AR Ecologies: greenwashing

What do you wish architects knew about forests? In the second episode of AR Ecologies, the conversation unpicks our obsession with trees, contrasting their limited role in greenwashing with the vast knowledges underpinning their presence in ecology. Scientist Suzanne Simard, architect Paulo Tavares and engineer Maria Smith shift our perception of trees by diving deep into the makeup of designing structures inspired from indigenous techniques, forest networks, and advocating for heritage that blurs forest and architecture entirely. Hosted by Sabrina Syed.

AR Ecologies, a podcast by The Architectural Review, explores the tension between architecture and ecology through critical positions. Instead of standalone interviews, each episode weaves curious and critical voices together to meet, discuss and give space to perspectives outside an architectural orbit. The first series revolves around trees, an audio counterpart to the AR October 2021 issue, available now.

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Bibliography

Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism (2020), Julia Watson
Finding The Mother Tree (2021), Suzanne Simard
How Trees Talk to Each Other, 2016 TED Talk, Suzanne Simard
Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field (1997 Paper), Nature, Suzanne Simard
Outrage: the false promises of floating gardens, AR February 2021, Sabrina Syed
Cultivating the arts: the tree out of context, AR October 2021, Ali Karimi
In too deep: Little Island in New York City, US by Heatherwick Studio, AR October 2021, Elissaveta M. Brandon
Trees, Vines, Palms and Other Architectural Monuments, Harvard Design Magazine “Into the Woods” (45) 2018, Paulo Tavares
An Architectural Botany (2018-ongoing), CCA research project, Paulo Tavares & William Balée
Cultural Forests of the Amazon: A Historical Ecology of People and Their Landscapes (2015), William Balée
The Hidden Life of Trees (2016), Peter Wohlleben
Universal Declaration of the Rights of Trees, PDF from CAMBIO Website, FormaFantasma
Treeline: the secret lives of trees (2019), Film by Patagonia

Transcript

This is a curious podcast. In our new series on architecture and criticism, we'll be exploring the tension between architecture and ecology through critical positions that launch each chapter. Welcome to AR Ecologies, a series by The Architectural Review. Founded in 1896, the AR has set the international architecture agenda in its pages for over 125 years. Instead of standalone interviews, AR Ecologies is set up to be episodic. You will hear a mixture of voices weaving in and out of our conversation surrounding ecology. While architecture is the common thread that links everything together, our voices are out of orbit. They include scientists, engineers, artist, activists, writers and more.We want to dwell in the in-between spaces of the topics we bring to the table, the grey areas that shift from anthropocentric to ecological, and, with the help of our guests, hear stories we never considered before. Our first series will focus on trees in all stages of life, from seed to material: an audio counterpart to the AR’s October issue.

In the age of ecological emergency, trees must go beyond their limited architectural definitions. What happens when trees are discussed beyond their role as objects or material, but as a form of a spatial practice – as beings with networks, rights, connections. Trees aren’t a simple solution to the problems that humans have made. They hold their own agency. They are entangled with the world, and we with them, in ways that are too complex to grasp all at once, but can reverberate through the perspectives we share. So, from the forests in British Columbia to contested land in the Amazon, to the wood we use in our homes, our three chapters will travel, weaving their way through geographies and stories, all connected to trees. I am your host, Sabrina Syed, Editorial Contributor and researcher at the AR.

‘Forests are cosmological non-human networks that live and think’

This episode is about unpicking our obsession with trees, from science to greenwash. Forests are often seen solely as a resource for humans to exploit, be it for timber or for leisure. But forests are cosmological non-human networks that live and think. Yet so often they’re commodified – their performance as objects chosen over their value for the preservation of our environment and our outlook towards nature to begin with. This brings us to the question we keep asking in this conversation: what do you wish architects knew about forests?

Maria Smith: Everything. I wish there was a whole first year of architecture school that was just a really deep study into forests and how they work and everything about them. You could teach so many concepts of structure, of irrigation, of spatial planning. You could teach so much of architecture through forests.

AR: That voice you just heard is that of Maria Smith, head of sustainability at Buro Happold. Trained as an architect and an engineer, they also shared an upcoming collaboration they’re looking to build with Julia Watson, who authored Lo-TEK.

Maria Smith: It’s an incredible anthology of a lot of Indigenous technologies. A number of them relate to forest as well. And for example, there are these living bridges made from the roots of trees, while the roots of those trees are still serving the trees that they’re part of. This is absolutely a collaboration with trees that happens over a long period of time. They are these incredible, incredible structures, and actually some of my colleagues at Buro Happold (a few years ago before I worked here) did a structural analysis of these living bridges and marvelled at how brilliant they were. And well, yeah, that makes absolute structural sense. Of course it does, why are you surprised?

