The Art of Architectural Grafting
Jeanne Gang, FAIA
Park Books, 2024
There is a rare joy in a bite of perfectly ripe fruit. It’s something that feels at once luxurious and natural. But much of the fruit we eat is not, really, natural: it’s often grafted—that is to say, tissues of plants are fused together to create joint growth. In her 2024 book, The Art of Architectural Grafting, Jeanne Gang, FAIA, posits that horticultural grafting—the practice of symbiotically fusing plants together—is a useful model for architecture. Through this metaphor, Gang ultimately calls for architects to deeply examine the existing and to repurpose and adapt it in a generative, thoughtful manner: to graft together the present and the past.
The grafting model mandates working with the existing context and avoiding demolition. It’s a doctrine that emerged from what Gang coins the “age of sobriety,” a reckoning with the excessive waste and consumption fueled by capitalism. Gang’s credo is based on the reality that the most sustainable way to build is, of course, to notbuild, or second best, to build while preserving the existing as much as possible.
The Art of Architectural Grafting avoids the most common pitfalls of architecture writing about sustainability, which often slides into greenwashing. While trends such as biomimicry and green walls do little aside from visual virtue signaling, Gang’s approach is fundamentally practical and would, if embraced, mitigate environmental damage.
As Park Books editor Julie Cirelli notes in the foreword, Gang challenges the perception of environmentalism as exclusively quantitative while remaining based in science. The book itself skews qualitative: each of the seven chapters ends with a short first-person essay, grounding Gang’s writing and work in personal anecdotes and experiences from both her childhood and her work with her eponymous Chicago-based firm, Studio Gang. She draws on many disciplines, ranging from the scientific to the humanistic—from botany and engineering to history and anthropology. Philosopher Bruno Latour’s constructivist actor-network theory, which posits that both human and nonhuman relationships interact within networks that shape situations, informs Gang’s perspective of architects as crucial actors who can fashion habitable features that address ecological and social issues.
Grafting emerged independently in Persia, China, and Central Asia 2,500 years ago. Gang traces shifting cultural attitudes toward the practice, from celebration in Ancient Rome all the way to the exaggeration of its transformative powers during the Scientific Revolution. The fundamental steps involve a precut shoot scion that is grafted onto an existing rootstock; as the vascular tissues fuse together, they exchange energy, water, nutrients, and structural stability. Beautifully illustrated diagrams complement the text, which is highly accessible even to the least botany-oriented reader.
Gang examines scions (additions and adaptations) in the built environment, noting that they are often scrutinized. She examines several additions to museums—buildings with longevity and a need for growth—from the visually disruptive Deconstructivism era and 1980s parasitic remodeling to more contextually sensitive works: Carlo Scarpa’s Venice projects, most notably the Castelvecchio Museum, and Lacaton & Vassal’s FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais.
Gang outlines a credo for architect-grafters rooted in the paradoxical challenge of trying to “do more with less.” Her tenets include consideration of environment, redundancy, precision, capacity, and flexibility. The last few principles get to the heart of the grafting analogy: joining, which provides insight into history; care, which considers the existing; and pleasure, both visual and experiential.
Gang advocates for the use of technology to carefully document the existing and to fabricate more precisely the new while recognizing that constructive realities constrict the potential of grafting. Several projects from Studio Gang accompany the concepts as case studies embodying various principles of the credo.
The strength of Gang’s built work is in its thoughtfulness and care. It’s unsurprising, then, that the most poignant passages in The Art of Architectural Grafting are several of the short postscripts that ground Gang’s outlook in her experiences. A personal essay about Gang’s mother, a Girl Scout leader and organizer passionate about the environment, roots the architect’s care for the built environment in her early memories of love. In this essay and one about annual family road trips, a young Gang begins to become aware of the environmental injustices facing her native region: pesticides, fertilizers, and heavy industry that results in children growing up inhaling petroleum coke, a by-product of petroleum refining.
Equipped with this recognition of environmental injustice, Gang investigates grafting at an urban scale. She surveys planning attitudes, which in recent Western history have desired a blank slate. Contemporary practices of landscape urbanism, which considers the natural and built environments simultaneously, and grassroots approaches that prioritize process are amalgamated by urban grafting. Gang examines several of her studio’s planning projects, all with regenerative aspects, socially or ecologically. It’s in this context where plants, Gang notes, become more than metaphors: they are literal regenerators of life.
The final section is dedicated to forest potential. Rejecting the false dichotomy of forests as either pristine or commodity, Gang explores case studies of successful, biodiverse forests, particularly in urban environments. Gang brings it home: she examines the history of her hometown, Chicago, and how the collapse of industry left a patchwork of toxic sites throughout the city. Her proposal, an “anti-master plan,” is to revitalize Chicago’s environment and timber industry by grafting urban forests onto urban brownfield lots. It’s a compelling argument—phytoremediation for toxic soil is extremely effective, and urban forests reduce ghost-acres—complicated by issues of ownership. The proposal imagines a network of forests that could connect and flourish under community ownership.
Gang considers two planted forests in the Midwest, Hantz Woodlands in Detroit and Gary, Indiana’s greening sites. In Gary, an investment firm partnered with a nonprofit to plant 60 acres on two vacant lots for phytoremediation of polluted land. In Detroit, entrepreneur John Hantz controversially acquired many foreclosed lots from the city with the stated intention of developing an urban woodlot; he has since sold some of those properties for profit, and residents complain that many of his properties are neglected, collecting blight tickets from the city. Gang largely sidesteps the complexity of real estate acquisition to limit speculation and private profit in her vision, focusing rather on the potential of the need for timber and its reparative properties.
I’m wary about the recurrence of speculative practices such as Hantz’s, but as Gang points out, brownfield and superfund sites are hardly in demand; the patience required for remediation is unbecoming in investment structures. Gang has established that she is adept at working sustainably within the business of architecture, and Studio Gang is undertaking a remediation forest plot of their own. Architecture has long left the blank slate model behind, and as participatory processes become more common, it is exciting to imagine urban community stewardship at such a scale.
In his review of Studio Gang’s Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History for the New Yorker, critic Christopher Hawthorne wrote, “The goal was to demonstrate that nature is awe-inspiring, yes—but also that the quest to understand and document it might bring us closer to the wellspring of that awe.” It’s this quest that gives Gang’s grafting metaphor power: architects must start considering the existing more carefully, preserving it, meeting it, and adapting it creatively and radically.
Maya Shamir is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where she majored in architecture and minored in history. She is currently pursuing her master of design studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.