Photo: Anne Nygard | Unsplash
The city of Cleveland, Ohio, US, faces an epidemic of abandoned houses – crumbling homes number in the thousands. These ramshackle structures are riddled with toxins like lead and dilapidated to the point of no return. And if tearing down and safely disposing of the waste of one such home sounds daunting, imagine thousands of them. Enter the humble fungus. “All of the material from demolition – the studs, the floors, cellulosic mass, and even things like ceiling tiles and asphalt material like roof shingles, can be mixed into substrate that then becomes good for growing fungus,” said Chris Maurer of Cleveland-based architecture firm Redhouse Studio. Maurer has been advocating for the use of substrate to address Cleveland’s housing crisis. The result of the process is that heavy metals and other toxins are extracted and captured in the mushrooms, while the substrate leftovers are compacted and heated to create clean bricks for new construction.
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