Domus 1104 hits the shelves

As the boundaries between architecture and nature continue to dissolve, a new material language is emerging. One shaped by living systems, seasonal rhythms and growth processes. Landscape is no longer merely a backdrop or picturesque setting; it is now an active agent in design.

In an age defined by climate collapse, planting is no longer passive – it is a radical act of design, resistance and remembering. As cities drown, burn and suffocate under the weight of their own materiality, the future will not be built from steel and concrete, but grown from forest logic and river lessons. Buried beneath paved streets and empire’s archives lie ancestral innovations – systems rooted in nature, cultivated through culture and sustained by generations of place-based knowledge. In this future, plants emerge not as materials, but as sentient technologies – living infrastructures that embody reciprocity over extraction, seeding resilience, regeneration and reverence.  

Biomass refers to the total mass of living organisms in a given system at a specific point in time. Although humans see themselves as central to the planet’s story, they represent only a tiny fraction of Earth’s biomass. Plants – silent, immobile and often overlooked – account for more than 80 per cent of biomass, forming the foundation of nearly every ecosystem. 

How can we create the most suitable habitat for trees growing into the sky of a city? How can we guide the roots of an oak or linden tree to extend laterally, instead of vertically? What is the ideal chemical composition and appropriate weight of a soil mix designed for a planter situated 100 metres above the ground? How many ladybirds need to be spread into the pots to combat pests that infest plants growing on the facade of a tower? How do trees respond to wind loads?

The new frontier of architecture embraces sustainable, living materials that breathe. Designers now draw on biobased resources ranging from living plants and fungi to plantfibre composites, grasses, leaves, agricultural residues, tree-derived substances and marine biomass, rather than relying solely on bricks and steel. These materials have the capacity to renew themselves. They grow, adapt and self-repair. They also offer dynamic responses to moisture, temperature and stress. Their cultivation and processing typically require low energy inputs and sequester carbon as they develop, offering circular end-of-life pathways through composting or reintegration into ecosystems.

In Bjarke Ingels’ manifesto for Domus this year, he wrote that in the process of our human development, “Life adapted to our material environment. Until the moment we discovered tools, technology and architecture. Then we acquired the power to adapt our material environment to life.” However, I believe we are now entering an epoch that is moving even further beyond this. Now our technology has adapted so far that we have acquired the capacity not only to adapt our material environment to our life but also to make up for the failures that life has inflicted on the material environment.

Landscape design as a product of local culture, which goes beyond mere questions of geology, biology and hydrology. The Swiss practice is based on these principles and rejects the term “habitat” to instead talk about neighbourhoods. 

In the second phase of the master plan, the circular courtyard of the Vandalorum Museum of Art & Design has been transformed with 8,000 perennial plants. Their combination is not the only important aspect: a garden is a constant process focused on the future. 

Built above the tunnels of an old seven-lane highway, Presidio Tunnel Tops is a public space with a network of trails, bluff landscapes, meadows, dynamic overlooks and spaces for gathering. 

The facade of Urban Farming Office returns green space to the city and promotes safe food production, while creating a comfortable microclimate throughout the building. 

Nômade Temple is a hotel designed like a garden: the corridor is a sandy path through the forest, and the rooms – some of which are raised off the ground – are enlarged by the sense of openness around them, while the pillars blend with the trunks of the trees. 

In the Healing Mountain, two square surfaces of interwoven reeds create a pleasant space in the middle of nature. Wind, rain and light enter the gap between the curved surfaces. 

Made of reeds, an iconic plant of marshy regions, the Rausa pavilion poetically addressed ecological issues and, in particular, called attention to the destruction of wetlands. 

United Nature is an ongoing inquiry into the invisible threads that bind life across the planet. These portraits include subjects across many species and kingdoms. Working with live insects not as specimens but as collaborators whose presence is alive and looking back, it becomes clear that all of nature has an interior life. What emerges is a sense of shared aliveness, a glimpse at the continuity of consciousness that runs through all planetary life. 

Simple and essential, the natural elements of Grandpa’s Lamp are not only decorative but also structural. 

Using plastic products as moulds for mycelium, the Consumer series explores a harmonious coexistence between economic prosperity and ecological protection. 

By opening holes into the bushes and forming circles by bending the branches, the Broken Landscape series creates surreal landscapes that allow us to see inside the forest. 

Exobiotaníca – Botanical Space Flight and Frozen Flowers are experimental explorations of what happens when flowers and plants are taken to extreme environments, such as the stratosphere and the depths of the sea. 

Framed by the exhibition spaces of the Isolation series, nature becomes a work of art that challenges the dichotomy between real and artificial. 

Grass is used to create photographic images thanks to its extraordinary capacity to record complex figures through the production of chlorophyll. 

In a quiet corner of Brooklyn, we are cultivating a new kind of architecture. It does not glitter or rise in defiance of gravity. Instead, it grows. It decomposes. It wriggles. At Terreform ONE, we do not draw inspiration from nature as a stylistic gesture. We invite nature into the design process as a collaborator.

For the cover of the September issue, we knew we had to work with Azuma Makoto, the florist/ artist who has encased bouquets of flowers in blocks of ice or flown them into space. I have his photo series of a bonsai tree ascending into outer space in my home. It combines the domestic and the cosmic scale in a single frame. His work takes the ancient art and craft of floral arrangement and turns it into expressive, gravitydefying, alien landscapes of colliding compositions of colour and form. We could imagine no better artist to express the abundance and diversity of living, breathing biomaterial.