AR: Originating from the Khasi tribe in northern India, root bridges look like they have been in the landscape for generations. They’re the only ones that can withstand the heavy monsoon rains. Grown and shaped from the fig trees native to that ecosystem, trees come with large buttressing roots, which develop on all sides of the bridge and include secondary root systems. So the bridges that are created, these living bridges, built over time, are deeply, deeply structural. A perfect blend of architecture, engineering, and the living world, these bridges are an example I wanted to start this episode with because of what they represent to Maria. This pursuit of knowledge exchange over appearance – of quite literally trying to bridge the gap of how we can bring the forest into our cities structurally – how we can borrow the intelligence of the forest over the appearance of it.

‘How can we make use of these technologies as a kind of collective humanity in order to create a climate resilient world for us all?’

In contrast to this, a really striking example of the latter is the failed garden bridge in London. Designed by Heatherwick Studio, the private proposal of a luxuriously tree-filled pedestrian bridge was given the axe in 2017 after years of funding controversy. Trees weren’t used structurally – but as ornament to decorate the project, like a green cloak. But let’s get back to the root bridges – and how their structural DNA can inform design rather than dress it.

Maria Smith: So we’re now looking at a number of these different technologies and we’re trying to think about how there can be this exchange of knowledge, how we can look – from our perspective as engineers educated within a restricted cultural framework of extractivism, capitalism – how can we and our scientific knowledge (and you know, we have good knowledge, but it’s also quite restricted in terms of the way that we think about collaborating with other ecosystems), work with and understand and have this knowledge exchange with some of these incredible Indigenous, thousands-of-years-old technologies that are really at risk of being lost? But how can we blend these systems in some way? How can we scale them? How can we replicate them? How can we make use of them as a kind of collective humanity in order to create a climate resilient world for us all? And it’s really difficult.

AR: Blending and scaling this knowledge exchange from Indigenous to urban is a challenge in its own right, and achieving this resilience also has to compete with a much more insidious narrative: that of greenwashing. A form of marketing spin, greenwashing is when organisations coat their products, aims, and policies in cloaks of ecologically rich language when it’s only surface-level – designed to make people buy into the hype. We know that architecture is part of this. And trees are notoriously used as icons to set the stage of these performances. Think of green roofs, hanging gardens on skyscrapers, the extremely leafy render before investment comes in on a project. It’s hard to unpick the real ecological ideas from the fake, especially when the fake ones used the same words, images and natural elements – essentially pinching from the same toolbox. How many of you have been at an event, an exhibition or even felt in conversations at your own place of work that ‘goals towards sustainability’ sometimes ring hollow? The search for being this virtuous, environmentally friendly actor can be a black hole because everyone wants in. However, pointing this out isn’t enough.

I do feel like the greenwashing conversation peters off after this point, especially when we talk about trees. After dissecting a project from all of its shallowness, all of its pretence criticising it, publishing that criticism – what are we left with? We need to go a step further, past the greenwashing debate. We need to look at the power of language, the way nature is othered, reduced as a chess piece played in the strategy of ecological clout. We need to speak to people who, from their own corners of the world, see trees as something that cannot be flattened in our understanding of them. Suzanne Simard, scientist, forest ecologist and author of her new book, Finding the Mother Tree, often describes the forest in very architectural terms: as ‘a cathedral with the pews full’.

Suzanne Simard: (on the cathedral) It means the – well, of course, I’m referring to the forest and I grew up in old growth forests, so these are spaces on our Earth where we have these enormous trees, plants. They're much, much bigger than we are as people. So they're awesome to see to be among, they're humbling, they're majestic. That's the "cathedral". It is this place that takes your breath away. And when I say that "the pews are full", it means that these places are full of species and processes and the ecosystem is fully functioning, is fully there.

AR: When architects and designers lean on the language of forests to dress their projects, it comes with ambiguity because the language is administered regardless of how ecological the projects' may be. It's up to us to kind of figure that out between the lines. This is the opposite, because when Suzanne describes the forest as "a cathedral with the pews full", she's using the language of architecture to amplify our image of an entire ecological system. Interpreting from the forest meaningfully means taking into account its entire spatial presence. All of its nooks, all of its crannies...

