This month, the staff and students of CSVPA, CATS Global Schools’ Art School, showcased their creativity and ground-breaking developments at The Cambridge Festival. Organised by the University of Cambridge, the festival celebrates all aspects of world-leading research in the city through 350 online or in-person events.
“The Cambridge Festival provides an excellent forum for CSVPA staff and students to collaborate with other creators and academics and showcase their pioneering ideas.”
Karin Askham
Managing Director, Arts and Enterprise
Rain Wu, Pathway leader for Architecture and Interiors and Head of Spatial Design Lab, brought together three students: Andrea Galimberti, Aleksandra Kim and Mikhail Nikolaev to premiere The Mycelium Pavilion.
The 3x5m structure, grown from biodegradable fungal matter, bound together by microfilaments of mycelium, offers a glimpse of the future of architecture: a fast-growing biomaterial that is lightweight, high-strength, low-carbon, and already growing all around and beneath our feet.
The audience touched and interacted with the pavilion while hearing about its design and materials directly from the creators.
Rain Wu, comments:
“The Mycelium Pavilion operates on the frontiers of art and architecture; it allows students to be at the centre of knowledge creation.”
Talking about the Mycelium Pavilion, Rain comments:
“The Mycelium Pavilion operates on the frontiers of art and architecture; it allows students to be at the centre of knowledge creation.
“The Mycelium Pavilion is a collaboration between a team of spatial designers with a non-human agency at a microbial scale.
“The design team pioneered the use of mycelium as an architectural material and learned through trial and error to create the pavilion over a 3-month period.”
Other CSVPA collaborations included:
- An interactive future fashion lab, where visitors got the chance to design bespoke looks drawn from futuristic elements previously originated by CSVPA’s Fashion students
- The development of a moving image work by animation and film students to accompany Professor Richard Causton’s contemporary classical composition, Phoenix (2006)
- An exhibition on contemporary art & design research practice.
Talking about CSVPA’s involvement, Karin Askham, Managing Director of Arts & Enterprise and Rector of CSVPA, said:
“The Cambridge Festival provides an excellent forum for CSVPA staff and students to collaborate with other creators and academics and showcase their pioneering ideas.
“I’d like to thank our lecturers for their commitment, innovation, and consideration of sustainable working practices that have really informed the outcomes for the students and festival.
“Special thanks also go to our operations team for skillfully constructing the timber frame for the pavilion and working tirelessly to support logistics of all CSVPA festival projects.”
The Cambridge Festival is an annual event. Details of the 2023 programme will be published later this year.
