In June 2023, the AR examines plant-based construction at its root
‘The success of humans as a species is inextricably interwoven with the success of plant life on Earth,’ writes Summer Islam in this issue’s keynote. This is as true today as it has been for hundreds of thousands of years.
But in cities, plants are often restricted to the spaces that humans create for them – parks, gardens and other planted areas – and bent to profit or aesthetic preference. While essential to the communities that congregate in them, green spaces such as Hage in Lund and Brockwell Park in London are subject to political and economic forces.
Plants are also sidelined in the fabric of buildings, often reduced to furnishings and room linings. While timber is enjoying popularity at scale, bamboo is widely and innovatively used to build flood-relief shelters in rural Pakistan and to navigate the thorny regulations of refugee settlements in Bangladesh. Other techniques, such as cork facades and thatched walls, are still in their relative infancy; experimentation is mostly confined to private houses and university departments. Change is hampered by the unwavering power of steel and concrete lobbies, which means that policy and fire regulations lag behind. Yet, ‘it is possible to be safe in a largely compostable building’, as Michael Burchert demonstrates.
This issue calls for a paradigm shift beyond a change in material palettes. Where new buildings are justified, plants should be incorporated along with other low-carbon materials, but not without consideration of how that plant life is cultivated – all other forms of life depend on it.
Lead image: ‘Abandonment is rewilding, in a very pure sense,’ writes Cal Flyn in her 2021 book Islands of Abandonment. Stefan Baumann’s photographs show how quickly plants, animals and fungi take over in the absence of humans – not rebounding to a pristine state, but creating new ‘post‑natural’ ecosystems that increasingly characterise life in the anthropocene. Credit: Media Drum World / Alamy