Suzanne Simard: ...all the niches, all the spaces, all the niche roles and spaces are filled with species, and they're doing their jobs of cycling carbon, cycling nutrients, cycling water, and it's all driven by the energy through photosynthesis from these trees. Yeah, the pews are full. The ecosystem is full and fully functioning. That's what I mean.

AR: Suzanne's connection to the forest is profound. It's all consuming-

Suzanne Simard: -I was connected to the forest. You know, my family, we're connected to each other, and we grew up and lived in these forests. And so the forest is part of our blood, it's part of our DNA, it's our history, it's our ancestry, my ancestry. And so my connection to the world, I see it through the lens of the forest - it's inseparable. So the species, the trees standing next to each other, their roots overlapping and entwined, the plants growing in and amongst them. In ecology, we study relationships between species and how they relate to the environment. This is what it means, but in a very much more, you know, to me, it was much more a physical, visceral sense rather than just sort of these abstract relationships. They're actually real things that as a child, I could see. And it was just you know, it became how I saw the world as a connected place.

AR: So that search of proving connections in forests formed the backdrop of Suzanne's experiments in British Columbia. She looked at Douglas fir trees - the prized timber variety, alongside Paper birch - a species that were seen as a weed that needed to be cut out of the way. Through that pairing, she discovered that trees everywhere formed what are called mycorrhizal networks. These are relationships plants form with fungi, underground - mycelium threads growing through soil, collecting water and nutrients and trading them with the trees. In contemporary architecture mycelium is looked at as a cutting-edge material to build experimental structures with. But I think we should look at its role in nature: connecting trees together underground - something that cannot happen when they are left isolated on top of buildings...

Suzanne Simard: ...and it's almost like a market exchange. And people have studied this, and it's like the more photosynthate the plant gives, the more water and nutrients the fungus will deliver back to the plant. It turns out that a lot of these fungi are what we call host generalists. That means that they can associate with many species of trees and plants and actually link them together. And so I thought, is this also happening in my forest? Is Paper birch and Douglas fir...are they connected together, and do they also trade carbon?

AR: Using radioactive carbon - something that she saw in earlier experiments done outside of Canada, Suzanne proved that trees did trade between one another - with one species, giving the other resources underground when its neighbour wasn't getting enough sunlight, for example.

Suzanne Simard: And so this, you know, upended how we viewed forests right away because we viewed Paper birch just as this evil competitor. And here I'm showing that the more birch does shade Douglas fir, the more it provides photosynthate to support that, Douglas fir. And I knew it happened through these networks because neighbouring cedar trees, which form a different kind of mycorrhizal fungus, didn't receive the carbon,

AR: As well as proving that different tree species thrived together in groups in their own societies, Suzanne proved collaboration.

Suzanne Simard: ...Collaboration at the same time as competition, and I think that that is an important thing is that these relationships between trees - they are sophisticated and complex, and they're not just one way of interacting. Just like when we communicate, we have multiple ways of communicating. We see each other, we talk to each other, we can sense body language. And trees and plants, they are equally sophisticated. So they compete at the same time that they collaborate. It's very complex.

AR: Understanding the science behind the vast underground networks in forests (I mean, in some cases, these networks are bigger in size and an age when entire movements of architecture) it feels strange when you realise that architecture is obsession with trees, as design objects forgets this entirely. Have you ever seen a press release talk about what's happening underground when it comes to trees? Too often, they're used as temporary installations, tree branches becoming window dressing on mile-high skyscrapers. I spoke to Suzanne about the burden that's placed on trees as performance objects as if their roots simply don't exist. Metaphorically speaking, how can the cathedral with its pews full function without its floor?

Suzanne Simard: (laughs) That's a that's a really great way of saying it. You know, in forestry, we've commodified trees as well. 2x4s, pulp and paper, toilet paper. And really, you know, the forest industry at first - soil was pretty much ignored. I mean, we knew that there were roots, I guess, but that wasn't managed. And even today, when we grow seedlings were growing out into the environment or when we breed trees to populate our next clear cuts we were very much focussed on the aboveground part. How can we breed trees that grow huge crowns and huge holes and we ignore the roots. And yet when we look in natural ecosystems, half of the carbon is below ground. If you reduce it down to carbon, which is what you know, the fabric of life, half of it is below ground! And so we've missed that whole picture.

