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“The Plant Knows Best”: A fieldwork report on automated flower production in the Netherlands

Shehu, G. and Muñoz Sanz, V.(2022). “The Plant Knows Best”: A fieldwork report on automated flower production in the Netherlands. In Backchannels, blog of the Society for Social Studies of Science, April 18, 2022.

In this post for the blog Backchannels of the Society for Social Studies of Science, Gent Shehu and Víctor Muñoz Sanz recount their visit to an automated glasshouse for orchid cultivation, and reflect on the implications of an architecture dictated by non-human-centered demands and affordances.

This contribution is part of the research project “Architectural Encounters with AI: The New Data-driven Agricultural Landscapes in the Dutch Delta Systems”, a cooperation between the Section of Urban Design at the Department of Urbanism, and the Theory of Architecture and Digital Culture Group, in the Department of Architecture of TU Delft.

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Conveyor belts moving plants between different zones within the glasshouse. Ter Laak Orchids company, The Netherlands, 2021. Image by Gent Shehu.

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Flowers waiting in line to be 3D scanned. Ter Laak Orchids company, The Netherlands, 2021. Image by Gent Shehu.