“Anything we love can be saved.” – Alice Walker
The goal of this studio is to design the movement of a historic plant collection at risk of inundation from sea level rise in South Florida to a historic conservatory building in upstate New York. These paired sites encourage reciprocal readings between plant life, climate change, and architecture. Students will approach the project by valuing the land that is left behind as carefully as the lands and buildings that support migration, a framework suggested in the publication ‘Landscapes of Retreat’1. We lead with the premise that architecture motivates the relationship between conservation and extinction, to compel the enduring bonds between architectural design and evolutionary biology. Students can choose to work on a single species, across hundreds of acres or land somewhere in between, directing projects that explore the trials of keeping endangered and threatened plants under cover.
Conceptual Overview
“Like it or not, we will retreat from most of the world’s shorelines in the not very distant future. Our retreat options can be characterized as either difficult or catastrophic. We can plan now and retreat in a strategic and calculated fashion, or we can worry about it later and retreat in tactical disarray in response to devastating storms. In other words, we can walk away methodically, or we can flee in panic. These are the choices we have.”2
Retreat is often imprecisely defined as a human-centric consideration, a product of social and natural worlds colliding. Which is why it is first necessary to understand what retreat is not. It is not nostalgia for a prior condition, and it is not a return to a previous ecological state. Retreat is not leaving in defeat, nor is it giving up hope. Instead, retreat creates hope by giving up false assumptions of human mastery over the environment. Giving up on mastery is not abandoning our relationships to land or place but reinforcing relations by redefining them anew. The fact that so many relationships between humans and the natural world have become largely exploitative and extractionist might be hard to accept, as is the recognition of any relationship that becomes toxic for one or more of its members. As James Baldwin once wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”3 The assumption of human mastery over nature must be confronted anew, courageously, to make way for other architectural practices—and other histories to emerge. As case in point, this studio will consider reciprocal areas of interest—two sites separated in the past but bound in the future:
A National Historic Landmark from the Gilded age where unique cultural and architectural assets are preserved, including an conservatory that sits abandoned, at ~38 meters above sea level.
A historic living collection whose primary purpose the preservation of endangered palm and cycad species, a landscape slowly abating as the ocean moves landward, at ~0 meters, or sea level.
The Architecture of Plant Conservation
Which plants matter to the making of architectural history? Some plants are valued for their timeless contributions; the culms of bamboo, the durability of oak, and the fibers of reed come to mind. These plants nourish cultural, and political consensus as they make history. Other plants persist along the margins of human life, making history scrappy, dirty, or noisy. Plants without history thrive by shaping their own worlds. Because they have no immediate worth or use, they challenge dominant architectural narratives. This recognition of how plant organisms come in and out of human worlds calls for multidisciplinary histories. And such histories can hardly include just humans, as other organisms have equally powerful claims to shared space. In the context of retreat and relocation due to changing climates, this studio also asks what kind of ‘history’ plants make.
“We have told ourselves that we could live in isolation from other species, not perceiving our connections to the larger world, thinking that we do not have responsibilities, and that we are not connected to each other. In the end, time tells us that we cannot escape from our past, that we must use our knowledge to reconcile ourselves with our history and with each other.”4
Thousands of plants are extinct in the wild, thriving instead under glass, in arboreta and other structures that grow or house living collections. Others are endangered, slipping under saltier water, burnt for industrial agriculture, embezzled to nourish demand. Tallies increase as conservationists try to keep up by counting the losses. A society that trades in accounts of lost species is a curious one, striving for narrative fixity in a time of great change. That humans have impacted the land, seas, and climate is not simply a means to expand architectural history to infer past human activities, rather, architecture can be rethought to celebrate other species’ survival in the present tense— even survival at the edge. When extinction is activated as a cultural issue, it begins the intellectual work of honoring the struggle to get there, suggesting plants break apart extinction as a finite, closed term.
The ‘conservatory’ is a glassed in area attached to a social space, or home. It evolved as an architectural hybrid between the glass house, a stand-alone structure to grow from seed, and the structural brick partitions built to shelter fruit trees and other tender woody plants. Horticulturally, these two types were separated from the household, a distant accessory to everyday life, until plants came to occupy more significance and position in society. The conservatory combines both assemblies, while mingling social and botanical worlds, ascribing plants into an architecture where the natural and the mechanical converge.
Some people can name an extinct animal or two, proudly citing woolly mammoths or passenger pigeons. And everyone knows a dinosaur or two. But how many people can name an extinct plant species?5 Humans do not live in isolation from other species, rather we are embedded in complex biological, ecological and social network that relies on other organisms. This interdependence manifests in vital ways from bacterial associations in the human body to microbes that sustain agriculture. While architectural history swells to emphasize that animal, plant, and fungal health are intrinsically linked, it is hard to care for or conserve what we cannot see or name—as plants without history lead to humans without relations. This studio is one small step towards repair.
A living collection is a landscape designed around the lifespan of individual organisms, including seedlings in a nursery, seeds in a seedbank, pollen in cold storage, or plants growing across outdoor grounds. It is hard to define a living collection except to say that it is like a museum, but the works of art are alive—breathing, dying and advancing. Every organism in a living collection is scientifically documented, mapped, and labeled with a unique accession number ensuring collections retain high genetic diversity. This data allows researchers worldwide to study plant biodiversity, morphology, ecology, phylogenetics and conservation. So, what happens when a living collection—once a refuge for imperiled plants—begins to lose ground, endangering the species it was once designed to protect?
