Through selective breeding, cloning, and genetic modification, plants in the twenty-first century are as much technological objects as they are part of the natural world. Additionally, through the apparatus and designed environments for human-plant interactions—those of scientific research, recreation, agriculture, and extraction—plants are also technological subjects. 

This session invites explorations of the architecture, landscapes, and urban environments for vegetation whose significance is directly linked to the concentrated efforts of society through technology. Of particular interest are papers that explore these topics in relation to the “non-human” turn in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Sylvia Lavin’s recent work on plant life and architecture revives “the ways in which architects adapted plant-based models of resource processing,” not as metaphor or motif but as an alternative set of environmental and ecological relations (“Reclaiming Plant Architecture,” 2019). Along these lines, an expanded view toward landscape and urbanism requires historical reinterpretations of nature-culture binaries such that purely instrumental views of biological life give way to new and potentially unanticipated spaces of coordination between living organisms and their diverse systems of vitality. 

Paper topics may include: plants as mediated matter for design (such as relationships between the nursery industry and design, architectural green walls and facades, and interior landscapes); the landscape and architecture of colonial botany; indigenous technologies of plant cultivation and colonial resistance; relevant architectural program (ranging from industrial agriculture to laboratories); or specific horticultural materials (stadium turf, engineered soils).

A student enters my office to discuss a project on “entanglements.” The whirring of the white noise machine on the floor catches her attention, and she quips, “Oh! It’s just like my therapist’s office!” We chuckle and make awkward small talk about climate despair. . . .This particular model, the Dohm® Classic Natural Sound Machine, is laminated in a muted camouflage pattern of various species of maple. It is a mechanical device; inside, metal fan blades push air through apertures in the plastic housing. The domestic white noise machine makes one kind of noise to diminish others; as summarized by Mack Hagood, it is “an absent presence intended to facilitate the absence of unwanted presences.” [1]

Camouflage has military origins as a technology of blending and obfuscation. It, too, is an absent presence—though one that inverts the Dohm’s relationship of technics to context. The white noise machine muddles environmental noise for the individual; camouflage obscures individual form in the environment. As an artifact of 21st-century product design, the camo Dohm could be explained through consumerism and the endless refraction of desire and anxiety. As an object lesson, it is a tool for considering nested (and porous) forms of environmental rendition.