Rhizome — Why We Stopped Building and Started Growing

In a converted greenhouse outside Zurich, a small team is demonstrating that the strongest structures are the ones that were never assembled at all.

The first time I held a grown panel in my hands, I was standing in an unheated workshop in the Swiss lowlands, mid-February. The material was still faintly warm — residual metabolic heat from three weeks of fungal colonization. It weighed less than plywood but flexed without creaking. The mycelium network inside it had done what centuries of industrial engineering could not: it had built a composite material that was, at every scale, optimized for the load it needed to carry.

The Cultivation Protocol

Growth Chamber Seven at the Rhizome Institute runs at 24 °C and 85% relative humidity — conditions that most architects would call uninhabitable but that Ganoderma lucidum considers paradise. Dr. Matteo Ferretti and his team inoculate substrate trays with liquid culture every Monday morning. By Thursday, visible hyphae have already mapped the tray's geometry. The organism does not need blueprints.

“We don't design the structure. We design the conditions, and the organism designs itself.”
— Dr. Matteo Ferretti, Rhizome Institute