A Pavilion Grown, Not Built
In November 2025, on the campus of Seoul National University of Science and Technology, an architecture studio finished a small public pavilion. The pavilion is made of wood, robotic-arm 3D-printed formwork, and a fungal skin.
It was not built. It was grown.
The studio is *Yong Ju Lee Architecture, and the project is called Mycelial Hut*. The through-line is that each of its 88 facade panels started as a customized 3D-printed mold, was filled with a mycelium substrate (the dense, white, root-like network that fungi grow before they fruit), and was allowed to colonize the mold for days.
The mycelium bound the substrate. The mold held the shape.
There is a moment in the workflow where the architect's authorship ends and the fungus's authorship begins.
The result is a wall panel that is, technically, alive — and which will, eventually, decompose. The standard 2026 narrative about climate-positive architecture is that it is expensive and slow and aesthetic-compromised. The pavilion is none of those.
The fabrication is robotic, which means scalable. The substrate is local agricultural waste.
The wood frame is conventional timber. The aesthetic is rough, organic, and (in this writer's view) more interesting than most of the parametric concrete produced this year.
What Yong Ju Lee's team is showing is that the unit economics of grown architecture may already be workable — that the obstacle is not the biology or the cost, but the building code.
The reason most cities don't have mycelium buildings is not that we cannot grow them. It is that no one has filed the structural engineering paperwork for a wall panel whose stiffness changes with humidity. There is a second thing in this project that is worth sitting with.
The pavilion is a collaboration between architects, roboticists, and a biology lab. The fabrication process is one in which the architect's intent (a panel of a specific shape, density, and growth rate) is delivered to a robotic arm that prints the mold, which is then handed to the mycelium, which does something the architect cannot fully predict.
There is a moment in the workflow where the architect's authorship ends and the fungus's authorship begins. This is not a metaphor.
It is a literal handoff of design authorship to a non-human process. The architect is no longer the sole author of the form; the architect is the gardener of the form.
The pavilion looks the way it does because the architect made a set of decisions and the mycelium made a different set of decisions, and the building is the record of both. Most contemporary architecture is still framed as a human author drawing a form and a contractor executing it. A grown building inverts the order.
The architect becomes a collaborator with a process that has its own agency. That reframe may be the actual interesting thing about Mycelial Hut — not the carbon math, but the authorship math.
The pavilion will, in a few years, return to the soil it came from.
That is, in the language of a 2026 climate conversation, the entire point. A building designed to compost is a building whose end-of-life was thought of at the start. The solarpunk imagination is full of buildings like this on paper. Yong Ju Lee's team built one.
Until the next transmission.