Designer Shinwei Rhoda Yen is turning furniture inside out with her ‘mushrooms ate my furniture’ chair. A contemporary addition to any garden, the seat of natural wood provides an excellent respite to enjoy your surroundings or take a break from your green thumb, while its underside provides the perfect habitat to grow mushrooms. Left exposed to the elements, mushrooms will grow and live within the chair for years, feeding off of the nutrients of the wood. As with all things in nature, the mushroom furniture will eventually degrade, giving way to the life of its inhabitants.
In the case of this mushroom bench, an inanimate object sustains life and automatically biodegrades as it reaches the end of its lifecycle. Since the bench’s bark has been embedded with mushroom spores, little maintenance is required for those without a green thumb. A trippy idea, although no word if the mushrooms are edible.
A novel way of encouraging life through the lifecycle of a product. It would be nice to see what this seat would be like after a few years and how much it would have degraded and also explore whether this would be possible with any other fruits/vegetables/fungi.
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