A long-vacant and condemned house owned by the Cuyahoga Land Bank on Cleveland’s East Side has been chipped into pieces and fed to mushrooms as food for an art installation, and, possibly, a future urban revival.
The $364,000 project, funded through Cleveland’s $3 million Transformative Arts Fund, has added new energy to research by Cleveland architect Chris Maurer, who is exploring how fungi can be used to turn demolition debris into a clean, lightweight and strong building material.
“We're transforming a house into a sculpture,’’ Maurer said during a recent interview at 9413 Sophia Ave., where he and Malena Grigoli, a recent architecture graduate of Ohio State University, are carrying out their project.
The Sophia Avenue venture taps the power of mycelium, the slender, branching root-like structure of fungal colonies that can be grown on sterilized wood chips and other materials harvested from the disassembled house.
Maurer said that if the mushroom-based process can turn a vacant house into a sculpture, “Can we fully recycle a house? Is that the next step we want to go to? And I believe it is. And after that, can we scale that up to the level that could do hundreds of houses?’’
Transforming a city through art
The Sophia Avenue project is one of seven supported over the past year by the Transformative Arts Fund (TAF), a project funded through the American Rescue Act Plan of 2021.
Cleveland received $512 million in ARPA money, the Biden-era bill approved by Congress during the COVID-19 pandemic. City Council approved using $3 million for the TAF projects in January 2024.
Overseen by Rhonda Brown, the city’s first senior arts and culture strategist, the seven TAF projects were designed to boost the city’s cultural sector, launch careers and address social and civic needs.
The project’s vision statement said it aimed to create “a ripple effect of positive change that transforms our city’s public spaces, our perceptions, and our world.”
A nine-member advisory council of artists and city planners chose seven lead artists, paired with collaborating institutions or firms, to carry out projects across the city, involving scores of other participants.
The lead artists and partnering institutions included Robin Robinson and Ingenuity Cleveland; Jameelah Rahman and the Cleveland Clinic; Ariel Vergez and MetroWest Community Development Organization; Jordan Wong and The Sculpture Center; Latecia Dolores Wilson-Stone and the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority; Kumar Arora and the Campus District and Grigoli and Maurer’s architecture firm, Redhouse.
Assembly for the Arts, the region’s nonprofit arts council, acted as the fiscal agent for the fund’s projects.
Upcoming events
Culminating events for some of the seven projects have been held since August. They have included performances at City Hall and the Nautica Pavilion in the Flats, murals and an “art garden’’ in Cleveland’s Clark-Fulton neighborhood and sculptural monuments at the site of a future park in AsiaTown.
Sophia Avenue is one of two projects holding free events on Saturday, Sept. 27. That day, visitors will be able to peruse Grigoli and Maurer’s installation at 9413 Sophia Ave. from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Then, from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., Grigoli and Maurer will host a reception and panel discussion at Convivium 33 Gallery, 1433 E. 33rd St., Cleveland. Photos of the Sophia Avenue site by Colin Martinez will be exhibited, along with a video by Jacob Koestler, who is producing a documentary about the project. Swisher, the Cleveland band scoring the film, will also perform.
Also on Saturday, from noon to 4 p.m., Wong and collaborating artists will unveil an exhibition of five “artistic structures’’ during the Mid-Autumn Festival at the AsiaTown Square Dancing Lot, 3236 Payne Ave.
A ‘cold email’
Grigoli, who graduated from OSU in 2021, got to know Maurer after she “cold emailed’’ him while researching mycelium for a college project. She reached out again to see if he’d be willing to partner with her on a Transformative Arts Fund initiative.
They decided to pursue a “choreographed deconstruction’’ of the Sophia Avenue house, which had been acquired by the county land bank in 2023 through forfeiture.
Built in 1910, the house was one of the few remaining on its street, once part of a thriving early 20th century Hungarian immigrant community in the Buckeye Woodhill neighborhood, where wood frame houses were packed densely around factories that no longer exist.
The community grew across the long, prominent slope on the east side of Cleveland that’s part of the Portage Escarpment, a vast landform extending from the Finger Lakes into Ohio that marks the far western edge of the Appalachian Plateau.
Today, the neighborhood, now majority Black, has been scarred by decades of deindustrialization, redlining and population loss. Few houses remain along some of the area’s streets, now lined with patches of forest where deer, wild turkeys and coyotes have replaced people.
“This is indicative of a lot of neighborhoods that we see here in Cleveland, where the city planning, banking and industrial practices have really marginalized people and created blight in thinning communities,’’ Grigoli said.
Seeking ideas
To collect ideas for the project, Grigoli and a team of assistants hosted 11 community workshops, a dozen on-site gatherings, a community design session. They also spent time in local businesses chatting with area residents.
After the house was deconstructed, Grigoli and Maurer installed two shipping containers on site in which they ran salvaged materials through a chipping machine and raised colonies of mushrooms to produce mycelium.
Part of the mycelium cultivation process has also occurred at the Redhouse “biocycler,’’ a lab/workshop at East 47th Street and Lakeside Avenue.
At Sophia Avenue, the shipping containers will be removed and the art installation will degrade into the earth over the coming year. The site will be managed by the nonprofit Collective Citizens Organized Against Lead. Grigoli said she hopes to negotiate a lease for the organization with the land bank.
The 9413 Sophia Ave. project received a unanimous vote of approval by members of Cleveland’s City Planning Commission at its Aug. 1 meeting.
Tarra Petras, the city’s public art coordinator, praised the project at the meeting.
“It breaks the mold of what we typically see,’’ she said. “I think it’s really amazing and very forward thinking.’’
Weeks later, during a visit to Sophia Avenue, Maurer said he was grateful to receive city support for a “mycotecture’’ research and development opportunity.
“We're hugely appreciative,’’ he said, adding that they were “seeing this project transform what was a house that was at the end of its life and [that] now has new life.’’
Then, turning to Grigoli, he thanked her for reaching out to him and initiating the project.
“You were like, ‘I want to recycle a house,’‘’ he said. “And I said, hell yeah!’"
