Call for papers | ARDETH 16
ARDETH - a journal on the power of the project | Issue 16 topic: VEGETATE. Vitality in Architectural Practice | Theme Editor: Aleksandra Jaeschke
The verb to vegetate carries a peculiar paradox. Derived from the Latin vegetare – to enliven, animate, quicken – it has gradually come to signify passivity, inertia, and doing nothing. This semantic inversion is more than a linguistic curiosity. It reveals a profound shift in how modern culture has come to understand vegetal life and, perhaps, life itself.
Architectural culture has long defined action in opposition to what modern culture dismisses as vegetating. It privileges visible intervention over latent responsiveness, form-making over transformative cultivation, command over attunement, disruptive novelty over meaningful continuity, and mechanical resistance over ecological resilience. In doing so, designers and institutions have often projected that very misunderstanding of passivity onto vegetal life itself. Consequently, when vegetation enters architectural discourse, it usually appears as an aesthetically pleasing – if often unruly – object rather than as a living participant with its own agency and distinctive forms of intelligence. It is treated as material, an ecosystem service, a carbon sink, green infrastructure, or a framing landscape: a resource. Plants are something architectural practices use, not living beings from which they might learn.