This month, students from the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute constructed a pavilion composed of mycelium units on the lawn in front of the Greene Building on campus.

Mycelium is the vegetative part of fungus that can be dried to form a solid, durable, and environmentally friendly construction material.

The students who worked on the pavilion were part of the inaugural class participating in The Arch, a transformative new program at Rensselaer that requires all students to live and learn on campus during the summer after their sophomore year before participating in an off-campus experiential learning experience during the fall or spring semester of their junior year.

Among the courses offered during this first Arch summer was Manual Parametrics, a 12-week architecture studio focused on the development of a pavilion in the shape of a dome using a sustainable material. It was led by Associate Professor Gustavo Crembil, with Mae-Ling Lokko as the material adviser and Tom Rowland as the fabrication adviser.

Taking part in a design-build studio during the summer gives students the opportunity to build outside, which also allows them to build on a one-to-one scale and gain experience working with a new material.

“We don’t only think with our heads; we also think with our hands,” said Crembil. “When working one-to-one, you’re confronted with scale and, suddenly, gravity matters.”

In addition to constructing the final pavilion, the students also created each of the individual mycelium units using a system developed by Lokko as part of the “Carbocycene” research project taking place at Atelier Luma / Luma Arles in France and at Rensselaer.