Mushroom Cultivation Workshops at
TOP Lab and Futurium
from 21st Oct to 10th Dec
A city out of mushrooms? Skyscrapers made of champignons, the train station made of chanterelles and for the walls of the city hall oyster mushrooms gave their best – what sounds like something from the Cockaigne scene, could become close to real with the project MY-CO BUILD. The architect Sven Pfeiffer and the biotechnologist and artist Vera Meyer met each other through Futurium and deal together with the creation of places and spaces with the help of mushrooms.
TOP already collaborated with the AMM department of TUB lead by Vera Meyer already in 2019-2020 within the “Mind the Fungi” project. During that project TOP hosted courses to train the individuals in mycology lab techniques to materialise their impulses and integrate them into academic research practices.
During the MY-CO BUILD project, TOP will train participants in mushroom cultivation techniques and at the same time grow the blocks to build a fungal composite material modular structure. This in collaboration with the KiezPilz* collective.
Each participant will build two blocks. All the blocks produced within the activities will be used to build the final structure on the very last day.
During the project, participants will be trained at cultivating gourmet mushrooms and growing composite materials using the format developed in “Mind the Fungi”.
Dates:
21.10 Thursday Session at TOP Lab
22.10 Friday Session at TOP Lab
11.11 Thursday Session at TOP Lab
02.12 Thursday Session at TOP Lab
10.12 Friday Session at Futurium
TOP Lab: Schillerpromenade 4, 12049 Berlin
Futurium: Alexanderufer 2, 10117 Berlin
Time:
There will be two groups, one in the morning (G1), working from 9.00 to 13.00 and one in the afternoon (G2) from 14.00 to 18.00.
Participants will be assigned to one or the other according to preference and place availability.
Corona Rules:
The 3-G rule applies (Geimpfte – Genesene – Getestete): We accept just fully vaccinated individuals OR individuals who recovered and got vaccinated once OR individuals who recovered OR with a negative test not older than 24h.
>top e.V. reserves the right to change the corona admission criteria according to the evolving situation and instructions of authorities
Registration:
Book your place on Futurium’s platform here:
Group 1 10.00 – 14.00
Group 2 15.00 – 19.00
If you have questions, write at lab@top-ev.de
Introduction:
Mushrooms are used to produce food, construction materials, furniture, textiles, packaging materials, dyeing pigments, chemicals, artworks, and medicinal substances. The variety in use cases makes mycology a field of study with the potential of proposing extraordinary ideas, and which will disrupt different aspects of agro-industrial processes and eventually of our lives.
To speed up the process, we believe that involving society in this transformation is the key to success. Therefore, we designed a course for beginners to get trained and start co-developing ideas and solutions in the mycology field of study.
This course further explores the trans-disciplinary field between mycology and architecture, focusing on growing modular blocks to build bigger structures.
The course:
The course is a series of workshops, with the goal of training the participants in basic mycology laboratory techniques. This means you will be trained to build a myco lab at home and run it, cultivate mushrooms on different substrates, grow edible mushrooms and grow mushroom materials.
A crash course approach will be used to provide the missing know-how exactly at the moment where it is needed.
Photos: Bon Alog, Alessandro Volpato
Syllabus:
Here is a detailed content of the content of the course
| Mushroom cultivation and fabrication course content* | |
| Introduction | Impulse of Vera Meyer and Sven Pfeiffer |
| Course presentation | |
| Lectures | Design and fungal materials |
| Mushroom biology | |
| Building a home biology lab | |
| The edible mushroom industry | |
| Bioremediation with mushrooms | |
| Home lab safety training | Home laboratory safety rules |
| Mycology training | Grow mushrooms on agar |
| Domestication and isolation of a wild mushroom | |
| Prepare jars of grain spawns | |
| Start a liquid culture | |
| Prepare grow bags and fruitification | |
| Fungal fabrication training | Preparing and filling molds of a negative mold to shape the fungal object |
| Cultivation of mushrooms in negative molds | |
| Essication and finalisation of the fungal object | |
| Tour | Visiting a mushroom fruiting chamber |
| *This syllabus doesn’t represent the order in which the program will actually take place | |
The team:
Prof Dr.-Ing. Vera Meyer, Head of chair at TU Berlin, Department of Applied Molecular Microbiology (AMM)
Prof Dipl.Ing. Sven Pfeiffer, Architekt & Designer, guest Professor of digital and experimental design at the Institute of architecture and urban development of UdK
M.Sc. Alessandro Volpato, Biologist freelancer & Co-founder of TOP Lab
Logan Noonan, TU Berlin employee at AMM & co-founder of KiezPilz
Annemarie Nazarek, co-founder of KiezPilz
