Making, exhibiting, and caring for 'not-quite-there' fungal building materials

How do architects materially and discursively present 'sustainable materials of the future'? This paper explores how considering the agency of non-humans changes the everyday practices of architects who have experimented with, conceptualised, and exhibited materials made from fungal mycelium.
The challenge facing many architects today is to reassess their practice in light of the current crises, particularly the environmental crisis for which architecture bears some responsibility and upon which the future of the discipline depends. To achieve this, architects are actively rediscovering old techniques or experimenting with new ones to develop more environmentally friendly architecture. The architects I collaborate with during my doctoral thesis are among those experimenting with fungal building biomaterials, which are made from mushroom mycelium. In their daily practice, my interlocutors temporarily exchange their designer's hat for that of a craftsman. By doing so, they are obliged to take into account the agency of non-humans, whether animate or not, with whom they work. They must constantly witness the extent to which matter is neither passive nor inert.

This paper explores the practices of caring and the expression of affects in sociomaterial assemblages within laboratory and architecture studio settings, as well as in front of institutional actors. It addresses the significance of (bio)materials in architecture as both 'matters of concern' (Latour 2006) and 'matters of care' (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). Drawing on ethnographic observations of a group of architects who aim to go beyond the exploitability of a resource (Fiévé & Guillot, 2021) and even beyond the concept of resources, this paper presents their material experiments as exhibited at a major architectural exhibition, the Venice Architecture Biennale. This allowed them to present both materially and discursively what I have called ‘materials-not-quite-there-yet’.