MyChair: The Bio-compostable Chair Grown From Mushrooms
MyChair is a concept product, grown from Mycelium as a seasonal outdoor seating solution. Fresh out of the formwork that gives the mycelium its iconic chair shape, MyChair is a pristine, off-white. MyChair is sealed with a beeswax/linseed oil mix to give it protection through a single seasonal cycle. As summer turns to fall and then winter, the wax seal gives way to the elements, allowing moisture to reach seeds contained within MyChair’s form. Come the next spring MyChair has transformed into a living sculpture with new life burgeoning from mycelium as it does in the forest floor. MyChair has become a landscape, as sprouts erupt out of Mychair. Chairs of native mosses, ferns, wildflowers, and mushrooms become a living sculptures. Each Spring a fresh batch of MyChairs are grown in re-usable formwork to inexpensively replace the last year’s “crop.”
Mycelium is a vegetative fungus that has recently been exposed to the industrial design world as an organically grown solution to replace Styrofoam in building and packaging. The largest organism in the world, mycelium is the white threadlike matrix that is essential in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems to deliver and store nutrients and water throughout the forest floor. Mycelium performs as a biological filter, and is essential to the decomposition of organic material in nature, metabolizing and creating fresh nutrients for the growth of new plant matter.
Initial Prototype 2010
