Studio Céline Baumann

Ramification


We are familiar with the idea of ramification from botany: in the case of the tree, aboveground elements like limbs and twigs visibly branch out in order to enlarge the overall leaf surface and thereby maximize processes of photosynthesis. The principle of ramification can also be seen in the realm of larger systems: for example, in the case of a watershed, where small tributaries flow into ever-larger rivers before reaching the sea.
Ramifications can cover larger areas without eliminating, or pushing out, what is already there, and can thereby connect otherwise isolated entities. And ramification is also a conceptual tool that offers insight— not only into the anatomy of a plant but also onto connections within and between landscapes. This publication presents the innovative perspectives of a select group of landscape architects, urbanists, and biologists whose practices share a forward-looking understanding of their disciplines and who have—knowingly or unknowingly—adopt- ed the metaphor of ramification to think about landscape and make it possible, thereby, to design more sensitively and with a greater orientation toward the future.
With contributions by Céline Baumann, Jana Crepon, Julie Delnon, Georges Descombes, Hilar Stadler, and Paola Viganò. Projects by Altitude 35, Paris; Inside Outside, Amsterdam; StudioPaolaViganò, Brussels and Milan; Superpositions, Geneva; Sylvie Viollier and Cyril Verrier, Geneva; and mavo Landschaften, Zurich.

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Flowers of Evil


Many of the ornamental plant species with which we share the domestic space, taking care of them daily without wondering too much about their origin, were imported to Europe from exotic climes, generating what Céline Baumann defines as a “cognitive dissonance between the decorative aspect of potted plants and a brutal colonial history”. The artist and landscape architect sheds light on the origins of those species and the journeys they have had to make to intertwine with our lives. This small yet invaluable collection of stories will prove useful for at least two reasons. On the one hand, it will help us to better understand that our way of relating to nature has profound political and ecological implications, even when we are at home. On the other it will make clear, yet again, that the notion of “home sweet home” is a cover – and has been for centuries – for much bitterness and countless daily abuses: expressions of the habitual domination of one gender over another and of one species over others, which today are no longer sustainable.

“Human habitats need to accommodate other living beings.”


Interview by Viviane Stappmanns for Vitra Design Museum.

Landscape architect Céline Baumann designs urban environments, but she also maintains a prolific practice as an artist and educator. Her Basel-based studio is committed to research on plant life and interrelations with humans. Her intersectional lens in turn informs her design work, in which she aims to create dynamic open spaces that respect the ecology of both humans and nature.

Roadside Picnics


With a combination of essays, memoirs, guided imagery, and speculative story-telling, this book reenacts Roadside Picnic, a sci-> story addressing the problem of humanity’s contact with another intelligence through the environmental effects and wreckage left behind by the visitors. The bewildering nature of worldly Roadside Picnics pushes human and non-human beings across the planet to a similar situation. In the face of that shared condition, the book Roadside Picnics highlights the ways in which architecture and the built environment participate in and condition both our encounters with the unthinkable—How do we face trouble?—as well as the futures that are possible in the unintended landscapes of the Anthropocene—How do we stay with the trouble?

Everything Goes in Nature: Learnings from the Plant Kingdom


A Tree, is about vegetal agency, plant knowledge, and the interaction between plants and people, with a specific focus on trees. Like all plants, trees make the world; they literally create soil, shape landscapes, and affect the climate. They produce oxygen. They provide fuel, food, building materials, and shelter, and form ecologies where a myriad of species come together to enter into various symbiotic partnerships. Trees are wonderful to think with, and humans have been doing so—through meditation, in all kinds of storytelling, and as partners in problem-solving—probably for as long as they have walked the earth. Trees are also time tellers, rather than following industrial time, clock time, or any time defined by human activity, trees relate to their own experience of time. Through this reader, the aim is to nurture and encourage dialogues and to share inspiration on exercising arboreal kinship by taking the time to think about trees differently through imagination, art, music, storytelling, poetry, and images. Moreover, the contributions in A Tree, inspire us to move beyond large systems of oppression and towards exorcizing anthropocentrism, capitalism, individualism, heteronormativity, and coloniality, by learning from and with tree time.