LAN3016YF
Fall 2024 Option Studio
Instructor: Behnaz Assadi
Meeting Section: L0101
Tuesdays, 9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m., 2:00-6:00 p.m.

Plant Diaspora* is a cross-disciplinary option studio that explored the agency of landscape processes as they relate to the built environment. 

A dynamic interaction between insulated and predictable built forms and unpredictable and messy ecological systems can lead to new and exciting architectural tectonics on one side and design agency in our climate-forward landscape sensibilities on the other.   

The studio uses greenhouses as a crossover between a garden and a house. If a house, in its most primitive sense, is a room designed and conditioned for human comfort and rituals, a greenhouse is designed for the comfort and growth of plants.   Plants, the involuntary inhabitants of the greenhouse, have travelled alongside humans as they traded and expanded their civilizations for centuries. In recent years, immigration, displacement, and conflict have become the main contributors to the creation of diasporic human and plant communities, which adds a level of richness and complexity to our explorations.   

As powerful symbols of rootedness, stability, and dignity in Illegality, plants serve as a testament to resilience and a means for individuals to maintain a connection to their homeland. Greenhouses have been essential in enabling plant movement throughout history by providing controlled environments and closed ecological systems, allowing the growth of plants that might not otherwise survive in their new and adopted habitat. 

This studio uses Wardian Rooms*** as a testbed to explore the overlap between human rituals and plant comfort in the age of climate crisis and global and regional conflicts, creating a new type of greenhouse for the Plant Diaspora.  

The studio has three parts:  

The Catalogue_ On two parallel histories: the history of greenhouses and the Plant movement  
The trip_ To Biosphere 2, Phoenix, Arizona.  
The Wardian Room_ Designing a room for plants.

*Diaspora,(/dīˈasp(ə)rə/) the dispersion or spread of a people from their original homeland. (Oxford Dictionary) In this studio Diaspora refers to plants spread and establishment outside their native or original habitat
**A term used by Henk Wildschut, Insecuri-ties: Tracing Displacement and Shelter, Oct 1, 2016–Jan 22, 2017 | MoMA 
***Wardian  case; a 19th-century invention by  Dr Nathaniel Ward,  designed to carry and protect plants across long sea voyages during colonial expansion.