Seventh Lisbon Architecture Triennale

We experience environments through their affordance, either natural, architectural or technological propensity: how does the irruption of the new figure of the planetary interact with our senses? How to come to our senses?

The dramatic situation of the German economy in the 1920s led the philosopher Alfred Sohn-Rethel, like many other German intellectuals of the time, to move to Italy.1 Between 1923 and 1927, Sohn-Rethel, a pupil of Ernst Cassirer and close friend of Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin, lived in Italy between Capri, Positano, and Naples, where he experienced an exception to the emerging world of modern rationality. Capri was an island not only in the geographical sense of the term: it was a historical-metaphysical oasis in which modernity and its ambition to dominate the world of objects seemed defeated and demolished. Thus, in an essay published in 1926 in the Frankfurter Zeitung titled “The Ideal of the Broken: Neapolitan Technology,” Sohn-Rethel wrote that in Naples, “the essence of technology lies in the functioning of what is broken.”2 His starting point was a statement of fact: “In Naples, technical devices are always broken.” “Only exceptionally,” Sohn-Rethel continues, 

The modern ideal of efficiency and automation is radically reversed here. Yet this inversion realizes modernity beyond itself. In Naples, technology does not aim to make the object autonomous. On the contrary, it continually requires further human intervention, and thus the invention of a new relationship between subject and object. Instead of alienating man through automation, the technical object asks the subject each time to reinvent the world, redesign it, reconstruct it. Indeed, it is precisely “when it comes to dealing with defective machines” that the human individual “is sovereign and far above all technology.” And it is at these junctures that he becomes capable of “ridiculously transforming a defect into a saving advantage in the face of danger.”4

Encountering a broken piece of technology, Sohn-Rethel does not simply recognize the sovereignty of the subject over the object and lead to the unexpected invention of a plan and project. The impossibility of planning and control, the absolute openness to the unexpected, that technology requires of us reveals the possibility of life for objects and things. Sohn-Rethel sees in these capacities a closeness between the technological avant-garde and ancestral spirit that manifests itself in children. In this, Sohn-Rethel found the perfect definition of what a few decades later Claude Lévi-Strauss would identify in Amerindian societies: bricolage, or a technology that has freed itself from the project and is “the contingent result of all the opportunities that have presented themselves, to renew or enrich the heritage.”5

After decades of habituation to the idea of automation, the experience of seeing things break, shatter, or disintegrate has become a tragedy or evidence of something diabolical. We make it a moral guilt, a crime, the proof of radical evil, the demonstration of the impossibility of theodicy. Against this strange theology of perfection, Sohn-Rethel reminds us that the world is constantly and joyfully broken, deteriorated, worn out, blunted, shattered, damaged, ruined. Breakage is the daily life of things (and living things). It is, in fact, for this very reason that we need technology in the first place. An artifact capable of constantly keeping itself alive would be indistinguishable from a frightening deity.

Furthermore, in the face of rupture, technology does not seek repair but practices diversion. Today, we are so hypnotized by a strange litany of repairs that when faced with the death of things, we have come to believe that the only possible solution is to restore things back to their original form, to bring back to life what no longer exists. But this is a dangerous illusion. The idea of repair, like that of recycling, conceives of the life of things in an extremely reactionary way: things exist only if they remain what they are, if they eternally return to what they have been. But the resurrection of bodies does not exist outside of faith; forms cannot live without transforming themselves. Above all, to ask objects to constantly retain their form is to take the future of the world hostage: to prevent it from changing, to impose on it a fidelity to a past that purports to be identical with eternity. It’s not about repairing: it’s about hijacking the past and grafting onto it new elements, new functions, new life. Life doesn’t want to be repaired but to be reinvented at every step. 

It is with this attitude that architecture should rethink its role in the face of the multiple climate transformations the planet currently faces. Rather than invoking a kind of naive and irresponsible self-suspension (as in the work of Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, or at least in part HouseEurope!),6 architecture should be understood, like any technique, as a form of building from something that is broken. Instead of claiming to repair the planet (as the recent exhibition “The Great Repair" suggested),7 and bring it back to a phantom anterior state that paints itself as falsely paradisiacal, it should accept the state of ambiguity that defines our form of being in the world. Cities should together become the laboratories and models of this new form of technological relationship to the planet. We should also begin to think of nature as a space where everything has always been broken, shattered, and crushed.

