In the summer of 2025, Bas Smets, in collaboration with Stefano Mancuso, will present the exhibition Building Biospheres in the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. In it, he explores the impact of the natural intelligence of plants on architecture. On this occasion, Kelly Shannon, a lecturer at KU Leuven and the author of the recently published Forest Urbanisms, entered into a conversation with Bas Smets at the invitation of A+. Together, they discussed what ‘biospheric urbanism’, ‘augmented landscapes’ and ‘natural intelligence’ mean to them, respectively as an academic and as a practising landscape architect. ‘We want to examine the extent to which architecture can be redefined as an organization of living organisms, human and non-human.’

Kelly Shannon: I would like to start with your notion of ‘biospheric urbanism’. What explicit legacies of urbanism and landscape architecture does it stem from? How does the iterative process of analysis – including, for example, work with the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI, which works with perceived thermal comfort) and Transsolar: KlimaEngineering – and design evolve? Are there larger, territorial scale possibilities of bioclimatic urbanism, as constellations of dynamic microclimates? Are vegetal and water systems designed and choreographed to adapt to the uncertainty of global warming?