Hypha-Lume Pavilion Uses Reconfigurable Mycelium Modules to Turn Movement Into Light
Mycelium's money is moving into panels and insulation, while pavilions like this one stay showpieces until someone publishes the moisture and fire data.
Five designers have conceived Hypha-Lume, a pavilion of reconfigurable mycelium blocks that uses sensors, projection and sound to turn visitor movement into light, in a project submitted to Designboom in October. It is an elegant idea, but the sector's capital is flowing elsewhere: to panels and insulation that must survive damp, regulators and contractors.
Blocks and light
Darya Holub, Selin Ozasik, Pinak Bhapkar, Nikhil Narendiran and Baskar Bharathwaj Subramanian built the design from three tapered block types with curvatures of 20, 40 and 60 degrees. The blocks connect around vertical supports, so a limited family of parts can form different walls. By day the shell is a porous enclosure. At night sensors track where visitors walk, pause and gather, and the pavilion projects coloured light and audio, including traces of earlier visits, onto its surface. The team presents this as a spatial memory.
That memory is electronic. Nothing in the submission suggests the fungus senses anything. Mycelium, the root-like network of a fungus, serves as skin, while sensors and projectors do the work. The write-up also gives no dimensions, fungal species, substrate or test data, and does not say whether a full-scale version stands anywhere. It joins a small genre of experimental showpieces, such as Myceen's mycelium insulation in an Estonian pavilion.
Showpieces and panels
Mycelium pavilions have a decade of history. Hy-Fi, built for MoMA PS1 in New York in 2014, stacked 10,000 bricks into circular towers more than 12m tall, then was disassembled and composted after three months, according to a composites history of the project. The Growing Pavilion at Dutch Design Week in 2019 covered a 750-square-foot circular frame in fungal filaments for 75,000 fairgoers, as Interior Design reported. Both were built for events.
The money sits elsewhere. Bristol-based Mykor completed a £4m round to grow prefabricated walls from waste. It says it has secured £338m in supply and offtake agreements with UK and European construction companies, according to Resource Media. Those are contracts, not revenue, but they are a buyer's signal that no pavilion can give. In Nairobi, MycoTile's 3,000 square metres of monthly panel output shows the same pull towards products. The cautionary case is Biohm, a London insulation start-up. Insolvency practitioners were appointed its joint administrators, notified in the London Gazette in the week of 18 May 2026, by their own account.
The moisture problem
A systematic review of mycelium composites as insulators puts moisture uptake at 40 to 580 weight per cent, which may cause durability issues in damp assemblies. It also cites lack of standardisation, poor durability evidence and unclear large-scale cost-effectiveness as barriers. A separate critical review finds that limits in strength and durability mean the materials may not yet be ready for widespread load-bearing use. Both are surveys of published laboratory work. They bound the claim, but they do not measure this pavilion.
Hypha-Lume's design is sensible against that caution. The blocks form a shell around vertical supports, so they are not asked to carry the structure. The weak point is reconfigurability. The designers want the modules to be reassembled for new sites, and repeated handling and wetting are where the reviews find mycelium weakest. If the blocks survive many cycles, that would be a useful result.
What would change the picture
A built, outdoor prototype would shift the assessment. It would need disclosed species and substrate, logged moisture and a stated number of reassemblies. A university or a start-up could produce that within a season. Until then, the pavilion is a rendering of ambition, and a good one.
The pattern across the sector is plain. Capital is going to firms such as Mykor that sign contractors and chase fire and acoustic standards, while the experiential end of mycelium, from Hy-Fi to Hypha-Lume, works as a shopfront. Biohm's administration shows the market has already culled one early mover. The next round of consolidation will favour makers of panels with offtake agreements.
