Figure 1. A plant ‘sitting’ in a control room and ‘supervising’ its own growth, as shown in an advertisement of Supervision, a management software package for indoor horticulture. Courtesy of Priva.
The plant is quite a busy little chap. He [sic] wants to keep everything under control. And the funny thing is he is actually succeeding. Thanks to Supervision. This is Integro’s advanced graphical interface that turns you into a natural—whatever company you run. By accessing the layout of the greenhouse and the areas with technical facilities you get a dear insight into all measuring sections and settings. The charts and graphs program renders your personal overviews. And Supervision is extremely well suited for advanced customised solutions. You’re getting the picture: success starts with closely listening to your plant. For what’s good for the plant, is also very good for you, the customer
– “The plant knows best”, advertisement of Priva, a Dutch horticultural automation company.
The image of the plant sitting in a chair surrounded by computers, cameras, and sensors in a control room is neither surreal nor staged as one might initially think. Perhaps it is a bit dramatic, but nevertheless, the image accounts for the most tangible and genuine depiction of what is going on inside a contemporary glasshouse. During a site visit to Ter Laak Orchids, a Phalaenopsis-growing company located on the edge of Westland, the Netherlands—an area world-renowned for its technologically enhanced glasshouses—we had the chance to confront an otherwise elusive and intriguing interior. Within the glass enclosure, harmoniously coordinated robotic arms and conveyor belts move the orchids from one climatic zone to another in a choreography adjusted to optimize plant growth (Fig. 2). Walking alongside the plants, we too experienced sudden changes in temperatures—from warm to cold and back to warm again.
Figure 2. Conveyor belts moving plants between different zones within the glasshouse. Ter Laak Orchids company, The Netherlands, 2021. Image by Gent Shehu.
The swift changes in temperature condition the orchids to produce more buds and eventually more flowers. It also regulates their growth in order for the company to adapt to the rapidly changing global markets, slowing it down or accelerating it in ways otherwise impossible to find in their natural habitat. Continuing with its uncanny journey inside the glasshouse—once a seedling turns into a fully bloomed specimen—the flower is directed to yet another science-fiction-looking interior: a 3D scanning room (Fig. 3). In this space, each plant is rotated by 360 degrees in front of sensors and processors, which are designed to capture and process multiple datasets to detect its height and quantity of buds, branches, and flowers—parameters by which a plant is sorted and ultimately designated a market price.
Figure 3. Flowers waiting in line to be 3D scanned. Ter Laak Orchids company, The Netherlands, 2021. Image by Gent Shehu.
Towards a non-human-centered architecture
Mesmerized by all that ingenuity, it took us a while to comprehend the extent to which the ‘demands’ of the Phalaenopsis was prioritized spatially. Inside the glasshouse, architectural relations, performance and elements are, following Jennifer Gabrys, continually remade by a “becoming environmental of computation.” The flower, whose growth has been historically managed by the situated knowledge of gardeners, has now purportedly gained a voice of its own aided by a distributed network of sensors, processors and actuators: A synthetic voice which beeps, clicks, clunks and clatters, and whose grammar is algorithmic. Complying to Gabrys’ observation of the Experimental Forest, an environmental sensing test location in California, the computational network inside the glasshouse has become a “superject, integrated with and formative of the environments and experiences it would decode.” In short, the echoes of the algorithmically-informed voice are shaping the architecture of the glasshouse and consequently redefining the Dutch countryside. These echoes are reverberating loudly and clearly enough to make a tiny country like the Netherlands the leading exporter of cut flowers worldwide.
In The architecture of the well tempered environment (1969, 145), architectural critic and writer Reyner Banham concluded that “an intelligent commercial glass-house operator today, judiciously metering temperature, moisture and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere […], has more environmental knowledge at his fingertips than most architects ever learn.” The visit to Ter Laak Orchids made us realize that inside these contemporary indoor environments, a comparison of gardeners, operators and architects loses relevance. It is the algorithmically-informed voice of industrial efficiency and flexibility that supersedes any glasshouse operator, or architect, in managing oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and light and which is driving every environmental and structural change in the glasshouse interior. To Priva’s advertisement “The Plant Knows Best”, we as architects must add, “…it knows best how to construct its own house.”
The glasshouse, thus, becomes not merely an environment that produces flowers, but comes into being as a result of growing flowers. Its spatial proportions and distribution are no longer contingent upon the practices of daylighting, nor the least concerned with the texture of the countryside, but rather depend on the mechanical configuration based on growing as fast and as many flowers as possible. The glasshouse is an artifice of warmth, of globalization, for one can be everywhere—east, west, south, and north—simply by moving between its invisible climatic zones. In such an environment, something as primal as the seasons and as fundamental as geography become insignificant; the unpredictability of climate is substituted with the predictability of mechanical systems and sensors. Nature is not trusted, nature is not fast, nature is substituted and controlled so that we can sustain the utopia of continuous modernization, economic growth and endless human consumption.
After our visit to Ter Laak Orchids, we realized that what makes Priva’s advertisement surreal is not the presence of the plant in the control room, but rather the presence of the chair. Since inside the house of the plant, there is no use for human artifacts. The house of the plant has its own architectural principles dictated by the motion and habits of the plant itself, and as we witnessed, sitting or standing still is not part of the plant’s routine. When the plant is not growing, it is moving to another climatic condition, to another zone, to another type; yet, ultimately, it is forced to abandon its machinic utopia to face a surreal encounter with a broken planet.
Authors’ note: This contribution is part of the research project “Architectural Encounters with AI: The New Data-driven Agricultural Landscapes in the Dutch Delta Systems”, a cooperation between the Section of Urban Design at the Department of Urbanism, and the Theory of Architecture and Digital Culture Group, in the Department of Architecture of TU Delft.
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Gent Shehu is a PhD Candidate at TU Delft. His research project investigates the typological transformations and overall spatial and cultural implications of using automation and AI technologies in productive environments. He is also a freelance architect in his hometown Skopje, from where he has collaborated with an Austrian architectural firm. Gent holds a high honors degree of Master of Architecture and Urban Design from Polis University, and a Post-Masters cum laude from The Berlage.
Dr. Víctor Muñoz Sanz is an Assistant Professor of Urban Design at TU Delft, currently leading research on productive cities and landscapes. Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral researcher at TU Delft, and coordinator of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre and co-principal researcher of “Automated Landscapes” at Het Nieuwe Instituut. Víctor holds the degree of Architect from ETSA Madrid, a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University, and a PhD cum laude in Architecture from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.