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).