Making houses out of mushrooms (BBC)

By Golda Arthur
BBC News

Much of the construction industry depends on fossil fuels, creating a big carbon footprint. As pressure mounts to make construction "greener", experts have started to design houses out of hemp and straw, and bricks made of mushrooms.

From a distance, it looks like something out of a desert landscape, ancient and handmade.

The closer you get, the more you see something much more modern in the curves of this tower, assembled from 10,000 bricks.

But it is only when you examine one of those bricks close-up that you get a sense of what the future might hold. Using bioengineering, this structure has been made from mushrooms.

"This is a hybrid of what I call an ancient technology of mushrooms and a totally new technology of computation and engineering," says architect David Benjamin.
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more: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28712940