Mark Wigley is an architect, historian, theorist, critic, and a Professor and Dean Emeritus at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Wigley is the author of numerous books on architecture, including Konrad Wachsmann’s Television: Post-Architectural Transmissions (Sternberg Press, 2020), Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation (Lars Müller, 2018), Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio (Lars Müller Publishers, 2014), and Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (010 Publishers, 1998).

With Beatriz Colomina, he wrote Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (Lars Müller Publishers, 2016), which accompanied their co-curated 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial. In 2025, they published We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture (Lars Müller Publishers), the book behind their exhibition at the 24th International Exhibition of Triennale Milano. Last year, Wigley also joined Colomina, Roberto Kolter, Patricia Urquiola, and Geoffrey West on The Other Side of the Hill, an installation at the 19th International Venice Architecture Biennale that fused microbiology and physics with architectural theory.

Wigley and Colomina’s interest is architecture that works with microbes, curating them rather than eliminating them, to improve the circuits between inside and outside, diffusing the thresholds. Wigley thinks and sees architecture and landscape from the flip side, and we were glad to have the chance to speak with him on the occasion of the UIA World Congress of Architects 2026 in Barcelona, themed Becoming: Architectures for a Planet in Transition, which ran from 28 June to 2 July 2026.

Urška Škerl: Landscape architecture is, in a way, architecture of the land. You call the planet an artifact, a human-product, by which you mean designing the environment. Landscape, I think, became much more interesting when architects too discovered they could architect it.

Mark Wigley: For me, landscape has always been the architecture of the land. There’s nothing natural about landscape. Landscape is exactly a kind of defense against nature. And it’s a kind of defense through domestication — it turns what is beyond the human into a kind of image, an occupiable image.

And if you say, okay, if it’s architecture, then what is architecture? If we go with Vitruvius, he argues that architecture begins by turning trees into buildings. Building is not a physical shelter, it’s more like an intellectual shelter. It’s a framework for conversation. In this conversation, humans become human. So for Vitruvius, architecture is not made by humans — it makes humans. It makes humans by separating the human animal from all other species. Therefore, you get things like right angles and geometry, which supposedly you can find only with the presence of the human.

“If I say landscape is always architecture, then it is always human exceptionalism too — but of a trickier kind. It sort of says: we literally shape plants and soil and topography as proof of the human. We’re going to use so-called nature as the proof that humans are not natural, are beyond or above nature.”

Landscaping is in a way braver than that, because it takes the same argument and completely dissolves the relationship between the object and the earth. Architecture has in it a kind of human exceptionalism — we’re superior, we dominate nature, we make a place to live. Then if I say landscape is always architecture, then it is always human exceptionalism too — but of a trickier kind. It sort of says: we literally shape plants and soil and topography as proof of the human. We’re going to use so-called nature as the proof that humans are not natural, are beyond or above nature.

This was super clear at various moments in history — the English landscape garden, for example, is an absolute statement of British aristocratic and colonial authority over the land, turning the land into an image.

But now we have the question: how big is landscape? In the age of the Anthropocene, would it be right to say the whole planet has been turned into a statement of human exceptionalism — that we’ve domesticated it all? I think the answer would be yes, we’ve done this vast landscaping project, because we can reverse-engineer it and look for the concept of landscape implied in Vitruvius by looking again at the building he imagined at the beginning, which is made of dead materials and isolates the human from most forms of life. It’s all about death. The sign that the human is special is that we separate ourselves from the living in favor of the dead. For landscape, I could use that as a model too. Landscape can look natural, it can look like the domestication of nature, but equally it is super technological — new forms of life and death.

In the age of the Anthropocene, it’s useful to think of motorways, plumbing systems, electrical systems, the internet, as landscape. So I agree with what you were saying, landscape is probably a much more interesting category than architecture. Maybe so interesting that most landscape designers are a bit afraid of this new kind of responsibility.

UŠ: About human-soil relationship: I find it interesting that Adam, being a sort of “proto-human,” comes from adamah, which translates as earth. If we’re made out of soil, that means we are turning the outside in, landscape into humans.

MW: Yeah, that’s interesting. The greatest density of microbes in the whole biosphere is in the human gut, in the colon. The second-highest density is in the top ten centimeters of soil, but it has ten times the diversity of the human colon. There’s a very special relationship between the human colon that microbes occupy and the soil. In English, there’s the expression that a child who shits in their clothing, soils it. So there’s a strong relationship between gut and soil. A child between the ages of zero and three who isn’t in contact with soil is unhealthy.