Project Approach
The studio considers endangered, extinct, and threatened palms and cycads as “clients,” whose ways of living are deeply embedded in the evolutionary history of the landscape. These species live and thrive in subtropical climates that are experiencing hotter, wetter and saltier conditions. Half of the studio will focus on the lands and buildings left behind at the collections in South Florida. The other half will work with the abandoned conservatory in Tarrytown, New York. Alternatively, students may continue working in pairs to develop a comprehensive final design proposal that addresses both sites and explores the possibilities and implications of plant exchange between them. Pedagogically, we are open to alternative ways of working and interested in supporting collaborative models that nevertheless cultivate distinct individual design outcomes.
Working in pairs, students will investigate the behavior of particular palms and cycads, focusing closely on ‘how’ they grow rather than ‘what’ they look like. In parallel, architectural proposals will be shaped by the different biotic and environmental requirements.
Studio Background
In 1851, the Crystal Palace, then the largest building in the world, was constructed by Sir Joseph Paxton. Its most celebrated feature was not the soaring transept or its unprecedented prefabrication and standardization, but the 10foot-wide plant named in honor of Queen Victoria. When Dickens wrote that the Crystal Palace arose from Victoria amazonica “as consequently as oaks grow from acorns,” he was not exaggerating. Just a 3 year prior, Paxton, a selftaught botanist, received unusual seeds known to belong to a waterlily distinguished by its extraordinary size. The seeds grew quickly. Its gigantic dimensions and tensile strength inspired him to design a structure in which it could live and thrive. Paxton also drew on the work of J.C. Loudon, a landscape gardener who transformed conservatory design in 1812 by proposing cast iron and copper frames, along with sashes, in place of wood. Loudon’s experiments with metal made it possible to build lighter, more durable iron structures that admitted more light. Protected, humid, and bright, these interiors differed sharply from the English climate. The plants loved them.
“We mostly inhabit closed spaces. These form the milieu from which our culture develops. Our culture is an exact product of our architecture. If we wish to raise our culture to a higher plane, so must we willy-nilly change our architecture. And this will be possible only when we remove the sense of enclosure from the spaces where we live.”6
Over time, frames fade, erode, deteriorate. Reduced budgets demolish, remove and relocate structures. Rust is the word for those innumerable instants when water kicks up the latching of oxygen to iron, forming a brittle coating we call corrosion. Snow load, fungal disease, leaks in doors, seals, panels, flashing, vents. Gnats and hail, mold and bacteria. Fingers are pointed while pathogens continue migrate and glazing is replaced with plastic. Electrical fires, rusting structural joints, severe temperature fluctuations. Ultraviolet is pretty word with a dreadful reputation. All of this is an unhappy legacy of Victorian science— the rise of sealed, protective containers situated in dissimilar climes to enable living collections to breathe and persist.
Which is why this studio will consider the necessity of amending the human – plant relationship through living collections and conservatories. We will engage a pedagogy of questions as students consider how plant life enlivens architectural discourse, how land is often reduced or parsed into obdurate forms of ‘property’, how borders are endlessly reified through legal geographies, and how plants migrate with or without budgets and how architecture engenders stewardship through conservation. Students will draw on multidisciplinary conventions and multiple (sometimes dissonant) ways of knowing. What remains constant in our inquiry is a shared interest in the pragmatics of making design more risky, interesting, shareable, of producing effects which you cannot dominate but you can learn with and learn from.7 With these untidy facts in mind, students will consider the architecture of an abandoned conservatory and an at risk-living collection, while designing a reciprocal relationship between them.
Ex-situ conservation tests how plants adapt to new climates, offering insights into biotic adaptation, while challenging architecture to adapt to the requirements of plant life.8 Within this endearing multiplicity, architecture is never singular or isolated, more often it is reciprocal, as conditions multiply through inter-dependance—an invitation to draw far outside of policy lines, property boundaries or state limits. An assembly of components to test how microclimates are designed and maintained. In the context of retreat, architects are positioned to steward ex-situ conservation and related scientific subfields that move genotypes from one landscape to another. Here, reciprocal relations refer to the mutual exchange of benefits, services, and evolutionary adaptations between the newly introduced plant, the building envelope and the local ecosystem.
1 Elkin, Rosetta S. Landscapes of Retreat. K. Verlag, 2023, 2025. See also full publication here: http://www.landscapesofretreat.com
2 Pilkey, O. Retreat from a Rising Sea: Hard Decisions in an Age of Climate Change. Columbia Press, 2016. p.9.
3 Baldwin, J. “As Much Truth as One Can Bear.” The New York Times [New York, N.Y], January 14, 1962, p.11
4 LaDuke, Winona. Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming. 1st ed., South End Press, 2005. p. 227.
5 Elkin, Rosetta S. “Narratives at the Margins of Extinction” in Arnoldia: The Journal of the Arnold Arboretum (81:2 2024), p. 64.
6 Scheerbart, Paul. Glasarchitektur. Verlag der Sturm, 1914. p. 11.