Instant-Nature

INSTANT-NATURE by HOME-OFFICE, located adjacent to the Plaza de la Solidaridad in Mexico City, is a deployable environment designed for the 2020 Festival of Architecture and City. Operating as a ready-made ecology, the pavilion is a gathering space dedicated to discussions about architecture and the production of nature. The pavilion’s strategies of packability and deployment draw attention to architecture’s ecological entourage, integrated into a complex system of resource extraction and environmental management. From pavilion to planter, this deployable garden creates a new species of social space for the city: mobilized, transient, and artificial. The pavilion’s light steel frame structure sits within an imported landscape of global plant specimens, each labeled with their indigenous point of origin and import-export histories. Using an inventory of annotated equipment, tagged details, and color-coded hardware, the project produces an atmospheric overlay of information and living material that makes legible the hidden logistical networks, physical extractions, and commodity flows of architecture. This display equipment details the transnational journeys of these living commodities, outlining each specimen’s geopolitical provenance. By detourning architecture’s tactics of ecological appropriation, the project seeks to disrupt traditional narratives centered around nature as fixed, idealized, and natural. The project creates an instant garden for the city, one that makes visible the processes of production that shape our everyday environments.

Volume Editors

ISBN
978-1-944214-30-2