The Garden

Coachella Valley

The lab's garage laboratory.

Earth, actually. I'm just good at listening. — Alice Thornburgh

The Living Architecture Lab is a garage laboratory in the Coachella Valley, California. This is where the work actually happens. The bricks are made here. The substrates are inoculated here. Contamination is managed here. The myceliated structures grow on shelves and in trays in the desert heat.

What lives in the garage

Five reliable manufacturing methods for myceliated cardboard bricks. Rice inoculation protocols. Living microclimate skin experiments — the SCOBY analog that replaces plastic wrap in mycelium cultivation. Strength matrix studies comparing Blue Oyster and Wine Cap substrates. The dirt-man pillow cartridge prototype.

The lab runs on consumer-grade equipment, salvaged frames, agricultural waste, and patient observation. The goal is reliability across the brick scale before scaling up to the structure scale.

Photographs

Photographic documentation is being prepared with Alice's release. This page will populate with images of bricks, mycelium fronts, contamination events, and the lab itself.

What the garden is for

The lab principle is Earth, Actually. Substrate engineering is a work of attention before it is a work of invention. The garden is where the attention happens. What grows in the garage decides what scales upward — to the structure, the organism, the territory, the planet.

Updates will appear here as the work progresses. Current status:

See also: Scale 1: The Brick for the architectural framework, and the brick project page for the artifact specification.