“The history of architecture separated humans from the soil. We lost fifty percent of the microbial density of the colon since we went indoors 10,000 years ago — architecture took away the diversity of our microbes, and we’ve also taken diversity away from the soil.”

For 200,000 years, we grew like a plant, we lived in the soil. If we think of the interior, the history of architecture, a ten-thousand-year history, separated humans from the soil. There’s an argument that twenty thousand years ago we made bigger, more permanent stone structures precisely because we used them only temporarily. We’d move around, come to a place for a festival, then move on. When we started living in one place, we went back to using mud, the earth. But the moment we go indoors, then for the first time you have the concept of the outdoors.

Landscape as a concept becomes possible when you have the interior. Then you get the structure of interior/building/exterior, where the architect does the building, the interior designer does the interior, the landscape designer does the exterior — each with its own profession. It all goes back to the moment when we, as a species, separated ourselves from the soil which we’d grown up in. We lost fifty percent of the microbial density of the colon since we went indoors 10,000 years ago — architecture took away the diversity of our microbes, and we’ve also taken diversity away from the soil. We separated ourselves from the soil, and that separation is also killing the soil. So the death, crucial to the definition of architecture for Vitruvius, is now in the soil. Or another way to say this is that we have expanded our deadly house to the size of the planet.

Maybe landscape isn’t yet fully enjoying its new political and aesthetic position, but it’s already producing a lot of jealousy in the architectural community. Many architects now act as landscape designers, and many landscape designers as architects. We are in an interesting moment. Petra Blaisse, who presented at the UIA Congress, has a very interesting point. Her office is called Inside Outside, and she does insides and outsides, not buildings.

Getting back to the soil: soil is where life is, or was, where our life was. Inasmuch as we think of landscape design as working with soil, then in a way it is a much more political material to work with. Still, I think most of the landscape projects maintain the same affection for death, but in a kind of a living situation. A group of trees in a line, organized by humans, all slaves to the line, slaves to the human. There is nothing really living there, or only living like in a prison.

UŠ: I am against trees in cities only to produce shade for humans, without having been allowed to be trees. And all those formalisms, such as trees in a line, the symmetry, came from aristocratic gardens. In the repetition of the aristocratic formalist expressions in the public space, we made landscape useful for the eye only, rather than for living systems. Landscape architecture is not as ecological as it may seem either.

MW: Right, landscape is super technological, chemical, within regimes of control, genetic control. One way to think about it: don’t focus on the figure of the architect versus the landscape designer, but look at the images these communities produce. So-called architects make drawings of buildings in which you can then see plants. The so-called landscape community makes drawings of plants in which you can sometimes see buildings. They are the same dialectically, but from a different perspective.

In a typical architectural drawing, you will find plants only inside, in a pot, very controlled. Toward the horizon, plants are loose, like spider-web designs; as you come closer, you get more and more organization, and by the time you reach the garden in front of the house, everything is absolutely under control, the lawn, all the little plants.

Architects don’t put a building like an object on the site — it’s the other way around. They build an image of the site, a kind of spectrum of domestication of plants, from extreme control to apparently no control. The modernists said, “the inside should flow into the outside,” but it was all about control. It’s a drawing that stretches from a single domestic plant to a huge forest. It’s very easy to stretch that drawing a little bit, and it’s a drawing of the planet. You can also stretch that drawing in the other direction, toward the microbes and fungi, for example, heading into the micro rather than the macro.

“The potential for a radical political landscape design isn’t just high, it is urgent.”

The so-called landscape designer is making the same drawing in reverse, but it’s quite often the same form. You see the building suspended within the landscape; the landscape is the view from which you’d see a building. This opposition never really made sense — it’s the same politics, the same technology. The difference between the inside and the outside of the building is not really important. No plant is free in either location. Meanwhile, humans only breathe to the extent that we absorb oxygen produced by plants. The plants are negotiating between soil and atmosphere in a complete loop. Humans are suspended in these circuits, which are now affected by technology and information, so they’re not in any simple sense “natural” circuits anymore.

So the potential for a radical political landscape design isn’t just high, it is urgent. If I exaggerate a little: people worried about climate change are really worried about human survival. They care about the planet only to the extent it can support humans. Advocates for climate resistance are imagining a landscape, designing a landscape, but the planet doesn’t ask for this. Even if we destroy ninety percent of species, it has happened before with previous great extinctions; no problem. The temperatures right now aren’t even that bad. In the exhibition about bacteria we did with Beatriz for the Triennale in Milan, a fifty-meter timeline showed the 4.3 billion-year evolution of different spaces against planetary temperature since the beginning of Earth — we’re still in a very nice range, even for humans.

