root logics grass structure as a stochastic collaborator
live materials research structure process
salina tran and chad connery
Building materials are typically expected to behave. They are milled, fired, cast, laminated, certified, and ultimately put in their place. Plants permitted to be themselves do not behave. They wander, hesitate, double back, split, tangle and thicken where resistance is encountered. They are instinctual fibrous builders with un-human intelligence and poor manners. Root Logics is an unfolding research initiative that treats this unruliness seriously—not as image or metaphor, but as a material logic with potential architectural consequence. Developed through a series of grown prototypes using wheatgrass root systems, the project investigates how stochastic plant growth might participate in architectural fabrication as a collaborator rather than a raw resource. In the context of climate-driven interests in biogenic materials, the work intends to depart from extractive or representational approaches. Rather than harvesting plant matter to be stabilised and processed, we ask plant collaborators (with some very human trepidation) what happens when a material refuses precision, repetition, or full control? Root systems grow according to preferential tendencies responding to light, gravity, moisture or nutrient gradients, but their exact paths cannot be prescribed. At the cellular level, roots operate through biological noise: constant micro- adjustments that allow the plant to test configurations, abandon failures, and thicken its successes. In this sense, stochastic growth does not mean chaos, but a probabilistic process in which local decisions accumulate into coherent form. The individual roots are unpredictable, but collectively they produce randomised systems of organised structure. Across eleven prototypes, we applied cereal grasses to lightly imposed 3D-printed templates designed to negotiate rather than dictate form. Early tests revealed that roots routinely ignored surface patterning, punching through layers of felt and growth media and etching themselves into whatever termination they could find. These encounters made clear that textural surface instruction was largely irrelevant; roots responded instead to volumetric conditions, making decisions within looser spatial frameworks as they plunged downward at the call of gravity. In response, we replaced surface patterning with a matrix of double hexagonal geometries, borrowed from soap bubbles and honeycombs. The 120° junctions of this array encourage materially efficient outcomes with a structural legibility. Rather than enforcing a trace, these templates acted as obstacles offering resistance, redirection and constraint around which roots could flow and range.
Failure proved equally instructive. In several tests, more porous negative-space moulds became irreversibly entangled, sewn into the root mass and made inseparable without destroying both. These outcomes clarified that roots do not distinguish between structure and formwork. In the eyes of the vegetation, everything presents itself as opportunity, so the tuning of control requires subtlety. We learned to shift away from precision towards guidance, allowing form to emerge through negotiation while remaining extractable and variably unresolved. The dense fibrous roots and abundant root hairs of wheatgrass interlock aggressively, forming intimately entwined mats. Individual roots remain legible up close, but at scale they fuse into cohesive sheet-like structures. Unlike the tidy tectonic assembly of a stitch or a weave, the results are anisotropic, irregular and surprisingly resilient. Neither woven nor grown whole, neither fully designed nor fully emergent, we see the tested material inhabit a middle ground between a domestic familiarity and a foreign biology. It resembles felted wool but has self-agitated to congeal and organise without a human hand. Instead, it uses time, moisture and proximity to mattify through searching, colliding, knotting and embracing. The outcome is not a surface applied to structure, but a structure that is surface, formed through accumulation rather than assembly.
Connery + Tran
47
on site review 48 :: building materials
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