“Pick up [your] intellectual machetes”

“The ground line is an abstraction that should not be confused with the reality of soil” said Aleksandra Jaeschke, speaking Thursday morning at Log’rithims: Excursions in the Ecosphere, an event convened and moderated by Cynthia Davidson, editor of the architecture journal Log, in her role as one of the Italian Virtual Pavilion’s ten creative directors. Jaeschke’s declaration was only the first of the morning, as she was joined by Bruce Mau and Sanford Kwinter to elaborate on ideas developed in a special section of Log’s latest issue. The event is the first of six “exponential conversations” focused on “how we will live together, not simply human with human, but…with all of the teeming populations of the earth.”

Looking to recent studies on the interconnectedness of plants, Jaeschke lamented the harm caused by architects’ struggle to acknowledge “the disturbed or extended self that we call nature.” The ground line drawn in section acts to blind architects to networks of mycelium found beneath the soil which facilitate communication—or thought—between plants. Other studies point to how our minds are “integrated with the environment and with other individual brains in many unexpected ways,” arguing that “instead of a post-human turn, perhaps we need creative humans capable of complete attention towards the extended self”, or, nature.

One of Jaeschke’s “creative humans” may well be Bruce Mau, who began on an optimistic note: “in times like these, we can’t afford the luxury of cynicism…we have to believe in the possibility of change.” Change was the silver lining of the pandemic for him, and, echoing Jaeschke, argued for a life-centered design approach (focused equally on all forms of life), a movement Mau for which sees architects to be the “ideal leaders.”

Sanford Kwinter extolled Jaeschke and Mau as examples of designers moving the discourse in the “right direction.” He decried the “false barrier” between humans and the environment, and finished calling for a fundamental change in the canons and systems used by designers: “Drop [your] computer mouses and pick up intellectual machetes and bushwhack [your] way into the difficult-to-penetrate forest of the ecosphere.”