A mushroom is only the fruit of a fungus. The real fungus lives underground: mycelium, a web of white threads far thinner than a human hair, growing from their tips, branching again and again, and wrapping round crumbs of soil and dead leaf until the forest floor is knitted into one mat. In 2014 MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York, picked architect David Benjamin and his studio The Living to build its summer pavilion, and he wanted bricks that were grown instead of fired in a kiln. Ecovative, a company in upstate New York that already grew packaging from fungus, chopped up corn stalks left over from harvest, mixed in the fungus and packed it into moulds. In five days the threads knitted the chunks into solid bricks, which were then dried so the fungus stopped growing. About 10,000 of them, tested by engineers at Arup, became Hy-Fi: three twisted chimneys about 12 metres tall, topped with shiny mirror-film bricks (the very moulds the bricks grew in) that threw sunlight down inside. It opened at the end of June 2014, and when summer ended the bricks were composted and the soil went to community gardens. Now NASA Ames, where Lynn Rothschild's team grows blocks from reishi fungus, is studying how to fly dormant fungus to the Moon or Mars and grow shelters on site. For now it is lab work on Earth.
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