Many people enjoy eating mushrooms, but would you want to live inside one? These mushroom houses aren’t for the pixies living in the forest, they’re for life-sized human beings.
The long white enoki mushrooms that have starred in many Asian dishes are now providing the inspiration for a future housing project in the city of Rome. Designed by OFL architecture (Rome), the Enoki Rome Eco City Project will be suspended above the city.
The mushroom buildings are planned to ‘grow’ upwards out of Rome, using the water courses, parks and other green spaces as a starting point- just the same as a normal mushroom. The exterior will also follow the cellular structure and molecular shape of the enoki mushroom themselves, if they were 150 storeys (350 metres) high and formed from steel, aluminium and glass, with an outer skin of steel diamond-shaped panels.
Inside, the enoki structures are small self contained cities, with green spaces for sports, community and cultural activities. The project will be able to house up to 6000 people within the 240,000 square metres of residential areas, while the remaining 300,000 square meters would be used for commercial and recreational purposes.
So how do you get from down to the ground to visit the old city or even travel between the different levels? Exactly the way you’d expect in a futuristic city. Instead of an ordinary lift, OFL have included flying shuttles that will take the inhabitants to and from the different levels and down to the ground.
These futuristic structures are meant to blend with the historical architecture of Rome, but this new species of building isn’t just for the Italian capital. The OFL designers believe that these eco cities would be able to be ‘grown’ in any major city, including Paris, New York and Tokyo.
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