We’re in an affordable housing crisis, and we’ve been stuck in the same loop of underfunded toxic building projects for years. It's high time we think outside the box. The answer might be where we least expect it…in the root system of mushrooms.

Join us for a live taping of Healthy Materials Lab’s podcast, Trace Material with guest Chris Mauer, principal architect at redhouse studio and member of the BioHAB team. Come behind the scenes as hosts Ava Robinson and Burgess Brown chat with Chris about mycelium’s potential to reshape the way we build affordable housing. 

In the upcoming season of Trace Material, we’ll be diving into the world of fungi to explore the myriad uses of this mysterious kingdom of organisms. BioHAB, a project based in Namibia, combines many of those uses. We’ll chat with Chris about how he and the rest of the BioHAB team are harvesting an invasive bush in Namibia and using it as biomass to grow gourmet mushrooms for food and building materials for affordable housing. We’ll take a quick detour to Mars where Chris will share how he’s partnering with NASA to “grow” martian housing.

This event is part of Mycelium Millennium, a 2-part lecture series that explores the potential of mycelium, networks of fungal threads, to shape the future of healthy materials. Mycelium can be harnessed to do everything from cleaning up toxic waste sites to constructing housing. In these events, we’ll speak to practitioners who are manifesting mycelium’s potential across the fields of design, textiles, and architecture.