The forest is one such space. The word “forest,” which is still used to describe a persistent and enduring association of diverse tree species in space and time, conveys an idea of otherness from the urban world. Its etymology traces back to the Latin “foris,” meaning “outside”: thus, the forest is conceived as that which lies beyond the city, encapsulating all that is not human, devoid of history, and untouched by artifice.8 However, for at least a century, anthropologists have contested this simplistic dichotomy. Ever since V. Gordon Childe’s influential—if controversial—work, it has become clear that the so-called urban revolution was precipitated by the advent of agriculture.9 For countless generations, humans lived as hunter-gatherers, moving in small bands, harvesting and hunting as opportunity allowed, never lingering long in one place. Then, imperceptibly at first, a profound transformation occurred. Perhaps the earliest humans were unaware of its significance, but at some point, a peculiar attachment to certain plants took root. This irrational and inexplicable affection for plants, this sense of duty and fidelity to a select group of trees and shrubs, compelled humans to forsake their most treasured asset—mobility—in favor of caring for these silent, rooted beings that continually grow and morph.

This ethnographic insight reveals two counterintuitive notions. First, it was the garden that invented the city, not the opposite. By mastering the cultivation of plants and forging enduring relationships with them, humanity created its most monumental and lasting artifact: the city. The garden is therefore not a mere interruption in the urban continuum. Rather, it is the primordial source, the “Big Bang” from which all cities, from New York, Lagos, and Shanghai to Cairo, Melbourne, and Johannesburg ultimately sprang. Urban life is a direct consequence of gardens, and it is within this context that politics itself emerged.

Second, the city’s invention can be seen as an extraordinary form of devotion to life forms entirely alien to our own. Urbanization represents a radical and almost inhuman declaration of loyalty to plant life. In a sense, every act of city-building is an instance of “bovarism”—the condition of believing oneself to be something one is not.10 In choosing to settle and cultivate, humans began to emulate plants, adopting their relationship to space and environment.

Biologists have long observed that humanity owes much to trees: the opposable thumb, for instance, evolved from the need to grasp branches, and our binocular vision was shaped by life in the canopy. Yet, the city is not an anatomical inheritance; it is a cultural one—a gift from plants. Humans are unique among animals in having established such a profound cultural bond with the plant kingdom. We do not merely consume or utilize plants; we have, in a sense, become culturally vegetal ourselves. Like characters in a fairy tale, we have entered into a kind of marriage with plants, and our cities are the offspring of this union. As in any love story, the relationship between humans and plants is fraught with conflict, disappointment, and drama. And as with all romances, it has faced condemnation and skepticism from outsiders—anthropologists included.

Some, like Paul Shepard, have gone so far as to label agriculture as the quintessential “ecological disease,” blaming it for humanity’s self-inflicted woes.11 James C. Scott, following this line of thought, argues that the shift to agriculture led to a loss of freedom and richness of experience, likening the adoption of farming to entering a monastic existence dominated by the genetic imperatives of a few plant species.12 These critiques rest on three assumptions: that hunters are more authentically human than farmers; that the boundaries between biological kingdoms are morally inviolable; and that cultural and identity blending is inherently negative. Yet, Darwinian evolution teaches that all species are composites, inherently multi-species, and biodiverse. Every anthropomorphic gesture is both a projection of ourselves onto other species and an alienation from our own identity. In this sense, when we attribute thought to plants, we not only humanize them but also recognize the vegetal dimension of thought itself. It is thus necessary to invert Marc-Antoine Laugier’s famous dictum that “One must look at the city as a forest,” and instead see the forest as a city. Our cities are the hybrid progeny of a forbidden love between humans and plants: ambiguous, mixed, and possessing the virtues of both lineages.

A primary and far-reaching implication of these discoveries is that the human relationship with plants—whether one calls it agriculture, horticulture, gardening, farming, or even a form of botanical affinity—is not a marginal aspect of urban existence, but rather its foundational event: the very premise and structuring principle of all cities. Urbanism, at its core, emerges as a botanical phenomenon: it is the result of a reciprocal domestication, a process in which certain plant species and humans mutually select one another, forging a shared habitat—a “domus”—in which both become interdependent. The act of founding a city thus presupposes a willingness not only to extend hospitality and kinship to plants, but also to permit ourselves to be shaped and domesticated by them in return. 

