"We can only cope with the environmental crisis if we accept uncertainty" and we will appreciate it as the basis of our design work.”
Ferdinand Ludwig
Ferdinand Ludwig is a German architect who is a pioneer and innovator in the field of baubotany, the architectural realm of living plant structures. In 2012, he graduated from the University of Stuttgart with a dissertation on “Botanical Foundations of Baubotany and Their Use in Design”. Today, he is the head of the chair for green technologies in landscape architecture at the Technical University of Munich. Ludwig has designed and created a number of baubotany projects throughout Germany, such as the baubotany footbridge (2005), the baubotany tower (2009) and the plane-tree-cube in Nagold (2012). The central theme of Ludwig’s research is the integration of the growth processes of living plants into architectural design and construction. The combination of living plants with architectural construction allows for the exploration of the creative and functional use of plants in the context of civil engineering. Baubotany invites a completely new perspective on architecture, which becomes part of urban nature. However, the concept of baubotany is also increasingly appreciated today as a method of adapting to climate change. Ludwig's book was published in 2022 Wachsende Architektur: Einführung in die Baubotanik (together with Daniel Schönl, Verlag Birkhäuser). Ludwig's text published here was originally published in English under the title "The Imposition of Uncertainty" on The Urban Environments Initiative (UEI) website on January 11, 2021. Translated by Jiří Zemánek.
Today, buildings are considered environmentally friendly if they cause as little damage to the environment as possible and have the smallest possible ecological footprint. This is often measured by their energy consumption: the lower the energy consumption, the better. As a result, however, buildings have become largely cut off from their environment. With maximum insulation and minimal surface area, their interaction with the immediate surroundings is reduced to an absolute minimum.
Our current global ecological crisis requires a rethinking of this approach. We can no longer limit ourselves to creating buildings that have a lower environmental impact; instead, we must create buildings that will help reverse the current trend and ultimately contribute to environmental regeneration. Especially in an urban context, this means maximizing interaction. Every surface of a building must be multi-functional and facilitate ecological and social processes. Facades and roofs must not only provide habitats for flora and fauna, but buildings must also play an active role in improving the water balance and microclimate of the city, and to this end they must be dynamic. Adapting to processes, in turn, means allowing for changes that are driven by plant growth and the acceptance of human and non-human users. This may be perceived by classically trained architects as an imposition, in which they seem to lose their authority over design. However, this actually makes design more important than ever. Furthermore, there is a need to design processes rather than finished objects.
“Baubotany” (“Baubotanik”) is an architectural approach that proactively addresses this challenge. The German neologism “Bau-Botanik” combines aspects of civil engineering and botany and is understood as a form of architecture that creates buildings through the interaction of engineering structure and plant growth. In particular, it manipulates the growth of trees or their parts, which are combined with inanimate components in such a way that they merge into a plant-engineering hybrid (Ludwig 2016).
In baubotany, the architect becomes a co-designer who creates a building together with the tree. This building will never be “finished”, even if sooner or later the desired stages of development will be reached. How the building will look in the future depends on events and factors that cannot be controlled. Forecasts are possible, but they are limited to general statements. And the further one tries to look into the future, the more blurred the picture becomes. For architecture, which is always designed in contrast to nature and built as durable as possible, this is too much to ask; the size and proportions of the building cannot be precisely determined by the designer. Moreover, its appearance changes with the seasons. In autumn, the building first turns color and then loses its leaves, in winter it is bare, weathered or filigree, in spring it sprouts again, perhaps blooming, and in summer it is densely leafy, perhaps barely recognizable as a building.
A practical example that demonstrates the potential of the baubotany approach is the living root bridges of the Khasi, an indigenous people living in the mountainous terrain of the state of Meghalaya in northeastern India. The bridges, created from living roots without contemporary construction tools, are an exceptional example of vernacular architecture that uses the manipulation of tree growth as a building technique. The bridges, which span canyons and rivers, connect homes, fields, villages and marketplaces. They provide an alternative to the often unsuitable current technologies and materials and can be seen as a very specific solution for rural connectivity in the geographical and climatic conditions of Meghalaya, which are characterized by high humidity, heavy rains, flooded rivers and steep, densely forested slopes.
Living root bridges can last for centuries, becoming stronger over time in a process that combines regular human maintenance with natural growth processes (Middleton, Habibi et al. 2020). And the process of creating a bridge is particularly long; in many cases, those who start such a project do not even get across the bridge in their lifetime. The root bridge represents a particularly slow form of architectural creation, but also an almost incredible example of creative activity that is driven by foresight and thinking beyond one’s own life. Living root bridges are inherently connected to their surroundings throughout their lives, ensuring slope stability and benefiting the ecosystem in various ways. They produce their own building material on site and absorb CO2 throughout their lifespan. They go far beyond the established concept of sustainable design, which aims to meet basic human needs in the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (Brundtland 1987). In fact, they represent an excellent example of regenerative design and development (Kubba 2009).
How can this example serve our cities today? Living root bridges, which often last for generations, are not a direct answer to the pressing ecological and social issues of our time. Nevertheless, we should see this concept as an example worth following. We are facing ecological problems today that will affect not only us but also future generations. We need to address these problems with exactly the kind of intergenerational approach that the Khasi people of northeastern India have been practicing for hundreds of years. When it comes to the measures we take now, we need to think one or more generations ahead. And there is another crucial point: constantly changing living root bridges, constantly transformed by non-human and human activity, are often more durable than steel or concrete bridges that are supposedly built to “last forever” (Ludwig, Middleton et al. 2019). At a time when not only the climate but also many social systems are undergoing fundamental changes, a static approach – as suggested by conventional architecture – can hardly ensure safety. We can only cope with the environmental crisis if we accept and value uncertainty as the basis of our design work.
Literature:
Brundtland, Gro H. 1987. The Brundtland Report, World Commission on Environment and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kubba, Sam. 2009. LEED Practices, Certification, and Accreditation Handbook. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Ludwig, Ferdinand. 2016. “Baubotanik: Designing with Living Material.” In Materiality and Architecture, edited by Sandra K. Löschke, 182–190. New York: Routledge.
Ludwig, Ferdinand, Wilfrid Middleton, Friederike Gallenmüller, Patrick Rogers, and Thomas Speck. 2019. “Living bridges using aerial roots of ficus elastica–an interdisciplinary perspective.” Scientific reports 9 (1): 1–11. Middleton, Wilfrid, Amin Habibi, Sanjeev Shankar, and Ferdinand Ludwig. 2020. “Characterizing Regenerative Aspects of Living Root Bridges.” Sustainability 12(8): 3267.
