The Unexpected Symboll-ism of Fungi

It took exact­ly four min­utes and thir­ty-three sec­onds for John Cage – the Amer­i­can com­pos­er and ama­teur mycol­o­gist – to rev­o­lu­tionise the fun­da­men­tal under­stand­ing of music and noise. “Hear­ing” his 1952 piece, the apt­ly named 4’33, that requires per­form­ers not to play their instru­ments, the amazed audi­ences realised there is no such thing as silence. A whole new world opens up when lis­ten­ing to sounds we nev­er thought were part of the story.

Cage’s pas­sion for neglect­ed sounds can very well illus­trate humans’ per­cep­tion of fun­gi. Con­sid­ered part of the plan­tae king­dom until a few decades ago, the con­tri­bu­tion of fun­gi to the ecosys­tems of this plan­et long went unno­ticed. But if humans weren’t able to sur­vive with­out oxy­gen pro­duced by plants, plants wouldn’t be able to sur­vive with­out myceli­um, the extent and role of which is some­times referred to as the wood wide web. Thanks to myceli­um – the sub­ter­ranean net­work of fun­gi branch­es – plants can com­mu­ni­cate, dis­trib­ute nutri­ents or send each oth­er sig­nals when in danger.

Much of human life as we know it has been impact­ed by fun­gi. They are lit­er­al­ly every­where: from alco­hol over sour dough to a mould pro­duc­ing a bac­te­ria-killing sub­stance known as peni­cillin. Fun­gi can break down rock, crude oil, plas­tics or TNT. They can push their way through asphalt, although they them­selves weigh no more than a few grams. Their pop­u­la­tions thrive in places no sane human would ever ven­ture into, for instance the imme­di­ate sur­round­ings of the Cher­nobyl nuclear pow­er plant.

A recent surge in fun­gi pop­u­lar­i­ty spear­head­ed by the likes of Mer­lin Shel­drake or Paul Stamets has sparked a grow­ing inter­est in the top­ic, espe­cial­ly with design­ers, artists, and entre­pre­neurs. Brands like Mer­cedes, Her­mès or Adi­das have incor­po­rat­ed myceli­um in their prod­ucts. Its poten­tial in rock­et sci­ence is stud­ied by NASA. Inno­v­a­tive approach­es to myceli­um as a mate­r­i­al have been lit­er­al­ly spring­ing up like mush­rooms: sus­tain­able pack­ag­ing, eth­i­cal leather, build­ing mate­r­i­al, and even coffins. All effort­less­ly com­ply with the cur­rent stan­dards for the nat­ur­al, cir­cu­lar, or biodegradable.

Czechs are often labelled as a nation of avid wild mush­room pick­ers, yet work­ing with myceli­um hasn’t quite tak­en off in the local design com­mu­ni­ty so far. But this year, he afore­men­tioned exper­i­men­ta­tion with the mate­r­i­al has result­ed in a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Lasvit and LLEV design stu­dio who are no new­bies in the field. Togeth­er, they launched Sym­boll, a glass­ware col­lec­tion shaped by nat­ur­al process­es char­ac­ter­is­tic of myceli­um growth. Not only is this the first time the mate­r­i­al is used in craft­ing moulds for glass­mak­ing, it aspires to rev­o­lu­tionise glass pro­duc­tion with a method using beech saw­dust as the basis for grow­ing mycelium.

“Our fam­i­ly con­ver­sa­tions inspired us to start exper­i­ment­ing with myceli­um as a mate­r­i­al for use it in design. As a result of these dis­cus­sions, we ordered a bag of spores from the Nether­lands at the end of 2019,” says Eva Mochalová who set up LLEV design stu­dio togeth­er with her part­ner Mar­cel in 2004. Based in a remote vil­lage near Turnov in north­ern Bohemia, they spent the first months of Covid lock­downs test­ing and pro­cess­ing the mate­r­i­al, and then pre­sent­ed a col­lec­tion of can­dle­sticks and tables at Design­blok 2020. “But we didn’t want to stop at mak­ing fur­ni­ture, bowls or pots, a lot of col­leagues abroad are doing that. We asked our­selves: How can we take this pas­sion to anoth­er level?”

One par­tic­u­lar detail imme­di­ate­ly caught their atten­tion: among oth­er qual­i­ties, myceli­um is fire-retar­dant. As Head of Stu­dio of Glass at the Fac­ul­ty of Art and Design in Ústí nad Labem, Mar­cel has seen glass being blown into all sorts of mate­ri­als includ­ing a pump­kin or card­board. “We thought, why couldn’t we try blow­ing glass into moulds made of myceli­um? After all, unlike oth­er types of moulds, they can be tak­en to the woods or com­post,” adds Eva.

In order to achieve this, LLEV teamed up with Brno-based start-up Myk­ilio who grew the forms using Gan­o­der­ma lucidum, a mush­room also used for med­i­c­i­nal pur­pos­es. “Mush­rooms have been cul­ti­vat­ed arti­fi­cial­ly for food and gas­tron­o­my for at least fifty years,” says Matěj Róth who co-found­ed Myk­ilio with Jakub Seifert in 2019. “We use grain inocu­lum com­bined with lig­no-celu­lous wastes like saw­dust, straw, or cof­fee grounds. All the input mate­ri­als imprint their mechan­i­cal prop­er­ties into the final prod­uct and the mush­room basi­cal­ly acts as a glue that binds all the dif­fer­ent parts togeth­er,” he explains the back­ground of the process.

After the fun­gus final­ly rips through the sub­strate, it is ground into a pow­der and poured into neg­a­tive moulds. It takes three to sev­en days before the result­ing object can be tak­en out and dried at about 80 degrees Cel­sius to kill the remain­ing fun­gus in order to pre­vent its fur­ther growth. Glass is then blown into the moulds, with myceli­um leav­ing a unique imprint on each piece in a slight­ly dif­fer­ent way.

“We are not the design­ers of this set, rather we let nature cre­ate. We’ve just nudged it and giv­en it some direc­tion, but we’re let­ting it work on its own. With glass — the cre­ation of which is also a nat­ur­al process — the two things come togeth­er to pro­duce this unique shape,” says Eva whose pas­sion for myceli­um can be an inspi­ra­tion to oth­ers on their jour­ney of dis­cov­er­ing what’s under­neath our feet. “If we under­stand fun­gi, lis­ten to and coop­er­ate with them, and live togeth­er in sym­bio­sis, every­one will benefit.”