I think in my understanding of built environments, of architecture or urban areas, my observation is that trees are used as like a painting almost. And they create a hole in the “fill” - I call it fill, it's gravel and whatever junk is leftover in the end - you put these trees down with their little root systems and say, "OK, grow!", and they can't! Right? Because there's no life in that soil! The soil is a living thing. It's not just a bunch of minerals, it's alive! It's got whole food webs in there. There are fungi, bacteria, nematodes, you know, protozoa. There's like millions of creatures. And these are all doing the job of cycling all the resources: water, nutrients, carbon - and trees depend on that cycling in order to get the nutrients they need from the soil to grow up and create trees. We have not, even in forestry, acknowledged, never mind the ecosystem but the tree itself - is an ecosystem and we've not treated it that way. Through forestry, through architecture, through agriculture it's pervasive through our disciplines in Western society. This commodification of trees and not understanding the full thing, that there's a below ground part to it as well.

AR: Acknowledging the tree itself in its entirety is a challenge that goes beyond our design industry. The underground cannot be ignored if we are to pursue them through an ecological agenda. The role architecture plays in our interpretation of trees is tenuous, so I challenge our listeners to this. Next time you see a project that relies heavily on trees, whether it's a built project or an exhibition, anything in between, ask yourself this: what narrative do the trees serve by being there? How long is their presence warranted for? Is it just temporary - which is against the principle of how trees work to begin with...I mean, I think the word "forest installation" is literally an oxymoron because it relies on the temporary objectification of trees. Some more questions: has the below ground been considered if the project is presented as sustainable? Are the trees alone, monocultured in their arrangement, or are they part of a bigger, holistically designed system? Finally, can we honestly say the trees are being set up to thrive, or to perform, or something in between? There are more spaces to be explored in this conversation, given the roles trees and forests play on our planet. How can we advocate for them? Can architecture have a constructive role in this?

Paulo Tavares: There is many questions operating here in architecture. First of all, is recognition of a form of architecture, which is in fact seen as nature. Right? And what happens if we see a tree not as a product of nature, but in fact as a product of a spatial practice? As a product of a form of knowledge in dealing with the land that is as a form of architecture, as form of landscape design?

AR: Paulo Tavares is an architect, researcher and writer based in South America. His work bridges and blurs the lines between architecture, ecology, advocacy and importantly, the role colonisation plays in how we interpret nature.

Paulo Tavares: I came to understand that architecture has been deployed and used as a means of power, specifically in the way it has been instrumentalized as a tool of colonisation, as an agropolitical tool of colonisation.

AR: Instead of appropriating trees into a form of control architecture is used as a form of power knowledge. In Paulo's work, looking at forests as the key spaces for that power knowledge and indigenous communities within them where, it's used as a tool to investigate and protect.

Paulo Tavares: It's weird that I'm always called an anthropologist or people refer to me as "anthropologist" just because of the fact that it's done in alliance with indigenous groups. It is somehow a very colonial way of perceiving work and in projects developed with indigenous communities and indigenous leaderships as if only anthropologists - which is, of course, a colonial discipline that was designed know that "other" than to study the "other" and, you know, to map the "other" - so I tend to say that my practice operates not on the ethnographic register, but on a kind of militant register. It's a kind of militant research, because if we understand that space, the city, the environment that the territory is a right, we need to deploy architecture as a form of advocacy for those rights.

AR: Paulo's research projects often question the point at which a forest crosses the threshold to become architecture and how we can advocate for its rights at that point. Surveying ruins deep in the Amazonian rainforest that manifest themselves as trees, vines, palms and other botanic formations formed the basis of how local villages were designed. But they were only made visible when seen from eyes that were distinctly indigenous.

Paulo Tavares: The indigenous elders, the indigenous leaders who came with us, they have a very interesting understanding of the landscape. And immediately, when he got closer to these forest formations they could identify (that) there was a village. They could say, "here is Bö'u, our ancient village. Here is Ubdönho'u - that's an ancient village." But you know, our eyes are trained just to see trees and to see forest while they could see the remains of an ancient village.

AR: Like the root bridges we spoke about earlier. These ruins are not architecture pretending to be forest, but actual patches of forest considered structurally, culturally and spatially as part of a built environment. There's no performance here, and those very root networks Suzanne talked about are ever present. Instead, you have something more profound.

Paulo Tavares: So somehow those trees, they are architecture, right? They register the history. They register, you know, the history of those people. They are memorials. As you know Western societies, when they see a ruin, they can understand the history. That's somehow the same way that those folks see the forest.

AR: While there's a tendency to appropriate designs or projects that seem ecological but aren't into things that are, we can't seem to identify architecture in spaces that are inherently ecological like these forests. Why is that?