On one side, the problem I would have if I were a landscape architect is all the people from competing fields who are designing gardens and landscapes. Then on the other side, there are brilliant theorists, sensitive to extractivism. The way we digest soil, minerals, elements, usually has incredibly inequitable and violent effects on most humans and other species. So the two discourses: “save the planet,” which really means save the humans, and people fighting for justice, are also operating as landscape designers. The very word extractivism implies digging, terraforming. Landscape is now probably the most politically charged site. And the problem is so many voices.

UŠ: It’s hard to get it right also, for the client, the human and the non-human, the climate. There are many requirements …

MW: But I think it can be good to be wrong. I think the problem with discourse about climate change and the extractivism discourse — and we could add the discourse about microbiodiversity reduction — is that people making these discourses have a moral tone.

I think it makes it very difficult to be a landscape designer, an architect, a fashion designer, a musician, practically anything, because you’re supposed to follow a moral code, and I think that’s absurd. The policing of the discourse is terrible. Precisely because landscape is so political and interesting, you can expand the potentials. It should be a highly experimental zone, not a zone of police action, where you have to make sure you spoke to an indigenous community, that you’re net zero, that you didn’t extract anything. I think that is another kind of human arrogance: “oh, humans, we’re so guilty, we’re so bad, we must now behave correctly.”

A lot of people at the UIA Congress are saying, “I’m a good person, I’m a good person in a bad, bad field.” This is super religious. Even if it is a beautiful conference.

UŠ: I think within the culture of architecture we throw around words like multispecies and design for more-than-human as buzzwords, like fashion, but I’m afraid it sits within a very narrow group of people who create designed spaces, run the discourse and are a part of a certain culture of architecture.

MW: In one sense I agree with you. I am one of these people, but my interest is how to think trans-species in a non-moral way. With figures like Donna Haraway and Lynn Margulis, it’s not moral, it is more a different way of thinking about the political community. More about who your allies are, who your collaborators are, who your community is, and those are maybe not other humans.

Elite discourses are always looking for the next set of words to prove they’re good people, but there is also another level, there’s also a real paradigm shift.

“A lot of people attach all the good words: ‘extractivism,’ ‘equity,’ ‘indigenous,’ ‘local,’ like collecting virtue badges. There’s not much room for transgression in the environment of self-policing.”

For example, students think in trans-species terms without hesitation, they don’t need the explanation. It gets interesting once they start designing, then you see which species and circuits are highlighted. It is an interesting moment. As a teacher, I have a lot of confidence that students will be more interesting than their teachers. Teachers are in the world of fashion, as you say — not that I’m against fashion if it’s a provocative fashion — but a lot of people attach all the good words: “extractivism,” “equity,” “indigenous,” “local,” like collecting virtue badges. They mean well, but in the end it is a soft kind of liberalism. I’d rather have something obnoxious, scandalous. There’s not much room for transgression in the environment of self-policing.

So what would be a transgressive landscape? I don’t know, but can we find examples? Matta-Clark opened another way of seeing with buildings. By the way, his first artworks were bacterial cultures. From there, he moved to making cuts into buildings that we still find interesting.

UŠ: In fact, I came across your wider work through your lecture and the book, Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation. I think it is a genius read of his cuttings, making buildings more like trees. But you also wrote about Constant’s New Babylon, Buckminster Fuller, Constantinos Doxiadis …

MW: You are right, I am interested in historical figures. I still do biographical monographs on dead white men, which is the most politically incorrect thing to do. But I think biographies are interesting for several reasons. One is, maybe we once knew these things, and we don’t have to say them again in the same way. For example, people who are really interested in the climate, they need to know what was said already in the ’60s.

“With all the discourse about steel, glass, and transparency, the image of modern architecture acted as a kind of tranquilizer. We forgot it was really about bacteria.”

With all the discourse about steel, glass, and transparency, the image of modern architecture acted as a kind of tranquilizer. We forgot it was really about bacteria. Once you understand that, you see the world differently, and the steel and glass and concrete matter much less. The white walls come from sanitary reform, killing bacteria; the lack of ornament, because ornament attracts microbes. Solar orientation and glass surfaces to let the sun in were also to kill microbes.

The microbe diversity we lost because of excluding soils and exterior makes us less resistant. We should soon all of us eat other people’s shit. For example, if you’re having an operation, friends who are doctors have their shit frozen, so after surgery, they take a fecal pill to return the microbes they lost because of the antibiotic treatment. There are examples of fecal transplants to heal disease, and it is very interesting, like giving someone “your whole self.”

UŠ: Shit me not!

