2:35
Growing a Building
Ines Valdés-Okafor on mycelium, lime mortar and why architecture needs a biology department.
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Polymath — a magazine for people who refuse to choose
BreakingUpdated continuously
01 — Cover Story
The long way round
Chapter I — The Turn
The Architect Who Grows Her Buildings
Chapter II — The Work
Ines Valdés-Okafor left glass towers behind to grow walls from fungus. Her structures are now outlasting her critics.
Chapter III — The Lesson
We stopped asking what the material could carry and started asking what it wanted to become.
Read the cover story
02 — The Latest
Stories of the second act
All stories
The Architect Who Grows Her Buildings
Ines Valdés-Okafor left glass towers behind to grow walls from fungus. Her structures are now outlasting her critics.
Listening to the Brain Sing
In a basement lab in Reykjavík, Saoirse Lindqvist turns the electricity of sleep into string quartets.
Robots That Learned to Dance
Nkechi Moreau-Hale teaches machines to move like people, and people to move with machines.
The Economics of a Well-Made Chair
Tomasz Achterberg left the central bank to prove that slow production pays. He publishes the receipts.
A Typeface Is a Term Sheet
Ren Isobe-Carvalho draws alphabets for subways and writes cheques for founders. She says the two jobs are the same.
Fieldnotes from the Cold Water
Halvard Ostrom dives beneath the Norwegian Sea with a notebook and a large-format camera. Both are data.
03 — The Index
Eight lives, twice lived
Meet the leaders
04 — Disciplines
Five fields, one restless mind
01
Design
How things are made to be used, held and lived in. Profiles of architects, typographers, industrial designers and the people who refuse to stay in one studio.
02
Science
Researchers who leave the lab with their questions intact. Biology, neuroscience, materials and climate, told through the people who cross over.
03
Business
Founders, economists and investors who treat a company as a creative medium. Capital, craft and the long arithmetic of good work.
04
Art
Painters, composers, choreographers and photographers whose practice bleeds into science, technology and enterprise.
05
Technology
Engineers and makers building tools with a point of view. Robotics, software and hardware, considered as culture rather than product.
Manifesto
— The Polymath Manifesto
05 — The Archive
Every issue, still in print
All issues
06 — By the numbers
07 — Conversations
Listen to the long version
All conversations
2:46
The Sound of Sleep
Saoirse Lindqvist plays a sleep recording live and explains how it became a quartet.
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2:51
Pricing Patience
Tomasz Achterberg on open-book manufacturing and what economists get wrong about craft.
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2:51
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1:47
Duet for One Human and One Arm
Nkechi Moreau-Hale and her robot rehearse on camera, then talk about compliance, trust and timing.
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1:47
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08 — From the editor
On doors we were told not to open
Dear reader,
Six issues in, a pattern has become impossible to ignore. The people we profile rarely describe their careers as a ladder. They talk about doors — usually ones they were told not to open.
This issue is about second acts: the architect who now grows her buildings, the central banker who builds chairs, the neuroscientist writing for string quartets. None of them abandoned what they knew. They carried it somewhere new, and it changed shape on the way.
We hope it gives you permission to do the same.
Margot Ellery
Editor-in-Chief, Polymath
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10 — The Sunday Dispatch
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