Paulo Tavares: We cannot see it, they can see. And why can't we see? Because we are blind by the epistemology of colonialism. So we need to clear the lens. We need sort of decolonise the way we see nature and therefore the way we understand nature.

AR: So using the frameworks of architecture to advocate for these forests, Paulo, together with the community, designed a petition to put forward to Brazil's National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN).

Paulo Tavares: ...so that those trees, those patches of forests need to be considered as architectural heritage and protected as heritage.

AR: We've talked about our understanding of forests as living cosmological networks, but what happens when we interpret them as architectural heritage? And in that light, defend them as architectural heritage? Another way ecological knowledge about forests was widened considerably through Paulo's research was when he reached out to his mentor, botanist William Balée.

Paulo Tavares: He came to Brazilian Amazonia to work with the Ka'apor (tribe), and through his research, he started to understand that the Ka'apor could identify forest that has been planted by their ancestors. And those forests are what botanists would call "true forests" or "old growth forests," meaning they are natural forests. But everything that Balée would see as a true forest the Ka'apor would call "taper", which means "ancient village".

AR: This threat of research is present in Balée's book "Cultural Forests of the Amazon", where he argues that the forests in question are not natural, but that they are cultural spaces...

Paulo Tavares: ...and as I say, they are architectural, they are planted, they are landscape designs. So we brought William Balée to the world of architecture, and he travelled with us in different forests, in different cities in Amazonia. And during through these trips he showed me some of his images of his archive that he had made in the 80s with the Ka'apor. And they are very beautiful, they are very poetic. And what I realised is that many of these - what I would call "architectural monuments" - have been destroyed because these areas have been deforested now. So they are documents of an architectural monument somehow, or architectural buildings or ancient villages that don't exist anymore.

AR: We live in a strange world, a world where certain architectural projects that lean heavily on the imagery of forests flourish. These projects, including, but not limited to: thinly landscaped hills in London's Marble Arch, private luxury housing with anaemically infilled trees (like the ones Suzanne mentioned earlier) perched on balconies, or small tree-lined-islands financed by billionaires. These get more financial support than their real-life forest counterparts. The real architectural monuments are forests constantly under threat. How we protect them hinges on understanding what constitutes forests, architecture made from nature, and its place in history.

Paulo Tavares: If you shift the way the forest is understood, not only as nature, but as a memorial, one can see how it should be protected because you cannot enter in somebody else's house or in somebody else see and destroy their memorials. Right? There are many laws against that, even the laws of war. You cannot destroy monuments, that's a crime. One should protect this as a memorial. And then there's the other side, which is to intervene into the very archive of what we understand by architecture because architecture is never understood in such a way. So if we understand the forest as architecture, what does it do to our very understanding of architecture?

AR: Challenging how architecture is seen from solely human-made, human-built constructs to something that's both human and non-human like the forests and communities marginalised by its definitions - the ones Paulo advocates for - is a paradigm-shifting act because it targets how we view nature as "other". When we do that, we acknowledge the colonial history of how it has been othered, portrayed from western viewpoints and ultimately stratified. I think we can argue that the history of separation leaks into our contemporary thoughts of objectifying trees and ultimately of greenwashing.

Paulo Tavares: If we are going to look at the history of how forests appear in Western thought they are always going to be a sort of symbol or the signifier of that which is out of civilisation, out of the boundaries of the polis. It's out of the boundaries of the city.

AR: The Polis, a word for origins of city, is often represented in a clearing within the Selva, the Latin word for "wood".

Paulo Tavares: In clearing the forest you institute culture. So our idea of nature, of the "savage" of the "primitive" is very much associated with this imaginary of the forest, which is something that we inherited from Western thought, from Western epistemologies. I came to understand through readings, anthropologists and botanists and archaeologists, but also working with and in alliance with indigenous groups and leaderships in doing this type of advocacy that in fact, they see the forests as a landscape saturated with history, saturated with culture, saturated with memory. Right? So for them, it's not something that's outside the boundaries of the city, outside the boundaries of the political - rather it's the contrary. The forest is a kind of political, cosmopolitical space.

Suzanne Simard: We have objectified nature. We've removed ourselves from nature in Western civilisation. We have said that nature is separate from us. You know, by the way, in indigenous languages, there are no words for "environment", because they view themselves as "one of," as integral, as "part of". Whereas in western science we are removed, we objectify it, we say we're superior. And that is given us, unfortunately, the licence to exploit.

