Vacant lots

text: Louise Wright

​

In 1987, Vessel and Wong showed

us that vacant lots aren’t really vacant: a surprising number of plants and animals live in the left- over spaces in our cities. This work could be considered the beginning of an understanding of how novel ecosystems are facilitated by the urban environment.

​

Moss

images and text: David Fox
 

As the city of Melbourne, Australia,

attempted to suppress Covid-19 with a lockdown, David Fox found an abundance of life close to home. With forensic clarity, Fox’s photographs present moss thriving within the mineral fabric of the city.

​

Up here from high is Nura [Country]

text: Danièle Hromek

​

Budawang woman of the Yuin nation, Danièle Hromek, lives in a birdhouse where she can see the forms and shapes of our Mother Earth, otherwise unavailable on the ground in urban spaces where the flows and shapes of Country have been smoothed off by colonial processes.

​

A yarn between two spatial practitioners

conversation between Danièle Hromek (Budawang/Yuin) and Louise Wright

​

As the city of Melbourne, Australia,

A yarn between Louise Wright and Danièle Hromek, held remotely and temporally over several months during the winter and spring of 2020 – dhagarwara (winter) and gambambara (spring) – of the continent now known as Australia.

Architecture sharing space

text: Louise Wright
 

Architecture’s physicality is at once

its problem and possibility in its relationship with its site and the species supported there. Its physical size, shape, footprint and material allow it to make, share, or release ground.

​

Under the green slate: otherness in landscape architecture

text: Nina Bassoli

​

This essay traces a path through the inalienable relationship between urban environments, natural ecologies and different forms of “otherness”.

​

Observing - intervening

text: Dermot Foley

​

Observing as-found conditions of

ground and substrate can fine-tune our appreciation of secondary- raw-materials, as they interact with ecological processes. Foley’s work is a response to the EU Waste Framework Directive (2008) and the EU Construction and Demolition Waste Protocol and Guidelines (2018).

One true time

text: Louise Wright
 

The ‘weed’ has in some settings

adapted more quickly than
it might have to a new kind
of ecological niche – the urbanized environment of the Anthropocene – to complicate notions of place and endemism.

​

Common ground

interviewee Monica Gagliano
interviewer Mauro Baracco + Louise Wright

​

Monica Gagliano is a pioneer in the research of plant cognition. Some of this work has focused on the ecological processes by which organisms are able to gather information on the variable conditions of their surrounding environment in order to thrive.

Architecture as proto-ethic entanglement

text and images: Christoph Solstreif-Pirker

​

This artist portfolio builds on a performative investigation of Gruinard Island, Scotland, taken place in 2018. Having served as a testing site for biological agents during World War II, the island’s soil and atmosphere remain a lethal environment for humans and non-humans.

Architectures of becoming-animal

text: Ron Broglio

​

From childhood games to ancient cave paintings, animal representations across time and space offer us an affective crack in rational consciousness by which to slip into a larger-than-human earth and share affinity with a range of animal life.

Westbrook Artists' Site

text: Kevin Lair

​

The mission of Westbrook Artists’ Site (WAS) is to seek the creative potential in the rural post-industrial condition. It is an exploration of the tension between control and that which escapes or eludes our control, and it suggests how we may reconnect to the rural environment.

The city in nature

text: Irénée Scalbert

​

To exist, the city must, according to

Fernand Braudel, dominate an empire, however tiny. The periods of greatest economic expansion were invariably accompanied by an explosion of cities. But can cities legitimately claim to be the destiny of the world? Must they always be obsessed with their own past, with their own imperium?

Anthropocene, architecture, and modernity

text: Giacomo Pala

​

In the last decades, the concept of the Anthropocene has become remarkably common in many fields, although sometimes, it is reduced to a catchword. This essay investigates how such concept may require the development of a specific historiography of architecture.

Flora of the Colosseum of Rome

text: Richard Deakin
introduction Louise Wright and Linda Tegg

​

In the 1850s Richard Deakin examined Rome’s Colosseum
and found 420 species of plants spontaneously growing among it’s ruins and documented each species.

Small plants in the concrete jungle

text and images: Alison Haynes

​

From the point of view of moss, the urban environment provides niches, like pavement crevices, that offer just enough shelter and resources to survive. These small plants, often overlooked, were amongst the first to colonise land around 400 million years ago.

Spaces for plants in void metabolism

text and images: Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Masamichi Tamura, and Fumiya Nonaka

​

Tokyo as a gathering of residential houses with small gardens can be characterized with its fragmentary green spaces that escape the mesh of statistics. Plants appear in voids that keep transforming with ever metabolizing masses.

Species in correlation: Superstudio and ground/planet continuity

text and images: Mauro Baracco

​

Reflecting on current environmental crises as related extensions of the production-consumption system, this essay refers to architectural works from the Sixties and Seventies, tracing analogies between their critique of the status quo and current positions that call for enhanced integration between human and non-human ecologies.