Harry der Boghosian Fellow lecture: Lily Wong "Patent Plants"

Architecture Fall 2023 Lecture Series - September 12, 2023 at Slocum Hall
Lily Wong, Boghosian Fellow 2022-2023
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.