real-world constraints that thwart attempts to find and test solutions.
In other words: there are no magic bullets. Previous generations might have kicked the can down the road hoping that future technology would save us, but we no longer have that luxury.
So, if you’re a designer, none of this is your fault, but it is your responsibility. To design is to solve problems and this is the biggest problem humanity has ever faced. It is not something the design industry can solve alone. Of course we need politicians and big corporations to get on board, but we can lead the way by demonstrating the power of creativity and innovation.
We have a unique, and perhaps the final, opportunity to tackle this issue head on and do something definitive. But we can’t do that mired in guilt.
To overcome the climate crisis, we need to design, not from a position of pessimism and shame, but in the mode in which we all do our best work: when we are driven by curiosity and excited about a future that, together, we can help create.
Katie Treggiden is an author, journalist, podcaster and keynote speaker championing a circular approach to design. She is the founder and director of Making Design Circular, a membership community for designer-makers who want to become more sustainable. She is also a Dezeen Awards judge.
To fight the threat of soil degradation to food supply, design graduate Ryan Waterhouse has invented a portable device that monitors the health of topsoil.
Terra Nova allows users to measure the levels of three critical nutrients within topsoil — nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous — as well as its moisture content.
Waterhouse developed the smart farming device as his final-year project in Bournemouth University’s product design course, after learning that soil degradation presents an imminent threat to arable land.
Terra Nova is a soil monitor that measures levels of moisture, nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium
“The world grows 90 per cent of its food in topsoil – the uppermost layer of soil – making it one of the most critical components in our food system,” said Waterhouse.
“Current rates of nutritional soil degradation suggest that topsoil will run out in just 60 years, posing a significant threat to food production,” he continued. “Every minute, 30 football fields’ worth of topsoil is lost due to degradation.”
According to Waterhouse, Terra Nova could help to reverse this trend. The device enables farmers and gardeners to track degradation and assists them to improve the quality of the soil, in turn improving their crops.
A small screen on the device shows real-time readings
It has three retractable probes on the bottom that stick into the soil, with sensors that measure the levels of moisture and key nutrients in the soil.
The collected data is then displayed in two ways: on a small LCD screen on top of the device, which shows the soil readings at the present time, and on a web app, which presents weeks, months or even years of data in graphs and visualisation.
The app also has additional functionality, as users can tell which crops they are planting and get recommendations for their care, such as when to add a particular fertiliser.
Full data can be viewed on an accompanying web app
The soil monitor connects to the app using Long Range Networking (LoRa), a low-power wireless technology, so it can relay data even in remote locations with no Wi-Fi.
According to Waterhouse, growers can use Terra Nova in one of two main ways: the first option is to leave it in the ground long-term, in which case one device per fruit or vegetable variant being grown is usually recommended.
Alternatively, the user can pick up the device and replant it to test a variety of areas at one time. Waterhouse suggests this option would suit allotment holders growing multiple fruits and vegetables.
Waterhouse sees Terra Nova as being of extra use now amid skyrocketing fertiliser prices, which are particularly putting pressure on farmers in Africa.
The device is recommended for farmers, gardeners and allotment holders
“It is increasingly becoming more and more important to make educated and informed decisions on fertiliser usage because of recent cost increases,” Waterhouse told Dezeen. “I believe Terra Nova could significantly impact developing countries with education in increasing crop yields through correct farming practices.”
Waterhouse won the 2022 New Designer of the Year award, the top award at the UK’s New Designers showcase, with Terra Nova.
Other recent innovations designed for sustainable farming, include Pasturebird’s robotic chicken coop, which is meant to integrate animals with crops, and Studio Roosegaarde’s Grow light installation, designed to stimulate plant growth.
Spotted: For June’s Indigenous History Month, Cheekbone Beauty launched a social-driven ‘#GlossedOver’ campaign with the help of agency Sid Lee. Cheekbone Beauty is a Canadian, Indigenous-owned beauty brand that makes vegan and sustainable cosmetics. The campaign recognised the struggles First Nations and Indigenous communities have faced for access to clean drinking water – a hot-button issue in the last three Canadian federal elections.
As part of the campaign, Cheekbone Beauty is releasing a line of lip gloss made using water from Indigenous communities in Canada. The twist? The lipgloss cannot actually be sold because the water is so contaminated.
With names like ‘Lucious Lead’ and ‘E.Coli Kiss’, the Cheekbone Beauty lip glosses are sure to get people talking—and thinking—about why anyone should have to put contaminated water to their lips.
Cheekbone’s mission is to make ‘a difference in the lives of Indigenous youth through donations addressing the educational funding gap, and to create a space in the beauty industry where Indigenous youth feel represented and seen’. To date, the brand has donated over CAD$150,000 (around €110,000) to a variety of non-profit organisations across North America.
Innovations spotted by Springwise that tackle contaminated water include a mobile filtration system that provides affordable clean water, a green technology to treat industrial wastewater, and kombucha used to remove e-coli from water.
First, it’s important to understand that while all mushrooms are fungi, not all fungi are mushrooms. Mushrooms are the fruiting body of fungi. A mushroom is like an apple growing on an apple tree––it’s the fruit, not the tree. In the fungi world the “tree” is called mycelium. Mycelium is the living body of fungi. It’s a rootlike structure that is constantly eating, expanding, and connecting in large filamentous networks underground or in rotting trees. Mycelium is the star of the MycoHab project and the key to a future of fungi-based materials.
