Designing Mycelium Exploring the Design Potential of Fungi

Foreword

Giuliana Furci

Notes from the Margin

Assia Crawford

All About the Fungus

Fungi: Ubiquitous, Relentless, and Essential

Sara Branco

Fungal Living Materials

Elise Elsacker

Critical History of Mycelium Architecture

Ali Ghazvinian

How to Cast with Mycelium

Assia Crawford

Amulets

Scenographies of Becoming in the Age of Decomposition

Assia Crawford

Architectural Invocations

Côme Di Meglio

Articulating an Architectural Poetics of Rot

Phil Ayres

Dead Gods

Jemila MacEwan

Biospatial Tectonics

Richard Beckett, Christopher Whiteside, Hangchuan Wei

Alchemy

From (Im)practical to Imagination: Artificial Intelligence in Mycelium Design

Omid Oliyan, Jonathan Dessi-Olive

Crafting with the Other

Jonas Edvard

Farming Mycelium Textiles

Orkan Telhan

BioScaffolds: Designing with Mycelium

Natalie Alima

Living Prints: The Craft of Mycelial 3D Printing

Nancy Diniz, Frank Melendez

Symbiotic Materialities: Co-Designing and Fabricating with Mycelium for a Sustainable Future

Natalia Beata Piórecka

Weed Form: Myco-Regenerative Dreams

Dana Cupkova

Leather and Lace

Assia Crawford

Artifact

The Mycelium Project: Integrating Material Research and Professional Education Jonathan Dessi-Olive

Sounding the Future

Rachel Rosenkrantz

BIOCYCLER: Using Mycotecture to Remediate and Recycle Buildings

Christopher Maurer

Scaling Mycelium-Based Materials in Southeast Asia: The MYCL Case Study

Mohamad Arekha Bentangan

Borrowing from Nature as a Regenerative Design Strategy

Andy Cartier

Mediating Form, Matter, Fabrication and Performance in Designing with Myco-Materials Benay Gürsoy

It’s Not About the Fungus

 Jonathan Dessi-Olive

Biography

Assia Crawford is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Tulane University and the founder of Wild Futures Lab, an interdisciplinary research and teaching facility focused on bio-design. She is an ARB-registered architect and author of Designer’s Guide to Lab Practice (Routledge, 2023) and Bios in Search of Zoe (ACTAR, 2025). She holds a PhD in Architecture from Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, where her thesis, Living Building Practice: Design for a Post-Anthropocene Era, examined methods for working with living organisms and the ethical dimensions of emerging material practices. Assia’s research centers on biological material alternatives and digital fabrication in response to ecological challenges. Positioned at the intersection of architecture, science, and critical theory, her work uses experimental and speculative design to explore resilient, adaptive responses to environmental uncertainty.

Jonathan Dessi-Olive is a researcher, designer, and educator whose work takes a critical approach to technology while integrating the history and theory of architecture, contemporary construction, and computational design. Presently, he is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at UNC Charlotte, where he teaches architecture design studios, structural design, and experimental research seminars. He previously taught at Kansas State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2021, he founded MycoMatters Lab, a design research and education practice that develops novel applications of fungi-based materials at diverse scales of structural design, architectural acoustics, and sculpture.