Mae-ling Lokko, building scientist and Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2018 and RIBA North to create an architectural installation and accompanying exhibition called Hack the Root, now open until 28 October. Here Mae-Ling describes the background and process behind the project.
The commission uses the metaphoric ‘hacking’ of contemporary forms of building material manufacturing to explore alternative forms of local, distributed production using renewable agrowaste resources.
Hack the Root defines the “root”, as a singular, totalitarian stock that displaces all around it in its self-interest, a system only superficially interested in its context in so far it can extract from it for its predatory growth. Today, as a powerful metaphor for historical and contemporary forms of our modern economy, the root takes many forms in our homes and cities across the globe - the city center, the strip shopping mall, or the mechanical air-conditioner. In contrast to this idea, Hack the Root explores an alternative notion of rootedness in a powerful, pluralistic system in the “rhizome” that maintains this idea of a network that seeks and encourages relations.
With the help of a range of different stakeholders - community farming groups, students, urban farming startups and professionals - Hack the Root aims to expose both the promise and challenge within agrowaste upcycling infrastructures through the life cycle of the exhibition. Using mycelium, the vegetative state of fungi, the entrance structure to the exhibition is grown from mycelium biomaterial panels fed with hemp agrowaste.
Through a series of open “grow workshops” in partnership with Squash Nutrition, a local community-led food hub, close to 100 school children from Windsor Primary School, Life Sciences UTC, Liverpool University and community farmers on Windsor Street participated in the growing of these 200 mycelium-hemp panels that make up the architectural installation at RIBA North. Hack the Root’s premise to expand exposure and participation across both academia, industry and community groups was an attempt to prototype distributed, large-scale production within the context of the biennial.
The entire growth period - ranging from three to seven days- can be observed within ‘grow chambers’ located within the RIBA North galleries. In contrast to reconstituted wood products that use formaldehyde and other toxic adhesives, mycelium bioadhesive technology proposes a non-toxic, low energy alternative form of production sustained by a local supply chain.
In as much as the production process of Hack the Root celebrates emerging, inclusive methods of ecological production that are riding on the back of the biotechnology revolution, the structure of the exhibition explores models of generative business models and generative design that underpin the success of green biomaterial economies.
Taking the shape of a spiral, representative of a symbolic framework for ecological production and transformation, the grow chamber is located in the center and terminates at the mycelium structure at the entrance. It is in this physical unravelling of the spiral that the production of Hack the Root, that the spirit of Hack the Root, aspires to activate new models of ecological material life thinking within the building sector - one that accelerates material innovation through open platforms for experimentation.
Hack the Root is open at RIBA North until 28 October 2018. Visit www.architecture.com/hacktheroot for more information on the exhibition and our programme of events.
