Paul Laffoley
(b. 1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts)

THE PHYSICALLY ALIVE STRUCTURED ENVIRONMENT : THE BAUHAROQUE
2004
31, 1/8” x 31, 1/8”
Media: India ink , photo-collage, vinyl letters on acid free board

The Modern Movement in architecture was based primarily in Utopian Solutions to its constructed Tasks. To complete these Tasks The Moderns combined Science [ as the desire to differentiate Nature indefinitely with Personal Intuition, so as to inform the architect when to make an end. Modernism’s most pressing problem was assumed to be the construction of Mass-Housing that is truly affordable by all.

Although the real issue was stated by the Modernists, somehow it was never solved successfully by their many strategies that included but not limited to Architectural Planning at the Macro and Micro Scales that would make anyone who ever attended L’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts take on a green patina , and the study of New Materials combined with Progressive Engineering that looked to Nature as the Source of its Structural Principles. The Post-Modernists who converged Science with Nostalgia avoided the Present, and its problems altogether, in favor of reviving the Past.

As we enter The Bauharoque [the third phase of Modernism] , architects are now faced with such problems as : bulging populations [ the United Nations has predicted that by the year 2050 the world’s population will have reached 18 billion, and this will mean to feed and house these teeming masses will require as drastic as raising three more continents the size of Africa from the ocean floor], un--winnable terrorist wars that seem to keep on escalating, a general and continuous degrading of the world’s natural environment, politics as entertainment and a substitute for religion, or the popular media making money by pitting various interest groups and classes against each other.

I believe that if a strategy for mass housing could found, that would involve non-repressive personal environments [ that would avoid mechanical standardization], a base could be established from which other social problems will be solved. Then finally the quest for meaning in existence could gradually replace the goals of our almost complete secular world. To do this requires the total convergence of Science with Mysticism. While this task has already been started a few individuals and groups [beginning in the 19th Century], it will not be until the entire world is involved, will a real change be noticed. My proposal ,therefore, for ending the world housing shortage is by growing houses from plant materials and developing genetically altered seeds which will induce habitable forms in single multiple species. These forms will then begin to approximate the rich vocabulary of spaces the history of the Human Species has created from the individual home to the city with mass and image of New York City [ which has now proliferated on the earth where a goal for urbanism is desired]

Recently the sciences of botany and bio-engineering have discovered four fuctions that plants can perform that can aid plant-human relations:

1. Semyon Davidovich Kirlian through his electro-photography discovered that plants bridge the abyss between life and death and regeneration;
2. When tobacco plants are gene-spliced with luciferin from fireflies the plants will light up with 5 watts of cold light. Soon bio-engineering will increase the light level to 100 watts;
3. Spinach leaves exhibit the highest electrical potential of all plantforms: 10volts D.C.
4. Large groupings of groupings of carnivorous plants can control insect populations within a confined area.

What could be a more plausible or delightful solution than to live in a world-wide garden - The New Eden – populated with physically alive architecture that could exist almost anywhere on the Earth’s surface or under the ocean or up in the air, that was produced in growing time of approximately two to three months. Also as Humanity begins to explore other planets and moons ,I do not believe , people will like living in high-tech tin cans on barren wastelands. We would certainly prefer Bio-forming an environment that exists as an individual ,and therefore , has a stake in staying alive, to the ill-fated Bio-Sphere Projects that were simply a complex form of the 19th Century Conservatory or greenhouse. The Conservatory has one basis drawback. It is a building type that requires Human intervention to protect the plant species inside. The purpose of Das Urpflanze Haus or physically alive architecture is to do what all architecture is supposed to do – protect us from an alien environment. We exist on the Earth because of the existence of Vegetation , not the other way around. Over the aeons we have been weakening the life force plant materials by protecting them by artificial cultivation techniques and Hot Houses. What we must do is help plant species regain their rightful place in the world as the Prime Species and avail ourselves of their protection and love by willing to fall in love with plant forms and feed ourselves by eating their delicious fruits and nutritious vegetables [ which are seed pods which are produced in an abundance beyond what is necessary for sustainable reproduction].

Bringing this proposal to fruition will first require prototypes created by grafting plant materials in forms generated by advancements in Combinatorial Topology – the branch of mathematics that the best chance of understanding the true nature of Biology. The secret of grafting and growing DAS URPFLANZE HAUS [the primordial plant house] to a mature and seeded state is the Ginko Biloba or The Maidenhair Tree. Native to China , it tolerates all climates and soils. It was saved from extinction in the 19th Century by certain Chinese Monasteries. The tree dates from the Permian Period of the Paleozoic Era [286 to 245 million years ago], making the Ginko Biloba the oldest flowering plant, and the fact that it was alive during the time of the Dinosaurs live shoots of The Tree can connect deciduous to conifer trees , fruits to vegetables, and grasses to vines. The Ginko Biloba is not subject to the so-called Divine Proportion [.382…/.618…] which is actually The Proportion of Death.

The poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1832] on May 17, 1787 wrote to a philosopher friend, Johann Gottfried von Herder [1744-1803] about the active nature of the Urpflanze, he had recently conceived, and the way it which it links to the Human Will . “The archetypal plant will be the strangest growth the world has ever seen, and Nture herself shall envy me for it. With such a model, and the key to it in one’s hand, one will be able to contrive an infinite variety of plants. They will be strictly logical plants, in other words, even though they may not actually exist, they could exist. They will not be mere picturesque and imaginative projections. They will be imbued with Inner Truth and Necessity. And the same law will be applicable to all that lives.”
My first contact with the concept of The Urpflanze and poet Goethe occurred in my grammar school days when I lived in Belmont Massachusetts. I went to a public school, THE MARY LEE BURBANK SCHOOL . It was at the time what people called a “progressive school”. The curricula emphasized instruction in alternative forms of education. What this meant was visiting other types of schools in the area to study other subjects that we did not normally encounter. To my classmates this was just great, like going to the movies for school credit. To me most of what I discovered was pure hokum, except for one place – a school so small that it was held in the upper floor of a large Shingle Style House at the top of a hill on Myrtle Street. The place was called ‘THE WALDORF SCHOOL OF BELMONT MASSACHUSETTS”. It was part of the educational outreach program of The Anthroposophical Society founded in 1912 by mystic Rudolf Steiner, that had its headquarters in a building dedicated to Goethe called THE GOETHEANUM [ a school of Spiritual Science] located in a suburb of Basel Switzerland – Dornach.

In the Waldorf School the children seemed to be painting and drawing all the time which really interested me. One day my school drove us to a place called THE GOETHE INSTITUTE of BOSTON which is on Beacon Street in the downtown. We were given a slide lecture on Steiner, The Goetheanum[the startling appearance of which caused me to become interested in architecture] and finally Goethe’s concept of The Primordial Plant – THE URPFLANZE from which all other plants are derived. After the class I asked the lecturer if Goethe ever found THE URPFLANZE ? She looked down smiling condescendingly and said : “While Goethe’s ideas were wonderful, they were long before the work of Darwin.” Suddenly the Magic I was experiencing was about to end, so I blurted out : “ If you connected all the plants together across the face of the earth would not then THE URPFLANZE EXIST”. With that her expression changed.

Since 1950 to the present, I have been developing the implications of that FIRST IDEA.