Exhibition Opening and Discussion: Harry der Boghosian Fellow 2022-23

Author(s)/Creator(s)

Lily Chishan Wong

Document Type

Video

Date

Fall 9-12-2023

Keywords

Exhibition, Harry der Boghosian, Discussion

Language

English

Disciplines

Environmental Design | Historic Preservation and Conservation | Other Architecture

Description/Abstract

What is a potted plant in the age of botanical reproduction? Often mass-produced in today’s blooming plant industry, houseplants are as much living organisms as they are technoscientific artifacts. Many novel tropical and subtropical cultivars in the U.S. are created by plant breeders, who augment biological traits to optimize propagation, shipping, ease of maintenance, and marketable aesthetics. Some invented fronds are considered to be intellectual properties under the law, while their inventors are granted plant patents with exclusive rights for reproduction and sales. These patent plants redefine the relationship between architecture and vegetal life. If transplants from European colonies once necessitated the development of architecture as contained environment, patented foliages from laboratories today absorb the logics of spatial and infrastructural systems. Such botanical facsimiles are designed for production lines, shipping boxes, and climatized rooms, challenging what we understand as “natural.”

The Patent Plants exhibition presents a care and signaling system for 18 houseplant varieties and explores the spatial and environmental conditions for their patentability. This system includes not only infrastructure for basic vegetal needs, but also a community of plant parents. Each patent plant on display here is under the care of a member from the School of Architecture. Visitors are encouraged to look at them through hand lenses and to draw them. As the anthropologist John Hartigan asserts in the essay “How to Interview a Plant,” drawing facilitates careful looking, which is the first step toward taking plants seriously.

Additional Information

Lily Chishan Wong will join the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in Fall 2022 as the 2022-23 Harry der Boghosian Fellow. As a transplant between Asia and America, she is interested in how global systems shape building cultures and vice versa.

Her project “Producing Nature” explores the use of plants in architecture and its planetary effects. It considers vegetation as atmospheric design—grown, stored, and shipped globally—and charts the spaces and species involved in the production of “nature.” Inherently interdisciplinary, this exploration seeks to foster cross-pollination between architecture and other fields and to speculate on new environmental engagements.

The research stems from Lily’s professional practice at the architecture and landscape design firm Weiss/Manfredi, where she worked on museum buildings and site design for six fruitful years. Licensed in New York State since 2019, Lily is a current branch member of the National Organization of Minority Architects and the American Institute of Architects.

Lily received a Master of Architecture from Columbia University GSAPP and was nurtured with the Kohn Pedersen Fox Traveling Fellowship, Award for Excellence in Total Design, Lucille Smyser Lowenfish Memorial Prize, William Kinne Fellows Travelling Prize, and Fred L. Liebmann Book Award. She cofounded : (pronounced “colon”), a publication and workshop dissecting the rhetoric and media that are rooted in the field of architecture.

Prior to Columbia, she grew vegetables in an egalitarian community, sowed spatial experiments at Parsons School of Design, and sprouted philosophical ideas at the New School. Aside from cultivating her own garden, her personal interests include street food, fog machines, and Wagnerian operas.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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