Today, buildings flying the flag of ‘environmentalism,’ or even mislabelled ‘biophilic design,’ struggle to move beyond the qualities of the obsessively vegetated facades of the 20th-century bio-utopias. They convey that if we can return to a Garden of Eden utopia, the environmental crisis will somehow be resolved. Unfortunately, it is scientifically irrefutable that humans have become a geological actor to horrendous effect, and the sweetness of these planted facades is therefore in danger of becoming little more than a short-lived anesthesia to the ongoing crisis. As we move into the age of ecological awareness, architecture needs new aesthetics to help us navigate our evolving relationship with the environment as we move from anthropocentrism to more ecocentric ideologies.

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Unfortunately, many of today’s ‘green’ facades further promote anthropocentric control through integrated planters, drip feed irrigation, and the planting of non-local flora. Many are designed under the banner of ‘bringing nature back into our cities,’ a funny paradox as nature is the cultural construct that separates everything outside of humans and their artifacts, setting up the city's fabricated boundary in the first place. Flora, fauna, and all other living entities are always here. Still, we have designed their visibility out of our facades by making them more easily maintained and wipeable, only permitting their presence in designated areas.