Vitruvius also had much to say about how to plant a building on the ground, but my emphasis here is on the early modern period when such antique practices were translated into the system of drawn plans, sections, and elevations that are still in general use by architects today.
While using the term “plant” to refer to an entire building goes back to at least the thirteenth century, it is only during the fifteenth century that the unified and three dimensional structure of the architectural plant is separated into the plan(t), as an abstract plane, which is further separated from the planes of sections and elevations. For an introduction to this broad subject, see Howard Saalman, “Early Renaissance Architectural Theory and Practice in Antonio Filarete's Trattato Di Architettura,” The Art Bulletin 41, no. 1 (1959): 89–107. An early Italian edition of Alberti’s De Re Adificatoria uses the word pianta several times, particularly when the discussion is concerned with dimensions. See Leon Battista Alberti, I Dieci Libri De L'architettvra (In Vinegia: Appresso Vincenzo Vavgris, 1546), 148 and 151.
Haussman’s transformation of Paris, both in relation to the planting of trees on Boulevards and also in relation to his use of lungs and other biological systems as metaphors for the city are the best-known example of this phenomenon. It is also interesting to note that this aspect of the Haussmannization of Paris became of particular interest to scholars during the 1970s. See for example, Howard Saalman, Haussmann: Paris Transformed (New York: G. Braziller, 1971).
The invention of photography pulled images into this logic as they too came to be understood as the result of industrial procedures acting directly through and on materials. For the relation between photography and other image media and photosynthesis see Greg Uhlin, “Plant Thinking with Film,” in The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World, eds. Patrícia Vieira, Monica Gagliano, and John Charles Ryan (London: Lexington, 2016), 201–217; Joanna Zylinska, Nonhuman Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017); John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Douglas Nickel, “Photography, Perception, Landscape,” in America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now, ed. Douglas Nickel (Providence, RI: RISD Museum, 2012); and Erin Despard and Michael Gallagher; Media Ecologies of Plant Invasion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).
Louise Hornsby has noted this as a problem in the reception of Olafur Eliasson’s work. See her “Appropriating the Weather: Olafur Eliasson and Climate Control,” Environmental Humanities 9, no. 1 (May 2017): 60–83. David Gissen and Daniel Barber are among those working on the environmentalization of architectural history. Additional evidence of this reorientation of the field includes the project Histories of Architecture and/for the Environement by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the establishment of the Architecture and the Environment subgroup within the European Architectural History Network, and the Buell Center’s recent call for proposals for new courses on the environmental history of architecture.
Some particularly provocative texts from this point of view include Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Michael Marder, Gianni Vattimo, and Santiago Zabala, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Owain Jones and Paul J Cloke, Tree Cultures: The Place of Trees and Trees in Their Place (Oxford: Berg, 2002). See also Giovanna Borasi, Kozy Amemiya, and Erika Beyer, Journeys: How Travelling Fruit, Ideas and Buildings Rearrange Our Environment (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2010).
On the specific question of intentionality, see Michael Marder “Plant Intentionality and the Phenomenological Framework of Plant Intelligence,” Plant Signaling and Behaviour 7, no. 11 (2012): 1365–1372.
On the history of urban forests, see Sonja Dümpelmann, Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019) and Joanna Dean, “Seeing Trees, Thinking Forests: Urban Forestry at the University of Toronto in the 1960s,” in Method and Meaning in Canadian Environmental History, eds. Alan MacEachern and William J. Turkel (Toronto: Nelson, 2009).
On the parallel between trees and computers, see Cesar Hildago, “Why Information Grows,” excerpted in Katie Holten, About Trees (Berlin: Broken Dimanche Press, 2016), 62.
On the impact of using wood as building material, see Chadwick Dearing Oliver, Nedal T. Nassar, Bruce R. Lippke, and James B. McCarter, “Carbon, Fossil Fuel, and Biodiversity Mitigation With Wood and Forests,” Journal of Sustainable Forestry 33, no. 3 (2014): 248–275.
Banham’s book was harshly criticized by Peter Plagens for what he considered Banham’s irresponsibly idealized view of the ecological impact of automobibles. See his “Los Angeles: The Ecology of Evil,” Artforum 11, no. 4 (December, 1972): 67–76. Peter Kamnitzer joined the faculty of UCLA’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning in 1965 where, along with working at NASA, he developed digital design tools for simulating urban conditions in order to study the impact of buildings on their environments. Kamnitzer and Anthony Lumsden were on the same UCLA faculty for over two decades. On Lumsden, see below. More broadly on the environmental history of LA and architectural responses to environmental issues in the early 1970s, see William Francis Deverell and Greg Hise, Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005); Reinhold Martin, “Environment, c. 1973,” Grey Room 14 (Winter, 2004): 78–101; and Giovanna Borasi, Mirko Zardini, Adam Bobbette, and Harriet Russell, Sorry, out of gas : architecture's response to the 1973 oil crisis (Montreal, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2007).
On the Tillman Plant, see City of Los Angeles, Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant (Los Angeles: Department of Public Works, 1990); “Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, Van Nuys: Anthony J. Lumsden; Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall” Architecture California 8, no. 2 (1986): 18–19; L. Moiraghi, “Un giardino d'acqua: A watergarden in Los Angeles” Arca 90 (1995): 30–39; and “L'eau dans tous ses estats: Usine tillman, assainissement de l'eau, Los Angeles,” Techniques Et Architecture 413 (1994): 82-83.