MW: I shit you not. Obsessing over Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto, made us miss that modern architecture was a biotic transformation. We missed that what came before it, too, like futurism, expressionism, was genuinely radical. In Art Nouveau, plants were always in every project. Modern architecture was actually a regression. All those architects worked with landscape designers, but landscape was subordinate to a narrative of the isolation of the human. Now it’s a complete reversal: landscape designers are the ones with the capacity to connect to politicians and cities, to deal with infrastructure, rain, watersheds, ecological life, toxicity.

UŠ: Nevertheless, what do you think is good design now, without quotation marks?

MW: I don’t believe in good design. I believe in non-boring design. For me, design, architecture, landscape, painting, poetry, music, it is not answering a question, it’s raising a question. Most of the world isn’t built by architects or landscape architects anyway — so we’re more like artists in relation to it. The really interesting work raises questions, makes people think differently. At this Congress, you’ll find many people who help you think differently — I wouldn’t copy their design as “good design,” but they’ve found other ways to think. With not-boring, you can’t be sure if it’s good or bad. For me, what’s really good is when you don’t know if it’s good or not.

“I don’t believe in good design. I believe in non-boring design. For me, design, architecture, landscape, painting, poetry, music, it is not answering a question, it’s raising a question.”

UŠ: Returning to the question of having ideas for the future, which we only see in retrospect … If landscape is the medium, following McLuhan and his “medium is the message,” where medium shapes the society more than the message itself, how will the landscape change society? Perhaps this is an overstretch?

MW: No, no, I love this Marshall McLuhan idea, that we see everything in the rearview mirror. But he also speaks about anti-environment. His principle is that the environment is like water to a fish. The fish never has an idea of water precisely because it’s always there. You’d have to take the fish out of water for the fish to have a concept of it. McLuhan argues the environment is what you don’t see, and the role of the artist is to produce anti-environments so that you see your environment. By definition, you don’t see the medium of your time, the environment of your time is not visible. We always see the old technology, the old environment. We’re always driving while looking behind, we never see the present or future.

“McLuhan argues the role of the artist is to produce anti-environments so that you see your environment.”

It’s a beautiful argument, but McLuhan tries to interrupt this by saying the intellectual, the artist, the writer, the painter, the architect, the landscape designer play with perception so that we see environments for the first time. Scientists who’ve shown we’re in the Anthropocene are operating as artists in that sense, by making us see what we normally don’t see. That’s actually the most classical view of art.

Now I can try to answer your question. Landscape, which already looks like an environment … If you say “I’m a landscape designer,” you’re almost saying “I’m responsible for all there is and will be, in the visible environment.” But McLuhan would say that can’t be true, because the environment is never visible. So we have to look more closely at the extent to which landscape designers make worlds that are not seen, that just fit expectations so well you don’t notice it. That’s why I am saying there’s a possibility for landscape design that asks questions, what is inside, what is outside, by interrupting everyday life.

“To what extent landscape designers make worlds that just fit expectations so well you don’t notice it. How do you reveal the inventing of nature, that is the landscape?”

I think this is where some landscape designers have a chance to reveal landscape design in an interesting way — this is what Matta-Clark was doing. He makes you ask “what is a building?” Normally, the building is exactly what you don’t see and don’t want to see. So what does it mean to reveal landscape — which doesn’t mean revealing “nature,” because there’s no such thing, it’s invented. How do you reveal the inventing of nature, that is the landscape? That will be the next wave. We can look to artists, to land artists — I don’t know who you consider the most amazing progressive thinker or practitioner, but it could be someone who changes our understanding of landscape.

“Landscape is not space between the buildings and the planet. It is the planet. And simultaneously, it is as small as a smartphone, it’s super digital, it’s super physical. If landscape profession does not involve the vast landscape of interaction we live in more than we live on streets, it is not radical.”

A smartphone is a landscape. Of course, it is completely designed on Bauhaus principles, it is a smooth, mysterious object. But it’s connected to the single biggest physical object humans have ever made. This is landscape in your pocket. Landscape is no longer, perhaps has never been, simply outside. Landscape is not space between the buildings and the planet. It is the planet. And simultaneously, it is as small as a smartphone, it’s super digital, it’s super physical, it involves vast amounts of energy, it’s super political because we’re all connected, it’s a space of super authoritarian kind of control. Wars are being waged, people are being murdered, protests organized.

So on the one hand, a smartphone is producing the binaries; on the other hand, it could produce resistance to it. Radical landscape design is working in a more complicated way. Whatever the current landscape profession is, if it does not involve this vast landscape of interaction that we live in more than we live in hotels or on streets, it is not radical.