Sebastian Cox and Studio Weave's Intelligent Garden pavilion is grown from mycelium and ash felled to dieback – a low-carbon, compostable structure made almost entirely from waste.
The garden shed isn’t always the highest priority when it comes to architecture. A utilitarian thing, where tools and good intentions tend to collect, and where design rarely intrudes. The Intelligent Garden, a collaboration between Studio Weave, landscape designer Tom Massey and furniture maker Sebastian Cox, takes that overlooked typology seriously and asks an unfamiliar question of it: what would a shed be if it were grown rather than assembled, and composted rather than pulled down.
Originally conceived for the Chelsea Flower Show, then moved to a permanent home in a Manchester park, the pavilion is a demonstration of urban-tree monitoring technology for IT consulting firm Avanade. The more pressing question, though, lies in what the building is made of and how those materials are put to work.
Studio Weave, led by Je Ahn, built the structure almost entirely from locally felled ash and mycelium – the root-like fungal network that threads through the forest floor, grown at Cox’s workshop in Kent. The ash was felled because of dieback, the disease that would otherwise have sent it to a biomass incinerator; the mycelium was cultivated on agricultural waste from Cox’s own practice, a maker known for sourcing from his own biodiverse woodland. Little in the pavilion began life as a building material, and most of it would have been counted as waste.
The idea that ties the two materials together is the network. Mycelium connects trees underground, letting them share resources and signals, and Ahn draws a line from that behaviour to the way artificial intelligence moves through its own connections.
The pavilion’s fluted facade shows the materials off rather than smooth them away – highlighting the irregular, faintly unfinished texture of the mycelium surfaces to the light. Operable screens of woven ash are set against panels of mycelium, which open the interior to Massey’s planting. The materials used are almost entirely reclaimed or nature-based, down to paving slabs salvaged from earlier shows.
Inside, the building is organised between two sections. At one end, a table and small kitchenette host workshops on how data might one day support the people who look after urban trees. At the other, an enclosed courtyard works as a mycelium parlour, kept darker and damper – the conditions in which mycelium grows.
Designed to be prefabricated in four volumes and raised quickly on site, then dismantled and returned to the ground at the end of its life, the pavilion is offered as a low-carbon alternative to conventional construction.
