We are, I want to suggest, weary of solutions. Be they plants, solar panels, or heat pumps, architecture’s collective reliance on solutionism has played out. ‘Solutions’ too often solidify the status quo. Climate change is only apparently a problem that will be fixed by solutions. It appears, to solutionists, that we can find a way through this. Policy measures, carbon capture and storage, net-zero 2050. Some adjustments, increasingly consequential but still just adjustments, that offer a course correction to our global industrial regime, an eco-modernism where everything appears the same, just runs on clean fuels. Solutions resolve the situation without disturbing the balance of power.

Considering natural intelligence offers some ways out of solutionism. A pathway well shaded, covered in plants to the point of feeling moist, damp and almost unwelcoming. Not the curated plants of Kew Gardens, or the Ford Foundation, shielding natural life from the vagaries of time and space, energetically producing sealed systems for incubation and preservation. More like the vines that climb up the telephone poles. The quintessential weed growing out of the sidewalk crack, flowering and probably a little toxic. The insufferable insistence of nature, unwilling and unable to leave us alone. A different kind of intelligence.