botany building, a new branch of architecture

Developments like this just brighten up my days, as we are getting closer to my dream of an organic world where everything is growing and dynamically interconnected with everything else. If we release ourselves of the mostly implicitly ingrained technoprogressive bias in our minds we come to see that we should not continue drawing away from nature and create a clean, abstract and cold lifeworld (look around you!) that feels safe and comfortable for our own little selves, we can come to see that technology and nature can merge, in fact that creating technology is our nature, and that nature can be a technology. That what is seen as nature and what is seen as technology just depends on our stance towards something. If we see that everything around us can become part of our creative canvas, everything becomes technology.

This particular project aims at building structures from trees of which the growth is controlled by making the trees grow around steel structures, that later can be removed. This way, trees can be made to even grow into each other so they become part of a single macroorganism, like a kind of above the ground rhizome.

This is truly the next step after environmentalism; seeing nature not as something separate that needs to be protected, but as something to be transformed by us to embody a larger and richer variety of human values, synergetically merging with the technologies we already have. Nature is plastic!