The plant was initially called the Sepulveda Reclamation Plant and intended to provide upstream relief for the over-taxed Hyperion Water Treatment Plant, in operation since the 1950s. The plant was designed to “grow” over time and increase both its capacity and the degree of amelioration it could offer water.
On funding sources, escalating costs, delays and tensions between the city and Federal Agencies, see: “L.A. Gets $66.9 Million for Sewage Plant: Facility Will Be Stage in Move to End Sludge Dumping” Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1980; Alan B. Nichols, “L.A.'s Wastewater Treatment Plant: Victim or Villain?” Journal (Water Pollution Control Federation) 59, no. 11 (1987): 932–938; and Doug Smith, “Regional Water Authority Collides with Growth of Metropolitan Area,” Los Angeles Times, January 27, 1977, WS14.
See the interview with Lumsden in Architecture California (July/August 1985): 30. For overviews of Lumsden’s work with DMJM, see Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall, DMJM, Architecture (Los Angeles: 1977). For an analysis of the plant in relation to the structure of that firm, see Aaron Cayer, “Design and Profit: Architectural practice in the Age of Accumulation,” (PhD diss., UCLA 2018), 163–169. For overviews of Lumsden work more specifically, see Anthony Lumsden, “Anthony Lumsden, DMJM,” Architecture and Urbanism 51 (March 1975), and Stephen Dobney and Anthony J. Lumsden, A.J. Lumsden: Selected and Current Works (Mulgrave, Vic.: Images Pub. Group, 1997).
“Design Frills Dominate L.A. Sewage Plant: Effluent Eyed for Irrigation Use,” Engineering News-Record (June, 1984): 26–27. Conversely, Leon Whiteson, then the architecture critic for the LA Times, who eventually wrote the introduction to Lumsden’s monograph, went so far as to credit the Tillman Plant with sparking an improvement in the overall quality of public and civic buildings in Los Angeles. See Whiteson, “Innovative Designs Can Enliven Even Those Difficult Buildings,” Los Angeles Times, January 2, 1989.
The stepped concrete water features recall Halprin’s Ira Keller Fountain (Portland, 1970) and Freeway Park (Seattle 1976). On Halprin, see Kenneth Helphand, Lawrence Halprin (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017). On the Oakland Museum, see Eeva-Liisa, Kevin Roche, Kathleen John-Alder, Olga Pantelidou, and David Sadighian, Kevin Roche: Architecture As Environment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). Lumsden also worked on the Urban Nucleus at Santa Monica Mountain Park along with Cesar Pelli, which won a Progressive Architecture award in 1966 has more recently been referred to as a model of what a low-impact building-as-infrastructure, might be. See Thomas Fisher, “Architecture As Infrastructure,” The AIA Journal 98, no. 6 (June 2009): 96.
Despite his acknowledged importance to the postwar development of Japanese gardens in the US and the fact that the garden won a Progressive Architecture design award in 1972, there is relatively little literature on Kawana. For the basic outlines of his biography, see H. Tobar, “Architect built bridge between 2 cultures memorial,” Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1990, and The Cultural Landscape Foundation, ➝. For Kawana’s own writing, see “Symbolism and Esthetics in the Traditional Japanese Garden,” Bulletin of the American Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta (1977) and “The Challenge of Building a Japanese Garden in the United States,” Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record: Japanese Gardens (New York: Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 1990). For overviews of Japanese gardens in the US, see Claire Sawyers et al., Japanese Gardens (New York: Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 1990) and Kendall H Brown and David M Cobb. Quiet Beauty: Japanese Gardens of North America (Clarendon, VT: Tuttle, 2013). For studies of other Kawana projects see Kent B Bunting, The koan of Seiwa En : history and meaning in the Japanese Garden at the Missouri Botanical Garden (PhD diss., Saint Louis University, 2002). For specific discussions of the landscape of sewage, see Robert J Barletta and Robert A Webber, “A Tale of Three Giant Sewerage Systems,” Journal (Water Pollution Control Federation) 58, no. 9 (1986): 871–879 and Joan Clemons, “Emerging from Sewage and Waste: A Postmodern Landscape,” Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers 60 (1998): 9–21.
See “L'eau dans tous ses estats,” 82: “Paraodix réussi: dans un site hautement industriel, ce son les minéraux et végétaux qui dominent.” My translation. See also Peter Papademitriou’s comments on the Honor Award given to the project from Architecture California 8, no. 2 (1986): 18.
That the peace-loving species were given the original name for Tokyo suggests the persistence of complex relations between the United States and Japan, particularly on the west coast, until long after World War Two. On Star Trek the Next Generation, see the fan site ➝.
See the interview with Lumsden in Architecture California (July/August 1985): 29.
See Lumsden’s comments in “The Silvers, Images from a Silver Screen” Progressive Architecture 57, no. 10 (1976): 73.
As cited by Giovanini, 15–16, within a description of Lumsden’s views on intuition and mutation particularly in the context of teaching.
Esther McCoy was especially interested in this group of project and organized her discussion of them around Lumsden’s concepts of extrusion and mutation. See “Post-Mies: Architecture di Anthony Lumsden,” Domus 552 (November 1975): 1–12.
Hidalgo has argued that trees are computers. Here I use his argument in reverse; that Lumsden’s extrusion buildings are trees.
See the exhibition catalog, The Museum of Modern Art, Buildings for Best Products (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1979).
For a list of films and television shows filmed at the site, see ➝.
In 1996, it was even used as a stand-in for the Bio-dome in a satiric film directed by Jason Bloom.
In October 2019, the Tillman Plant will receive a 25 year award from the AIA/LA.
Architecture California (July/August 1985): 30.