When in January 1897, in a lecture delivered to the Royal Institution in London,
the Bengali scientist Jagadis Chandra Bose presented his latest research, he
received a lukewarm and mistrustful welcome from his British colleagues.
Bose demonstrated a substantial continuity and unity between the living
world and the one considered inanimate, ranging from the transmission of
electromagnetic waves, a field in which he had anticipated Marconi by a few
years, to his research into the sensitivity of plants. That research led to the
consideration of plants no longer as inanimate beings but, on the contrary,
as endowed with sensibility and cognitive capacities.
What induced the Europeans to mistrust the Bengali polymath was precisely
what had enabled him to achieve those results: a different vision of the world.
On the one hand was our Western outlook, which since the 17th century
had proceeded by divisions and specialisations that greatly hindered any
interaction between various disciplines. On the other, the conception of a
substantial unity of the world, in which continuity, transformation and movement
were the cornerstones of reality. Bose, who incidentally counted Henri
Bergson among his supporters, had grown up in a culture that facilitated the
idea of continuity between animate and inanimate. It was a short step from
there to seek proof of that continuity. But, at that time, the shape of Western
thinking would not even have allowed him to imagine anything of the sort.
The Bengali scientist's studies would have to wait almost a century before
anyone seriously expanded upon them. Only the move towards the idea of
substantial unity in the real, accepted in the second half of the 20th century
by official Western science, succeeded in creating the substratum that would
allow research to move in that direction. Italy boasts one of the most advanced
and acclaimed centres of these studies: the International Laboratory of
Vegetal Neurobiology, directed by Stefano Mancuso in Florence. "LINV
works on the hypothesis that the functioning of plants on a cellular level is
not very different to that of animals. Life is a single thing; the differences
between animal and vegetable are a human superstructure that has nothing
to do with the reality of things. It was LINV that discovered a zone in the root
which has a spontaneous electrical activity similar to that of neurology. A kind
of 'brain' in plants, situated at the tip of their roots. Another line of research
concerns sleep, which is linked to consciousness."
While making this concise selection of "green" architectures aimed at the
future, I was immediately struck by the fact that many of the architects
working on this theme are of Asian origin, in particular from Korea. One is
inclined to think that the same system of thought that led Bose not to stop
at disciplinary divisions is leading Far Eastern architects to make free use
of plants in architecture. The designs by Kyungam, MAD, Mass Studies and
Unsangdon clearly express a strong utopian force, almost a will to create new
worlds. The French, on the other hand, have a different attitude. The work
of François Roche takes up the great tradition that made France a model
for those concerned with landscape and technical green space, while the
futuristic and image-filled works of Vincent Callebaut reveal glimpses of a
cinematographic visual culture. A more pragmatic spirit can be observed in
the Italian project by Studio Iosa Ghini for a car park in Rome. Meanwhile
it is no coincidence that the green towers by the Dutch studio MVRDV won a competition in Seoul, and that the British Grant Associates and Wilkinson
Eyre Architects proposed technological gardens for the Bay of Singapore.
Along with Dubai, the East is a training ground for new utopias, the true seat
of architectural imagination in the early 21st century, where there is room
for projects by large international groups like Studio Atkins.
I know from personal experience how difficult it is to bring architecture,
agriculture, botany and floriculture together. It is a task that calls for strong
motivation. In the best of cases, the people concerned regard one another
with mistrust, each clinging to the "conquests" of their own discipline, each
with their own particular language. Here the same effort is required as that
implicitly requested by Bose from the British scientists, namely to relinquish
disciplinary borders in favour of a different conception of reality. Or, to
narrow the field of action, of the space inhabited by man, where there is
no longer a contrast between nature and architecture. In this idea of place,
vegetal life can once again be what is has been for us humans for more than
nine tenths of our existence on Earth: our real environment, and as such,
the one that best satisfies our needs.
A key theme in recent years has been the development of urban cultivations.
Here we see the chain farms of the Canadian Scott Romses, the French Atelier
Soa and the Italians Studiomobile, manifestly indebted to the atmospheres
of Flash Gordon. Human dependence on the vegetal element becomes evident.
And so does the much less obvious relation between agriculture and
architecture, two hitherto sharply contrasting spheres which today instead
can intersect and join hands. For that matter we need only dig a little into the
mythological origins of both to discover a substantial unity between them.
Just as in the foundation of every human space, be it a city or a building, "agriculture
was originally perceived as a violent act, in that man, by practising it,
raped nature, his mother, and dominated it; which is the opposite of what
happened with horticulture, an intimate, peaceful and positively symbiotic
collaboration with the earth-feeder."
'Very' green utopias
A pantheistic idea of the world and the things in it underlies a convergence of disciplines that can lead to a "truly" natura listic architectural hypothesis.
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- Maurizio Corrado
- 17 May 2010
- Florence