Controlling the Uncontrollable

Throughout the history of architecture, new design, fabrication, and production paradigms have arisen from industrial revolutions. The three revolutionary eras of mechanical, electrical, and electronic engineering have led to three principal paradigm shifts in architecture. Now, in the fourth industrial revolution era, another change in the perspective seems necessary. This era, distinguished by climate change, environmental problems, and biodiversity, offers the possibility of returning to nature and taking advantage of biomaterials. The increasing interest among scholars and industries in using nonindustrial timber, bamboo, bacterial cellulose, algae, and mycelium shows the importance of this return to nature. However, working with bio-based materials as living organisms challenges the designers in a multitude of ways. These materials are intrinsically uncertain, mostly weaker than common materials in mechanical behavior, and thus, more unstable while prepping and functioning in different environmental conditions. These challenges call the designers and the existing traditional methods of design, fabrication, and production into question. Working with these materials goes beyond the straightforward studies on forming the material and even the relationship between form and matter. On the one hand, these materials are cultivated by designers so that they control the material properties as part of the design process. On the other hand, the intrinsic uncertainty of these materials may enable the design process with unexpected discoveries. In other words, the fourth dimension of time is involved in working with these materials. Thus, unlike traditional materials, the outcome is imposed not only by the designer but also by a dialogue between the designer and the material. This paper discusses how these novel biomaterials are uncertain and, thus, unstable in their prepping and curing processes and the importance of the interrelationship between the designer and the material to cope with this uncertainty with prototypological frameworks. This paper presents a study on mycelium-based composites as a specific case to contextualize the broader research.