Archaeological and historical ecological research has long proven that the Amazon rainforest should be seen as an immense urban park. Michael Heckenberger’s research on Upper Xingu “garden cities” reveals meticulously planned settlements—central plazas linked to satellite villages via road networks, surrounded by agroforestry mosaics—that redefined urbanism as symbiotic with Amazonian ecologies.13 Stéphen Rostain’s LiDAR-driven Upano Valley discoveries exposed a 2,500-year-old urban complex spanning hundreds of square kilometers featuring geometric earthworks and intricate road systems that challenge notions of Amazonian “pristine” wilderness.14 Eduardo Neves demonstrates how contemporary biodiversity in the Madeira Basin emerged from millennia of indigenous landscape stewardship, with cultivated forests outlasting their creators.15 And Darrell Posey’s Kayapó studies documented “forest islands” where managed fallows sustained biodiversity and productivity for decades, dismantling myths of destructive slash-and-burn practices.16 Archaeological syntheses emphasize infrastructural landscapes—raised fields, canals, causeways—as collaborative projects enabling large-scale societies through ecological engineering, blurring divisions between urban and wild. Together, these works reframe the Amazon as a palimpsest of multi-species urbanism, where cities thrived not by dominating nature but through reciprocal domestication.17

In this sense, it is essential to dispel the persistent misconception of domestication as a one-sided, forceful imposition by humans upon other species. This anthropocentric reading has been robustly challenged by recent scholarship, which demonstrates the inadequacy of such a view.18 To attribute the entirety of domestication to human agency alone is to grant humanity a power it simply does not possess. Indeed, not every species can be domesticated; it takes actively participating in the formation of a genuine cohabitation pact. Moreover, such a perspective denies any form of agency or initiative to nonhuman species in their interactions with us and with the broader living world. It is therefore necessary to acknowledge not only “the active role played by animals in approaching humans and in looking for benefits resulting from human proximity and interaction,” but also the fact that domestication and agriculture are not uniquely human endeavors. Rather, they are co-evolutionary dynamics, widely distributed throughout the natural world.19

Furthermore, the domestication of plant species—what we commonly call agriculture—proves to be far more complex and heterogeneous than conventional wisdom suggests. In this regard, insights from the field of historical ecology, and particularly its studies of the Amazon, offer a broader vantage point than traditional anthropology. While ethnography tends to interpret landscapes exclusively through the lens of human culture, translating interactions with other species into narrative and thus obscuring the histories and cultures inscribed by nonhuman actors, historical ecology reveals a different story. The majority of Amazonian societies, for instance, “rather than domesticating the species they exploited … domesticated the landscape.”20 Through an array of ecological engineering techniques, these societies transformed shared environments—home to humans, plants, and animals alike—to foster greater biodiversity and density. Such strategies, which privilege the management of populations and the encouragement of difference over the uniformity of individuals, are not unique to the Amazon; they also characterize aspects of Europe’s ecological legacy. Urban settlements, therefore, should be recognized as one among many possible expressions of ecological transformation—processes that always, by necessity, implicate a multitude of species. 

From the vantage point of territorial domestication, the traditional opposition between agriculture and hunting loses much of its significance, as does the dichotomy between city and countryside. The countryside is not the city’s antithesis but rather a diluted, more regulated version: it is an interspecies technology in which every element—people, stones, and, crucially, plants—is subject to calculation and control. Decisions must be made not only about the number and kind of humans and buildings, but also about which plants are present, in what numbers, and at what rates they should grow. In this sense, the Amazon forest—with its engineered abundance, density, and uncontrollable complexity—resembles the contemporary metropolis far more than the tightly regulated “inter-species police” we call the countryside. For this reason, the answer to the climate crisis is not to replace cities with rural landscapes, but to radically reimagine the city itself: to extend the logic of urban density to encompass the density and diversity of species. Like the Amazon, the city of the future must become a magnet for plant life, a space in which the vegetal world is empowered to domesticate us in turn.

Cities are therefore trans-specific, multi-kingdom alliances—inherently transcultural and trans-ethnic from their inception. We need a radical reorientation in how we conceptualize urban differentiation: rather than analyzing cities through purely architectural or infrastructural lenses, their cultural identity must be framed within ethnobotanical and ethnozoological paradigms. This shift acknowledges that the quintessential “urban fact” lies not in mineralized structures (contrary to Aldo Rossi),21 but in the dynamic, often imperceptible relationships between taxonomically divergent life forms. A city’s “urbanity” intensifies in proportion to the diversity and complexity of its interspecies interactions, with the quantity, quality, and modes of these relationships serving as the true markers of its identity.