AR: for a discipline that prides itself on its command of language, the way architecture does often, it seems to run dry when describing the natural world, at least in the English language.

Suzanne Simard: In the English language we don't have words that properly describe connection. We don't have words that properly describe the intelligence of nature. And so that's where the criticism comes: "Oh, you can't use, you know, these human words like 'intelligence' or 'mother trees' or 'communication' or 'sentience', because those are human, they describe the human experience." Well, then let's invent some more words that describe this beautiful, incredible phenomenon. And the indigenous languages did have that sophistication in their language - that we need to increase the sophistication of our English language in order to embrace this if we're not going to use these other words.

AR: It's interesting hearing about the limitations of the English language compared to indigenous languages when Suzanne describes it, because when we describe buildings as sustainable, ironically, we are also reduced the same limited set of words. Think about it: "sustainable”, “green lungs", "carbon neutral" - there's this lexicon that surrounds greenwashing that is actually really repetitive. And apart from our expansion of ecological language, there's more fundamentally the expansion of ecological knowledge, which comes when you speak to people outside of your architectural orbit.

Maria Smith: Ecological knowledge is a way of knowing that is humble and a kind of a practice, rather than an actual piece of information. So it's an of an approach to fitting in with the ecosystems around you.

AR: There is a humility to think ecologically, like Maria describes. It does feel like a practice above anything else. With that in mind, it's hard to look around and see so much content on how the construction industry is one of the planet's biggest polluters (I know I feel it) and how being an architect is inexorably tied to it. It's where a lot of mistakes happen. But thinking like an architect means pulling together connections out of our fields. And I do believe it helps propel thinking ecologically as a practice. Imagine if we worked with forest ecologists or consulted scientists during design stages. Would the same inauthentic presentations or conclusions of trees be made? An example for Paulo of someone who thought across disciplines rather than be limited by their own that he shared is Lina Bo Bardi.

Paulo Tavares: Lina Bo Bardi, she was operating across different fields of knowledge. She was operating across different spaces, political and cultural: writing, curating, designing, building. She was, you know, a militant, agitator, cultural agitator. She was really at her time, you know, operating across different spaces but with a mindset, with a sort of attitude, which is very characteristic of architecture. So I think, you know, people like you, Sabrina, people like me and other types of architects that are really working on a kind of more expanded way or trying to expand the way in which architecture can operate are really sort of drawing on this legacy.

AR: Ecological knowledge is an ever-expanding grey area in our industry. But some things are clearer when it comes to trees...

Suzanne Simard: ...A tree is a living, dynamic, sentient, highly evolved, essential part of our world.

AR: They aren't monoliths. They aren't objects. They cannot be used the way a concrete plinth is because plinths begin and end at ground level. Trees keep expanding. Reaching out for growth in connection trees can both perform and thrive when thought of as ecological beings. But if they just perform, they probably aren't thriving. Trees can be advocated for as more than just nature. They can transcend into our human and lived histories through architecture. By that lens, we have more agencies, architects to advocate for them. And through that more knowledge, by embracing forms of knowledge out of our Western thoughts. And finally, there is so much more to be learnt from scientists when it comes to forests.

Suzanne Simard: Well, first we're working with living creatures. Creatures that have behaviours, they have agency, they make decisions, they have memory. These are not objects. These are concentric beings. They're not that different from us. And they're social creatures - that means that they like to have neighbours. They don't grow by themselves, they don't like to be by themselves, they grow in communities. My message is: treat them as such. Treat them as living concentric beings, as social creatures, as societies. That means growing trees, not as individuals in "fill", but growing communities of forests and real living soil. And then you will see the transformation compared to, you know, what you see on a boulevard, which is usually trees isolated from each other in a line, all of the same species. It'll transform how we design our urban areas so that they include clusters of trees that can connect and communicate and form whole ecosystems. So using ecology, using what we know about forests and really owning it and then applying it into the design of your environment - we'll all be so much happier.

Paulo Tavares: Ecological knowledge is understanding there is no centre, and we are not at the centre.

AR: I really believe we can go a step further past the cynicism of what we're left with when we exit another greenwashing debate. If anything, I hope that anyone listening to this podcast right now, whether you are an architect, designer, student, writer, tree lover or just a curious mind (which is all you need to be to be honest), comes out of it with an answer or something new. When it comes to answering that question we asked at the very beginning: What do you wish architects knew about forests? Or if you're like me, a different image that comes to your mind when you think of a cathedral with the pews full.