Using this example in botany as a point of departure we understand it at graft as a phenomenon in human culture and examine its implications for Architecture. We live in an age where the identity of the individual becomes displaced from his original physical context and has to continually find new identities by engaging with local and global environments, enriching new definitions through changed
locations and media. What is fixed and what is mutable? How can the two conditions in varying state of equilibrium continue to support and benefit one another? The traditional boundaries of Architecture must be increasingly questioned to include interdisciplinary methods and techniques that as a matter of practice expand the quest for meaning and enrichment. Typically, our research spans a wide variety of archetypes from different sources: high culture, low culture, philosophy, banality, architecture, movies, literature, sports etc. Analysis, communication and thereby the creation of relationships between and across these entities is graft. Our product refuses to accept the exclusive limitations of artificial borders between disciplines and elements and opens new possibilities for the creation of expansive results. Unexpected and surprising misunderstandings, global transfer of spatial quality, and the production of robust crossbreeds – an architecture derived out of circumstances, which can only be created through the grafting of different realities. Spread across continents, multiple disciplines and experience levels there is a mix of native and foreign at all locations and in all phases of a graft project. The consequential connections and adjacency produced and mutated out of this richness of process both inspire and drive graft and its body of work.
