Building with Biology: Lab Grown Construction materials

Last updated on November 18th, 2025 at 11:00 am

I understand the idea that there are buildings created out of fungi or concrete that heals itself may sound like so much sci-fi nonsense when you first hear about it. But here’s the thing: this stuff is really happening.

I began digging into lab-grown construction materials because I was curious whether they’d be another flash in the pan or truly revolutionary to how we build. Turns out, they’re doing both.

Table of Contents

The Materials That Are Actually Available Today

Mycelium-Based Building Blocks

So mycelium is essentially the root system of mushrooms. I know, odd way to start building. But companies like MOGU and Ecovative Design are already making this stuff at scale. It’s simple: they grow fungal mycelium on agricultural waste straw, hemp, sawdust, etcétera and it naturally binds everything together into a solid, lightweight material.

The applications are pretty wild. You have worked acoustic panels (as opposed to those cheap foam things), insulation that won’t give you the itchies, and even construction bricks. The bricks have about 30 psi in compressive strength, which may not seem like much compared to the 4000 psi your concrete does. But here’s the thing: they weigh a lot less, and for non-load bearing walls, partition walls and interior work as a whole are actually kind of definitely helpful.

And what really stunned me was how these materials could last hundreds of years. if they were treated well. These are not companies that are just making disposable novelty items.

Concrete That Fixes Itself

This one is probably the nearest thing to magic: self-healing concrete. Researchers embedded resting bacteria typically belonging to a group called Bacillus into concrete. When the concrete cracks and lets in water, the bacteria wake up and begin to eat. They metabolize the urea and form calcium carbonate, which literally fills in the cracks. It’s as if the concrete has an immune system.

The treatment works on cracks up to 1.24 millimeters in width. Over the long term, that could give us structures that heal themselves all along their lives rather than degenerating over time. There are even researchers who are developing genetically-engineered bacterial strains that work more rapidly or better withstand extreme temperatures.

Algae That Builds and Cleans

I was dubious about this one, but algae based materials are actually kind of cool. They don’t just hang around looking handsome they actively scavenge carbon from the air. The SolarLeaf project in Hamburg employed algae-fed façades, and algae bricks that mix biomass with sand and aggregates can be bought. Some suck up CO₂ and grow stronger with age.

It’s not that you’re making an entire building out of algae (not yet, anyway!), but incorporating it into concrete or other materials means your building is actively sequestering carbon from the atmosphere while you’re sleeping in there.

3D-Printed Homes Made From Earth

TECLA is worth your attention. What it really is, literally, is a fully 3D-printed house crafted from local clay and earth no regular concrete, no fancy polymers. Hewn from local materials and adjusted to its regional climate, it is what carbon-neutral housing could actually look like.

The implications matter. If you can take local material and 3D-print that into a house, all of the sudden you’re not flying in tons of material across this planet. Construction emissions drop dramatically.

What’s Still in the “Kinda Works But Not Quite Ready” Zone

Engineered Living Materials

Here is where it gets really futuristic. By BAYLEAH MCKENNA A new wave of technology is coming that will let us print living microorganisms with the same control, ease and speed. Call it living concrete that heals itself. These systems also include built-in biocontainment so you don’t inadvertently end up with a sentient building (thankfully).

The research is sound, but scaling production while keeping the organisms happy? That’s still a challenge.

Bacteria-Based Cement Production

Here’s the pitch: Forget traditional Portland cement (brutal for carbon emissions), and use microalgae that store CO₂ as calcium carbonate. In theory this could make cement production carbon-negative. The concept is good, but it’s not production scale.

Why This Isn’t Going to Take Over Construction Tomorrow

I wished I could love this technology without reservation, but there are genuine barriers:

The scalability problem is real: Even though it seems that growing biological materials can help, it is never as easy at industrial scale: keeping it consistent, avoiding contamination and not to forget long production cycles. Traditional materials? At a factory you flip a switch and get the same thing every time. Mycelium and bacteria don’t function like that. Each batch has variations. That may not sound like much until you’re a construction company looking to place an order for 10,000 of the things, all with exacting specifications.

Cost is the other killer: You’re paying more upfront at the moment. Yes, some bio-based materials are starting to become cost-competitive with conventional ones in certain categories but not across-the-board. Start up costs for dedicated production facilities are huge. Regulatory compliance for new materials? Also expensive.

The industry is conservative: Construction moves slowly. The building codes are designed for concrete and steel. Insurance companies get nervous about materials with no track record. Veteran architects who have spent 30 years designing with traditional materials are not going to redesign their plans around mycelium bricks overnight. It’s not personal. it’s just what happens in entrenched industries.

We don’t have decades of data on performance. If you purchase a home with mycelium insulation in it, will the product be doing as well in year 20? Possibly, but we don’t really know yet.

Where These Materials Make Sense Right Now

For inside jobs: Non-structural use is where it’s at. Acoustic panels, insulation, wall cladding yes, even furniture for any setting. MOGU’s acoustic products have already found their way into commercial environments. This is happening.

As pilot projects: Developers are incorporating lab-grown materials in showcase projects to establish market confidence and performance data. It’s clever positioning and genuinely enables learning.

Pour des solutions locales adaptées: imprimer en 3D avec de l’argile locale est comparable à faire pousser du mycélium à partir de déchets agricoles locaux tant sitôt d’un point de vue économique que d’un point environnemental. You are not shipping materials around the world you’re working with what there is.

For self-repairing concrete applications: Bridges, parking garages and infrastructure take up costly maintenance, but it all adds up for repairing itself over time.

The Good Stuff You Can’t Get Anywhere Else

And if you want to explore more without having to spring for courses:

MOOC Biobased Building teaches you practical applications with wood, bamboo, straw, hemp and mycelium. ETH Zurich’s regenerative materials coursefocuses on earth-based and bio-based alternatives with practitioner interviews.

If you have to have technical depth, there’s research on self-healing concrete and mycelium composites available through academic databases.

So What’s the Actual Future?

Here’s where I get real: Lab-grown construction materials are not about to displace concrete and steel. But they’re not hype either. “We’re in that middle part of the wave where actual progress is occurring, costs are coming down and use cases are growing.”

In five or 10 years, mycelium acoustic panels will be the norm in commercial offices. Builders will regularly chose bio-based insulation. Self-healing concrete to increase infrastructure lifetime. By that time, the regulatory rules will have caught up. Insurance will be figured out. Performance data will exist.

The transformation isn’t about ditching everything it’s about employing the right material for the job printed on a box in Comic Sans, and all. Sometimes that’s concrete and steel. Sometimes it’s mycelium- or algae-infused materials. At last, the construction industry is getting more tools in the toolkit, and really, that’s what it’s all about.