West Berkeley Mushroom Factory

Project Name: West Berkeley Mushroom Factory

Year: 2025

Competition: Re:Form - New Life for Old Spaces

Location: West Berkeley, California

Keywords: Industrial Remediation,
Inhabitable Façade.

 

Description:

This project repurposes the former Pacific Steel Casting plant as a scaffolded ecology of public space, bio-fabrication, and cultural memory. The industrial frame is wrapped in a vertical plaza—a new inhabitable façade that allows people to walk under, across, and over the building. A translucent veil interwoven with vegetation transforms the structure into a climatic envelope, shading, cooling, and producing atmospheres for collective life. Rooftop parklets and circulation ramps extend this commons upward, making the factory’s façade and roof into civic terrain.

 

Within this scaffolded armature, the plant begins to transform. Laboratories and controlled environments cultivate mycelium panels for construction and remediation, while the scaffold stages the gradual substitution of steel and concrete with bio-fabricated materials. The building is conceived as an unfinished organism, continuously becoming, its surfaces decomposing and re-forming as mycelium intervenes in the substrates of industrial production. The project redeems Pacific Steel by retooling its machinery for mycelium manufacture, by using fungal metabolism to remediate toxins in soil and air, and by troubling the ideology of progress that has long governed the Bay Area’s industrial and digital revolutions.

 

Mycelium carries both material and conceptual weight. It absorbs contamination, restoring balance. It generates a social network that mimics its morphology, built on exchanges of labor, care, and resources rather than accumulation. It decomposes what came before, turning waste into nutrients for future growth. In doing so, it exposes other histories sedimented in the shoreline: the wartime shipbuilding that once tied Berkeley to global flows of minerals, technologies, and labor; the postwar expansion that forged East Bay’s industrial order; and the techno-utopian narratives of innovation that continue to drive displacement under the so-called “fourth industrial revolution.”

 

Inside the building, a cultural installation reshapes part of the factory into an artificial topography commemorating the West Berkeley Shellmound. These mounds—once towering accumulations of shell, ritual, and exchange created by the Ohlone—are reminders of alternative ways of dwelling with land and sea, and of the temporality of discarded yet valuable forms. By reintroducing this buried landscape within the factory, the project aligns Indigenous deep time with the speculative futures of bio-industrial fabrication.

 

The purpose is to articulate a different model for “cleaning up” industrial sites—one that resists gentrification and real estate speculation. Instead of erasing industrial ruins in favor of capital-driven redevelopment, the project supports an alternate economy modeled on fungal intelligence: networked, symbiotic, and irreducible to binary logics of presence and absence. Its architecture is scaffold, veil, plaza, and organism at once—an evolving typology that reframes the industrial ruin as laboratory, memorial, and civic commons, always scaffolded, always in the process of becoming.