Description: "In this book, Jeanne Gang, one of America's most distinguished contemporary architects, proposes applying the plant cultivation technique of grafting to architecture and urban design as a way of rethinking adaptive reuse and combatting climate change. Grafting is the process of connecting two separate living plants--one old and one new--so they can grow and thrive as one. This ancient practice continues to be performed today in search of more fruitful, palatable, and resilient varieties of plants. Grafting is also a useful paradigm for how architecture can address climate change on a broadly impactful scale by reusing and expanding older structures. Addressing both the environmental and cultural value of reuse, Gang shows how the concept of grafting can inform architecture across many scales, provoking the imagination and shaping tectonic, programmatic, formal, and regenerative adaptations"--Publisher's website.
Brief description: Jeanne Gang is an architect and founder of Studio Gang, with offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Paris, and the Kajima Professor in Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Review Quotes: "Stitching, splicing, and nimble joining abound in Jeanne Gang's The Art of Architectural Grafting. This slim, handsomely produced book with an impossibly long subtitle is one part horticultural field guide, one part personal journal, and one part treatise on a design philosophy rooted in agriculture, whereby the old is melded with the new to become something wholly different."-- "Architectural Record"