“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 st…