If you follow us on Instagram, you know we’re a bit obsessed with mushrooms. We’ve reported on mushrooms as a viable material for a range of products from packaging to architecture. Now you can add lighting to that list. Designer Jonas Edvard showed his MYX pendant lights last year but his material research was included in Materialbiblioteket’s sustainable materials exhibition at the Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair.
The MYX lamp consist of plant fiber and mushroom-mycelium. The lamps are grown in a mold during a period of three weeks, where oyster mushrooms eat and bind together the plant fibers into a flexible and soft living textile. After harvesting of the edible mushrooms, the waste can be used as a dry and lightweight material that is organic, compostable and sustainable. The mushroom mycelium stabilizes the construction by physically binding the material behaving as a glue between the fibers. During the production period every lamp produces 500-600 grams of oyster mushrooms, that can be harvested as a nutritious and delicious edible byproduct. The mushroom mycelium uses waste to grow the fruits and stabilizes the material in a matrix of mycelium roots, that creates a optimized end-waste product with a nutritious food product during the growing cycle.
MYX received a Green Furniture Award 2014 and was part of the traveling Danish Craft Collection 2014. See more of Edvard’s most recent work with seaweed as a material for design here.
