News — Eco

Ian Fletcher, Leeds Beckett University The world of fungi has attracted a lot of interest and seems to be becoming very fashionable of late. A new exhibition at Somerset House in London, for example, is dedicated to “the remarkable mushroom”. No surprise: we’re being promised that mushrooms may be the key to a sustainable future in fields as diverse as fashion, toxic spill clean ups, mental health and construction. It’s in this last field that my own interests lie. Climate change is the fundamental design problem of our time: buildings are hugely complicit in the crisis. Together, buildings and construction...