For this special issue of A+, Lionel Devlieger, co-founder of Rotor, and Michael Ghyoot, current collaborator of Rotor, invited Jane Mah Hutton for a conversation on material flows. Mah Hutton is a Canadian landscape architect whose research centres on the expanded relationships of the act of building, from material flows to labour movements. In an open conversation on the world of deconstruction and material reuse, Devlieger and Mah Hutton address a pressing question: what if we look at materials not as single-purpose products or commodities, but as continually changing matter that comes from and returns to the land?

Lionel Devlieger: The topics of material flows, provenance and impacts are at the heart of your expertise as a landscape designer and researcher/author. You co-founded the journal Scapegoat: Landscape, Architecture, Political Economy. You have edited two volumes, Wood Urbanism and Material Culture, in which qualitative assessments of material impacts take centre stage. And in 2019 you published Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements, an analysis of five public spaces in Manhattan through their respective counterparts, the remote landscapes from which key materials for these designs were extracted. This book won many awards and has been recognized as a major work in the theory and history of architecture of the past decade. Along with its conceptual clarity, the quality of the writing and the depth of the inquiries make it an unforgettable read. What makes me curious is the following: what brought you from a practice in landscape architecture to first conceiving, then writing Reciprocal Landscapes?