Bio-design lab · Athens, Georgia
KUDZU grows structural materials from an invasive vine, mycelium, and bacterial cellulose. No extraction, no landfill — just harvest, and regrowth.
Since you opened this page, kudzu somewhere has grown 0.0000 mm
01 — Materials
Every material below started as a seed, a spore, or a culture. Each one is grown to the shape of your brief, then cured so it stays put.
KZ-01 · Textile
420 g/m²tensile 38 MPaharvest to loom: 11 days
Kudzu bast fibre pulled from roadside thickets, retted in rainwater, spun like linen. The vine grows a foot a day whether we ask it to or not; the supply chain is embarrassed by abundance.
MY-02 · Foam
96 kg/m³grown in 9 dayscomposts in 45
Reishi root-web fed on pecan shells, grown dark and humid to the exact geometry of your mould. Ships as protective packaging. Dies, on schedule, as soil.
CS-03 · Sheet
1.1 mm gaugedyed with oak gallwaxed, air-cured
Bacterial cellulose brewed flat in shallow trays — a kombucha mother the size of a table. Air-cured, iron-black or left tea-gold. Improves with handling, like everything honest.
CH-04 · Tile
NRC 0.85pressed at 40 tpigment: its own chlorophyll
Summer growth, mulched and hot-pressed into acoustic tile. No dye — the colour is the leaf's, faded exactly as far as the season took it. The room hears the difference.
02 — Growth protocol
01
A starter the size of a thumbnail — reishi, oyster, or a kombucha mother, depending on the brief. Kept in a fridge we call the library.
02
Pecan shells, cotton gin trash, last season's vine — packed into moulds. "Waste" is a word for feedstock nobody has claimed yet.
03
Nine to twelve days in the dark at 27 °C and 90% humidity. We check on it daily. Mostly, we leave it alone.
04
Six hours at 70 °C. Growth stops; the shape stays. The material stops being alive on purpose — and remembers it.
03 — Field notes
Batch 141 fruited through the mould seam overnight. Fruiting means the block is happy and we are late. Cured same day; the seam line stays in the finished tile. Clients ask for it now.
Vine Lace warp passed 38 MPa on the second pull. The break, when it came, was clean as a spoken sentence. We wove the failed samples into the studio's door curtain.
A visiting architect asked how we stop the kudzu taking the building. We don't. We harvest the attempt.
The vine does not know it is a supply chain.— pinned above the culture library
04 — The sample box
Nothing sits in a warehouse deciding to become landfill. Your box is started the day you write, cured the week after, and shipped in a hyphal tray. Bury the tray.
samples@kudzu.bio