VEGETATE is animated by the exhilaration of encountering vegetal life as a radical form of alterity. Knowledge of plants has developed over millennia – and continues to be held and renewed – by Indigenous peoples and place-based communities through sustained observation, tending, and cultivation, as well as healing and spiritual practices. In many Indigenous traditions, plants have long been understood as sensing, communicative, and relational beings – but within onto-epistemologies not reducible to the categories of Western science. Western botany, in turn, was shaped by many forms of plant knowledge cultivated by rural communities, herbalists, and monastic orders. At the same time, its development as a modern science was deeply entangled with colonial expeditions and institutions that appropriated Indigenous knowledges while operating within – and contributing to – systems of dispossession and extraction. Contemporary research into plant communication and ecological relations is transforming scientific understanding of plant life, using new instruments and methods to record processes unfolding across temporal and spatial scales not directly accessible to human senses. Plants sense, signal, adapt, and form relations in ways profoundly different from our own. The joy of attending to this still difficult-to-perceive world is itself part of the proposition, and the issue invites contributions that make its richness and strangeness palpable.
The proposition, however, extends beyond a reconsideration of architecture’s relationship with vegetation. The call asks not only how architectural practices might engage with vegetal life, but also what it might mean for architecture itself to vegetate – thereby reclaiming, in the process, the term’s original vitality.
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