Glastonbury's mushroom mycelium pavilion explores sustainable stage design

Competition set designer Simon Carroll has created the spiralling Hayes Pavilion from salvaged timber and mycelium at Glastonbury pageant to problem the business’s over-reliance on polystyrene foam.

Encircled by an extended bench, the Hayes Pavilion was designed as each a gathering house and a dialog piece, exploring whether or not mycelium can be utilized as a extra sustainable materials for constructing the flowery units discovered at festivals like Glastonbury.

The construction consists of a 26-metre-long timber body, formed roughly just like the quantity six with one lengthy wall clad in mycelium – a biomaterial grown from the foundation construction of fungi that’s more and more being explored as a pure insulator and hearth retardant.

To kind the wall, mycelium insulation boards created by UK firm Biohm have been reduce up and mixed in a lot the identical approach that set designers within the movie and music business will carve elaborate units out of low cost polystyrene panels.

Carroll, who has labored within the business for 20 years and was liable for Glastonbury’s personal Lonely Hearts Membership stage, got down to discover whether or not mycelium may supply a viable alternative for the fossil plastic, which can’t be processed in conventional recycling streams.

“I’ve seen the impression of what we do,” he informed Dezeen. “The pageant business and the theatre facet is much more resourceful – primarily due to funds – and so they do are likely to try to ensure that supplies are upcycled.”

“However finally, they find yourself in landfill or incinerated. And the movie business, sadly, is notoriously unhealthy for it.”

For the Hayes Pavilion, Carroll labored with a gaggle of fabric researchers and set designers from throughout music, movie and TV to push mycelium to its artistic limits.

“We tried all kinds of various approaches primarily based round the way in which that we at the moment method the usage of polystyrene,” he mentioned.

That meant reducing, sanding and glueing the panels collectively utilizing a gelatin-based adhesive to create an undulating three-dimensional floor and colouring it utilizing a seaweed-based bioplastic coating by industrial designer Aleksa Kostur.

With the intention of holding the pavilion’s footprint as little as attainable, Carroll used varied reclaimed supplies in its building.

The uncovered timber framing system was made utilizing salvaged wooden from a 200-year-old Douglas fir that was upended in Wales throughout Storm Arwen, whereas the roof is made utilizing repurposed tents from an organization that rents pageant marquees.

To make sure stability, industrial timber was used to kind the decking helps holding up the pavilion’s raised, oriented strand board (OSB) flooring, which protrude out past the footprint of the construction to behave as a bench the place festivalgoers can perch.

“Mycelium gives a communal community to a forest and I needed to try to convey that concept into the design by way of giving folks a spot to sit down and speak and interact with the mission,” Carroll defined.

Related by way of metal bolts and mounting plates, the wood construction may be completely demounted and flat-packed so it may be reused for future editions of the pageant.

Carroll plans to return the Hayes Pavilion to Glastonbury yearly as a automobile for exploring new inexperienced applied sciences and approaches which can be promising to revolutionise the business.

The mycelium panels could be retired after the inaugural version to create space for different improvements. However Carroll claims that, not like polystyrene, the panels may be composted as soon as they’re not wanted, even with their bioplastic coating.

To confirm these claims and assess the general impression of the mission, the designer enlisted sustainability marketing consultant Pauline Bourdon to finish an entire carbon evaluation of the construction.

“Loads of the time after we do massive builds and issues like this, time is an terrible stress and that then implies that we have now to make sacrificial selections,” Carroll defined.

“We try an increasing number of to grasp what the impacts of these are, whether or not that be materials selections or staffing selections.”

Though Biohm’s mycelium insulation boards are near receiving regulatory approval, Carroll says that extra materials growth might be essential to adapt them to be used in set design.

That is largely all the way down to the fabric inconsistencies which can be revealed when the ready-made panels are reduce and sanded to create extra intricate shapes.

“I had initially give you the idea of fairly a unique design by way of its styling and I realised in a short time that we’re not fairly the place we must be,” he mentioned.

“We’re at very early phases and it is given us the flexibility to now suggestions and to proceed creating a product that’s extra appropriate.”

Glastonbury can also be working to scale back its environmental footprint in different methods.

This 12 months, the pageant might be completely powered by renewable power and renewable fuels, whereas the sale of disposable vapes might be banned in an extension of final 12 months’s ban on single-use plastic bottles.

Reversible pavilions which can be designed for disassembly have develop into more and more common amongst architects and designers in recent times because the business grapples with the environmental implications of making momentary installations.

Amongst them is Vestre’s stand from the 2020 Stockholm Furnishings & Gentle Honest, which was repurposed to kind an set up at Milan design week the next 12 months.