Permanence and Permeability: Intervention Architecture and Cellular Botany

This paper encourages rethinking assumptions about enclosure and the assignment of materials in creative reuse projects by analogy with plant cellular structure, borrowing from 19th-century architectural theorist John Ruskin, who was fiercely opposed to architectural restoration. Ruskin used extensive analogies between plants and buildings throughout his life and particularly admired plants which he perceived to be simultaneously decaying and undecaying. Contemporary with Ruskin’s largely philosophical botanical musings and other early theories about the enclosure of life at the cellular scale, German architect Gottfried Semper’s “Caribbean hut” explicitly decoupled the structure of a wall, which he associated with its roof, and the wall’s primary function as social and physical enclosure, which he associated with a membrane-like textile hanging from the roof. Semper’s hut functions similarly to a basic plant cell, in which the cell wall and the cell membrane perform separate functions—an apt analogy for 21st-century renovation projects. Whereas new-build projects tend to privilege the wall that “does it all,” existing building stock, often inadequate by the latest standards of efficiency, could be coupled with newer experimental materials which have desirable ecological properties but which on their own do not substitute for load-bearing walls.

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ISBN
978-1-944214-31-9