Architect Tony Osborn of Vancouver has carried off the grand prize of the 100-Mile House competition – the design of a dream home using only materials within a 100-mile radius of Vancouver.
The contest was sponsored by the Architecture Foundation of British Columbia as a way of fostering innovation and fresh approaches to the achievement of sustainability within the building industry.
Billed as an "open ideas" competition, the contest challenged participants to design a 1,200-square-foot dream home using only materials manufactured or recycled within a 100-mile radius from Vancouver's geographic centre.
Submissions were judged by a panel of five residential design and urban planning experts.
Osborn won for his Myco House, a design that featured masonry blocks made of mycelium (the vegetative part of a common oyster mushroom), along with lime-hemp plaster, and wood harvested from forests devastated by the mountain pine beetle infestation.
Osborn calls these "mushroom bricks" and knows they sound like science fiction, but he says the technology is being developed by the 3M Company in the U.S.
"It's not Star Trek-type stuff," he says. "It just needs to be implemented correctly in the building industry."
Osborn says his design was intended to inspire his peers as much as the general public.
"Architects like to get together and sort of feel bad about having contributed to [the] environmental problem we find ourselves in," Osborn says. "I wanted to offer an alternative message. These problems are solvable. We just need to be creative about it."