Urban theory should abandon spatial metaphors in favor of horticultural frameworks, particularly the concept of grafting. As architect Jeanne Gang elucidates, cities function as technologies of inter-species symbiosis, mirroring biological grafting’s capacity to fuse genetically and evolutionarily distinct organisms into cohesive wholes.22 Grafting, a practice as ancient as viticulture yet biologically revolutionary, demonstrates life’s ability to transcend taxonomic boundaries, circulating vitality between disparate entities irrespective of spatial constraints. The city embodies this: it is an innovation that replaces static ecosystems with engineered hybridity, where species density flourishes through deliberate, often paradoxical unions.

Urbanization, understood through the metaphor of grafting, reveals three transformative dynamics. First, urbanization is a process of ecosystemic disruption: cities intentionally break from patriarchal ideals of ecological stability by grafting human habitats onto vegetal and animal systems, creating unpredictable hybrids rather than seeking equilibrium. Peter Latz’s Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord (1990–2002) exemplifies this, where a former industrial site was ecologically revitalized through the integration of native plants and adaptive reuse. According to Latz, it’s important to “deliberately [place] gardens in the most horrible places that I can’t use at the moment, that I have to visit in protective clothing and so on, and one day [make] them into places where I can once more say: I want to stay here, this is where I want to be… Bad places include anywhere I wouldn’t allow my four-year-old granddaughter to play. These can be very exciting places.”23

Second, urbanization is a process of temporal reconfiguration: grafting in cities defies linear time, suturing together disparate historical epochs. Brunelleschi’s Renaissance Florence, for instance, stands as a Gothic structure grafted with Greco-Roman ideals, embodying a living palimpsest where past and present converge. Third, urbanization is a process of regenerative pruning: instead of restoring original states, cities thrive by integrating contextually alien elements through strategic innovation and excision. Studio Gang’s WMS Boathouse (2013) in Chicago demonstrates this by blending riverine ecosystems with human infrastructure via native plantings and silt-based erosion control. These examples underscore how cities foster a planetary tapestry of unpredictable hybrids and redefine urbanism as a continuous act of biological diplomacy, where humans evolve through negotiated alliances across species and kingdoms. 

A speculative project by Andrea Branzi and Stefano Boeri from 2009 exemplifies this last point. In 2009, in response to French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s request to come up with new ideas for “Grand Paris,” Branzi and Boeri proposed to simultaneously release 50,000 sacred cows and 30,000 monkeys into Parisian parks and boulevards.24 The aim of this was twofold. On the one hand, it was about imagining a metropolis that was no longer anthropocentric, one capable of a cosmic openness to the most extreme diversity. On the other, as Branzi explained, “the presence of free animals inside the urban territories creates a sort of reduction of the stress, like elastomers inserted in an accelerated mechanism, which increase the level of unpredictability of the system and force it to slow its pace.”25 This extremely simple idea presupposes a radical transformation of the urban imagination. It makes the city no longer have anything exclusively human about it, becoming indistinguishable from any jungle where it is impossible to predict what you will encounter. It would also make the constant and habitual presence of monkeys, cows, and other animals something that cannot be ignored, and thus mark the end of the romanticism that is implicit in the idea of an ecosystem. The concept of an “ecosystem” introduces into the relationship between life and space the idea of exclusive and natural ownership that nineteenth-century politics had conceived for nations: just as, according to nationalist ideology, a territory belongs by natural destiny to a people, so there are places naturally destined to welcome a species forever.

This proposed invasion transforms the city into a hybrid space that no longer belongs to any one species. Paris would no longer belong to human beings, who would no longer be able to claim ownership of streets or even objects. But neither would it belong to cows or monkeys, who would not be able to inhabit the space next to the Seine as if it was their own ecosystem. Paris would become the name of a perpetual form of negotiation between different species, which must, on a daily basis, reallocate every tiny piece of space. The Earth can never belong to any one species. And it is only if the city ceases to think of itself as an improbable “naturally human ecosystem” opposed to other “naturally nonhuman” or “wild” ecosystems that it will be able to open up to many other species. All species are tenants on this planet.