Blog
This section features a selection of articles published in magazines and online platforms, alongside personal reflections and commentaries on student projects.
Archive of essays and texts here: AplusTexto: Stefano Ferracini / Architectural Writings (Italian).
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Stefano Ferracini
Mushrooms, Algae, and the Messy Future of Living
Sometimes I look at the walls of my house and think: we’re surrounded by concrete drains, plaster that never sees the light of day, and materials that, once extracted, stay exactly the same until the day we tear them down. It’s strange, isn’t it? We build for eternity, yet we live in dead shells.
Recently, I stumbled upon these experiments with mycelium. Yes, mushrooms. It made me smile, the idea of "growing" a brick instead of baking it in an industrial kiln. You take some agricultural waste, add the spores, put it all in a mold, and wait. You can’t exactly go move in tomorrow—the structural strength is what it is, and I’m not sure I’d feel that comfortable in a skyscraper made of spores. And yet, the idea that a material could grow instead of being ripped out of a quarry makes me think we might have had the wrong approach from the very beginning.
To understand whether this is just a trend or something concrete, I went to look up a few real-world examples. Take The Living, a studio in New York: for the MoMA PS1, they built the "Hy-Fi Tower." It was made of mycelium bricks grown in a few days using corn stalks. When the exhibition ended, they took it down and tossed it into the compost. It’s a strange thing: you build something knowing it’s going to die. It goes against everything we’ve been taught about the durability of buildings, doesn’t it?
Then there are the algae facades. You see them in renderings and they look like giant aquariums attached to office buildings. They work on photosynthesis: they produce oxygen, absorb CO2, and meanwhile, they heat up the water for the building's heating system. Take the BIQ House in Hamburg: the algae aren’t just a hypothesis; they’re inside the facade’s glass panels. There are panels filled with water pumping nutrients around. When it’s sunny, the algae grow, provide shade (cooling the interior), and generate heat.
Nice on paper. But I immediately start to worry: who cleans them? If the system breaks, do you end up with a wall of dead, rotting algae? It’s a maintenance job that requires a gardener, not a construction worker. It’s a bit like having a car engine integrated into your living room wall; I always wonder how long those pumps will last before they fail. Are we ready to treat a building like a house pet that needs to be fed and looked after?
The idea of living in a house that "lives" for real—that metabolizes my trash or changes color depending on the sun—makes me a bit uncomfortable. It’s a huge shift. And then there’s the cost. If I go to a hardware store, a concrete brick costs pennies. Mycelium, for now, is an artisanal, almost bespoke process. Are we sure it can be scaled up? Or will it remain a luxury for museums and super-tech offices that want to use a "green" facade for publicity?
Sometimes I wonder if we aren’t making things too complicated. We try to make buildings "alive" with technologies that feel like they’re straight out of a sci-fi movie, when perhaps it would be enough to go back to insulating houses with hemp, which is a simpler material.
Anyway, between the Hy-Fi Tower and the facade in Hamburg, it feels like we’re in a phase of pure creative chaos. A bit brilliant, a bit messy. Maybe the building of the future won’t be perfect; it might need a "doctor" instead of a mason. It sounds exhausting, if I’m being honest, but maybe it’s more sensible than just keeping on digging holes in the ground to make bricks.
#BioArchitecture #SustainableDesign #LivingMaterials #FutureOfLiving #OrganicArchitecture #AIAssistedWriting
From Authors to "Algorithm Curators": How AI is Reshaping the Designer’s Role
A few weeks ago, I tried using Midjourney for an interior design project I’m currently working on. I was looking for ideas for a system of wooden partition walls.
Inhabiting the Mind: How the Built Environment Redesigns Our Brain
Imagine walking into a Gothic cathedral. Your eyes track upward, following vaults that seem to defy gravity; your breath deepens, your mind opens to abstract thoughts, and your sense of time slows down...
Relationship Architecture: Proximity Spaces Against Urban Loneliness
Urban loneliness represents one of the greatest contradictions of modernity: we have never been so densely packed into the same spaces, yet we have never been so isolated...
The Mirror Wall Shatters: The Bluff and Contradictions of The Line
The dream of the straight line has definitively collided with the harsh reality of the desert, exposing the true nature of The Line: not the ultimate manifesto of future urbanism...
The Illusion of Work-Life Balance: When the Office Owns Your Soul
There is a scene in Severance (the cult Apple TV+ series) that perfectly encapsulates the horror of modern corporatism. The protagonist, Mark, steps into an elevator...
The Gray Apocalypse: Concrete and the Erasure of CivilizationThe Gray Apocalypse
In Victor Kossakovsky’s documentary cinema, images speak for themselves, entirely bypassing the need for a narrator. In his film Architecton (2024), this stylistic choice evolves into a profound philosophical reflection...
