The Art of Architectural Grafting
Description
In this book, Jeanne Gang, one of America's most distinguished contemporary architects, proposes applying the plant cultivation technique of grafting to architecture and urban design as a way of rethinking adaptive reuse and combatting climate change. Grafting is the process of connecting two separate living plants-one old and one new-so they can grow and thrive as one. This ancient practice continues to be performed today in search of more fruitful, palatable, and resilient varieties of plants.
Grafting is also a useful paradigm for how architecture can address climate change on a broadly impactful scale by reusing and expanding older structures. Addressing both the environmental and cultural value of reuse, Gang shows how the concept of grafting can inform architecture across many scales, provoking the imagination and shaping tectonic, programmatic, formal, and regenerative adaptations.
Awarded as Architecture Book of the Year 2024 in the category «Technical» and Architectural Book of the Year 2025.
Reviews / Votes
"This slim, handsomely produced book with an impossibly long subtitle is one part horticultural field guide, one part personal journal, and one part treatise on a design philosophy rooted in agriculture, whereby the old is melded with the new to become something wholly different." Matt Hickman, Architectural Record
"The latest book on Studio Gang, the Chicago studio headed by Jeanne Gang, is a departure from the norm, not only in its relatively petit size, but in the way it acts as a manifesto and manual for a particular approach to architecture - grafting - that applies an agricultural technique to the design of buildings and cities." John Hill, World Architects