“We now understand that plants shape the environment more than it shapes them,” Bas Smets tells me. “So the question I wanted to ask was, ‘how can we use that plant intelligence to produce new types of landscape?’”
The result is Building Biospheres, this year’s Belgian pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, which is populated by hundreds of plants and trees, rather than the usual models or photographs of buildings. It is a striking display, the white-painted interior occupied by a verdant miniature forest supported by an armature of high-tech gizmos, monitors, lighting and sensors.
“Every time you and I breathe,” says Smets, “we’re breathing air made by plants. But we’re cut off from the environment in buildings. In the 19th century, trees were planted in cities as embellishment; now we’re going to need them to provide oxygen, to filter out particles and absorb excess water and to cool down the city.”
Trees and plants, suggest Smets and his main collaborator Stefano Mancuso, pioneer of plant neurobiology, have an intelligence that we are only now beginning to understand. “Plants cannot move on the ground,” Smets says, “so they need to be able to manipulate the environment around them. They need to be able to manipulate birds and bees to come to them. They have intelligence but also an extreme sensibility.”
The aim in this pavilion, commissioned by the Flanders Architecture Institute, is to create what Smets refers to as “a symbiosis” between the plants and the people, the architecture and the organic. Intriguingly, this symbiosis is one in which the plants are in charge, manipulating the environment so it suits them better. Fortunately, as Smets says, “what is good for them is also good for us”.
“What trees want is to grow . . . They want more photosynthesis and that is good for us, lowering the temperature, producing more oxygen. What we’re proposing is a new symbiosis between what the plants need . . . what the building can handle and what we humans like. And we think that in that new symbiosis lies the future of architecture; architecture not as something that is dissociated from nature but a new collective intelligence between humans, plants and buildings.”
Smets, who trained as an architect and engineer before he switched to landscape design, might sound like a dreamer, with his rhetoric about intelligent plants controlling the building’s services, but he is anything but. This is a project engaging scientists and philosophers as well as a technical team including plant ecophysiologist Kathy Steppe of Ghent University and software developer Dirk De Pauw of Plant AnalytiX. It is predicated on an emerging understanding of plant intelligence (something that has, of course, been appreciated by different cultures in myriad ways and eras).
Philosopher Emanuele Coccia has been instrumental in outlining this concept, particularly in his wonderful 2018 book The Life of Plants. And Smets himself is a fascinating though always modest figure who is currently working on the landscape around the newly restored Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, making it greener, friendlier and more resilient, as well as the huge Astridplein outside Antwerp’s central station.
A prototype of the biosphere pavilion was already set up on the Ghent campus in a greenhouse; photos show a hybrid of high-tech and organic, galvanised steel and odd-looking gear wired up to tree trunks. “The trees will be cyborgs,” Smets grins, “as are we all now, with our phones and headphones, on Zoom calls.” Machines measure sap flow (the movement of fluid around a plant) and soil humidity, while data processors and AI help with calculations around light and irrigation. Smets suggests this is a lab as well as an artwork, an opportunity to monitor the plants over the six-month duration of the Biennale in real time.
Measuring the plants’ responses helps to accommodate them better, and the better they are accommodated the better the internal conditions get, for us and for them. The trees and plants have been mostly selected as those from a subtropical environment, that climate best suited (or at least most comfortable) to us as well.
“In a way, we have to rethink how we live on this planet,” says Smets, “and by bringing the most important living organisms that have allowed life on the planet into the building we change the status of that building.”
It’s a curious thing but the Belgian pavilion is very often the best. Belgium had the first national pavilion on the Giardini site (1907) and perhaps that extra experience has made them better at it. Seeings Smets’s plans, I mention that the best pavilion I ever saw in an Architecture Biennale was After the Party by architects Kersten Geers and David Van Severen in 2008, in which the architects built a wall to enclose a garden and then covered the floors of the interior and the garden in confetti while a few cheap café chairs were strewn around. It was a wonderful relief from the cacophony around, a pure, simple idea of a hedonistic moment that had somehow passed, but still utterly beautiful. “Ah, yes,” Smets says, “in a way this is a similar idea, about creating a place in the shade of trees.” The designers worked together recently in, of all places, Bahrain, where their Pearling Path lays out a trail of intimate public spaces.
In recent years, architects have been reassessing the role of plants in building but the danger has been a certain superficiality. Plants are green, literally, symbolically and environmentally, and the suspicion is that designers have been using them to cover up the less sustainable processes involved in architecture. If anyone can begin to ensure that plants are taken more seriously as real actors in a warming world, it is Smets. “I hope,” he says, “that architects see that plants are not just decoration but an active agent of our climate.”
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