Bjarke Ingels: why the future of architecture needs plants

All religions have a vision of a sacred garden. Eden, Jannah, Nandana Vana, Pairidaeza. Architecture served to create shade and shelter from the elements. Safety from the wild and protection of property. Along with it came the idea of contained nature. The Islamic water gardens, the Mediterranean patio, the urban courtyard, the modernist rooftop terrace. If architecture took us out of our natural habitat, landscape architecture brought it back to us. 

I grew up in a tiny house in a beautiful garden. Like the Lego set #345 Modern House, it was a rectangular box with a flat roof, low ceilings and large windows. What made it a wonderful place to live was the garden, the lake and the forest beyond. The explosion of nature all around, snowdrop, errant, birch, beech, deer, ducklings, squirrels, swans. I would always forget my keys, and as I got home from school before anyone else, I got to spend my childhood afternoons outside. In the garden, on the roof. Near my childhood home was one of the world’s most beautiful art museums: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Little white brick buildings with timber roofs connected by glass-enclosed pathways through a jawdropping garden. Like a network of interconnected pavilions in a park. Plants and art everywhere. A true realisation of the modernist dream of blurring the boundaries between inside and outside. 

Through Akira Kurosawa, I discovered Japanese gardens. Little man-made ecosystems, complete with the orchestrated flow of water, stepping stones, mosses. Seemingly wild but evidently orchestrated landscapes. 

When I started studying architecture, I was puzzled why modern architecture was so boring while modern landscapes were so imaginative. The austerity of Arne Jacobsen’s National Bank of Denmark (1971) was compensated by the colour and beauty of plants suspended in the glazed light wells. While Danish modernist buildings tended to be dry derivations of the International Style or local adaptations of a critical regionalism, Carl Theodor Sørensen’s gardens were expressive abstractions. His oval allotment gardens in Nærum (1948) or the Geometric Gardens in Herning (1956) dissolve the master plan into avant-garde abstract graphics. At Aarhus University, the architecture has all but been reduced to an inhabitable wall of buildings that frame Sørensen’s garden (1933) at the heart of it. 

On my first journey to Brasilia, the protagonist, to my surprise, was not the expressive modernism of Oscar Niemeyer but the indigenous tropical gardens of Roberto Burle Marx. It led me on a pilgrimage to his own garden (1949) outside Rio de Janeiro. Burle Marx had become so disenfranchised by colonial landscapes dominated by European species that he went on expeditions in the Amazon to bring back uncatalogued and unappreciated tropical species to his own garden. Half paradise, half nursery, Sítio Roberto Burle Marx may be one of the most  biodiverse places I have ever visited. 

Even if as architects we tend to get to the landscape as an afterthought, if you look out the aeroplane window, the landscape is our primary presence on the planet. The manmade topolines of Asian rice fields. The Gerhard Richter-esque colorful striations of Dutch tulip fields. The expansive Voronoi patterns of European grainlands or the Cartesian abstractions of Iowa’s cornfields. In New York, the most gamechanging interventions have been the High Line (2009), the inprogress Manhattan Waterfront Greenway, Little Island (2021), and the Domino (2018) and Brooklyn Bridge (2010) parks. Piet Oudolf’s invasion of the abandoned train tracks of Chelsea with indigenous species of New York flora is like a present-day Burle Marx foraging overgrown industrial sites to elevate the mundane to the meaningful. In a city of glass and steel, the most radical transformation is not built, but grown with plants.

Our first contribution to the Manhattan skyline, the Courtscraper (2016), was shaped by the desire to scoop out an oasis of green in the heart of the city block. The Mountain (Copenhagen, 2008) is a parking structure covered by houses with gardens. The 8 House (Copenhagen, 2010) elevates a string of townhouses from the street to the rooftop. CopenHill (Copenhagen, 2019) is a power plant covered by 150 species of native plants, making it a manmade mountain for hiking and skiing. If modernist architecture tried to undo the distinction between inside and outside, recent decades have sought to bring landscape qualities back into the urban space. The orderly regime of pavements giving way to living, breathing materials. Trees sprouting through the cracks in the concrete. 

In this issue devoted to the art and craft of living material, Julia Watson explores landscape architecture without landscape architects in her survey of Indigenous practices. Stefano Boeri elevates landscape into the vertical dimension of our cities. Ben Lamm advances bioengineering with microorganisms capable of degrading plastics or by bringing dire wolves back from extinction. At the Vandalorum, Piet Oudolf places plants in friendly proximity like you would arrange a seating plan at a dinner table. VTN Architects adorns their Urban Farming Office with a facade of edible produce. Field Operations tops a Presidio highway tunnel with a man-made coastal landscape. In Holbox, Nômade turns hotel corridors into tropical gardens. Studio Duyang forms a thatched mountain for healing, while Atelier Faber uses bundles of reeds as bricks in the circular wall of the Rausa Pavilion. Andrew Zuckerman turns our attention to the morphological diversity of microfauna with his human-sized portraits of insects. 

Nongzao grows mycelium moulded in everyday plastic objects. Thomas Takada explores the beauty of the seasons with his deciduous lampshade leaves. Azuma Makoto takes the fragile, ephemeral beauty of flower arrangements on an odyssey of extremes from the Arctic to space. Antti Laitinen’s “broken landscapes” are collage-like voids created in naked Nordic nature. Fabian Knecht brings Mohammed to the mountain with his Isolation series by constructing the architecture of the gallery within and around the nature he seeks to exhibit. Ackroyd & Harvey use lightsensitive chlorophyll to grow lawns of green-scale imagery. 

Mitchell Joachim considers crickets as clients, kelp as data archives and mycelium forms as structural systems in his exploration of the oxymoronic hybrid of nature and technology. Finally, Günther Vogt shows us the landscape as an interspecies neighbourhood at all scales, by applying his sensibility to Switzerland’s changing landscapes. As glaciers melt, they drop to the bottom of the valleys to form lakes. And as stone-paved cities like Paris become too hot to inhabit, tree canopies and meadowlands become the materials with which we can respond to evolving climatic conditions. If cities were invented to make our landscapes more inhabitable, we now have to bring back the landscape to make them inhabitable once again.  

The battle cry of the student riots of Paris in 1968 reminded us of the beach lying dormant under the cobblestones in a desire for liberation from restrictive structures and a return to more natural and playful ways of life. Half a century later, in the face of climate change it is time to crack open the concrete once again. This time to make space for a natural human habitat with cooling shade and natural humidity. Sous les pavés, les plantes.

Opening image: Thomas Heatherwick and Signe Nielson, Little Island, New York, United States, 2021. Photos Michael Grimm