Arts and Architecture

Architecture lab’s work using mycelium featured in new installation in Old Main

Office decor for the University’s new provost includes work by Benay Gürsoy and students in her Stuckeman School lab that explores the use of mycelium as building components

An acoustic wall that was designed and built using mycelium — the root of fungi — by a team led by Benay Gürsoy, associate professor of architecture and director of the Form and Matter Lab in the Stuckeman School, now adorns a wall in Provost Fotis Sotiropoulos’ office in Old Main. Credit: Alale Mohseni / Penn State. Creative Commons

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — An acoustic wall that was designed and built using mycelium — the root of fungi — by a team of interdisciplinary researchers led by Benay Gürsoy, associate professor of architecture and director of the Form and Matter (ForMat) Lab in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School, now adorns a wall in Penn State Provost Fotis Sotiropoulos’ office in Old Main.

Mycelium-based composites are more eco-friendly than traditional building components, yet they match the performance of traditional insulation. The material has been a focus of ongoing research and experimentation in the ForMat Lab, where Gürsoy and her team explore their architectural applications along with researchers in the College of Agricultural Sciences.

How did this unique office installation come about?

In the spring of 2024, former interim Penn State Provost Tracy Langkilde took notice of Gürsoy’s work after Gürsoy participated in the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research’s Art Research Curation Exhibit on the University Park campus. Langkilde invited Gürsoy to design and build a mycelium acoustic wall — based on the work Gürsoy completed with architecture alumna Natalie Walter, now an acoustic engineer at WSP USA — for the provost’s office.

“I was delighted that Benay agreed to this project. This is an extraordinary installation — a stunning fusion ecological innovation, functionality and aesthetic elegance,” Langkilde said. “This unique application of mycelium exemplifies the creativity and innovation of our talented faculty and students and exemplifies the power of Penn State's culture of interdisciplinary research.”

Gürsoy, who is a researcher in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing, echoed Langkilde’s enthusiasm about this unique installation.

“We were very excited about this opportunity as it would be our first full-scale acoustic wall installation using mycelium-based composites,” Gürsoy said.  

Global research on mycelium-based composites is growing rapidly, Gürsoy said.

“This was a truly collaborative project and a lot of knowledge around it already existed in our lab,” said Alale Mohseni, a third-year architectural doctoral candidate.

In the spring of 2025, Gürsoy, Mohseni and Kieron Cook, then a second-year architecture master’s degree student, visited Langkilde’s office to take measurements, which Cook later used to create a 3D model of the space. Mohseni and Gürsoy then developed several options for the acoustic wall design that were simulated by architecture master’s degree student Aisa Shams. The simulations predicted how each design would perform in reducing reverberation time and overall improvement of acoustic quality in the office.

“The design selected by the provost’s office is a versatile system in which the panels can be rotated to alter the overall wall pattern,” Gürsoy said. “The installation spans approximately 9 by 6 feet and consists of 56 mycelium-based composite panels. The panels are mounted with magnets, allowing users to easily move and rotate them to continually reconfigure the design.”

The inspiration for the panels’ tessellation system, which refers to an arrangement of one or more shapes that completely covers a surface without overlap, draws from Sébastien Truchet’s 18th-century tiling patterns. These patterns generate a wide range of seamless designs through tile rotations. In this project, the concept has been reinterpreted using hexagonal tiles.

Mohseni, Shams and Gürsoy began cultivating the panels with the help of visiting doctoral researcher Alime Şanlı from Istanbul Technical University, who joined the ForMat Lab in July. Using reusable thermo-formed molds produced at the Stuckeman Shop and the Learning Factory in the College of Engineering, the team of four grew the mycelium-based composite panels at the Mushroom Research Center and dried them in the ovens at the College of Agricultural Sciences.

Sotiropoulos, who joined Penn State in August, has embraced the project with enthusiasm and recently met with ForMat Lab team to discuss the work further.

“This project exemplifies the power of our interdisciplinary work and innovative spirit at Penn State,” Sotiropoulos said. “Kudos to the acoustic wall team for their outstanding work across multiple colleges, labs and research centers. This collaboration integrates the arts and sciences and leveraged the latest technologies to produce a functional solution from sustainable materials. I look forward to seeing the future impact of their innovative work.”

Although the wall has been installed, Gürsoy and her team’s work is far from complete.

Gürsoy and her team plan to continuously return to the office and study the functionality of the wall and its insulations, creating even more opportunity and research experience for mycelium studies.

“We see this as an opportunity for further research,” Gürsoy said. “We will go back to take measurements of the room acoustics and compare them with pre-installation conditions, and we will also evaluate these findings against our simulation results to further our understanding of mycelium’s properties over time.”  

Last Updated October 14, 2025

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