Caroline Kirk

“The Mush-Room & Growing Center”

This proposal is a destination for relearning and reconnecting to the world around us. Through continual sensory experiences that advance our relationship with the earth, visitors can rediscover how the natural world grows and how they grow as a person. The center challenges the idea that the only nature worthy of our attention is green, lush, beautiful, and bright. Instead, it creates spaces highlighting the mush. This humid, dirty, decomposing, brown fungal world gives life to the greenery commonly seen as the natural world. By seeing the beauty in decay, we discover relationships with the world, ourselves and others to obtain new understandings of purpose, meaning, and value.