Push Away the Building, Long Live, the Plants!

This paper intends to demonstrate the tactics of nature in finding its way to exist among urban fabric as man-made settings. It questions the dominant paradigm of our control towards nature in urban context that is reflected through our tendency to be defensive toward nature. In particular, this paper will discuss about plants as a form of nature that has become an indicator of the nature's existence among us. As man-made physical entity that exist in natural setting, building is always under the course of time and nature that eventually will decay and degenerate its materiality. This could be the beginning of the plant's tactics as it slowly decays and degenerate man-made materials and turns them into potential living medium for plants. Then, plants start inhabiting building and being dominant over building while the buildings turn into ruins. These tactics will be revealed through the narrative and poetic reading of photographs of real settings in Old town of Jakarta that illustrates a glimpse of the plant's tactics in inhabiting building, from occupied building, unoccupied building, and up to ruins. This paper believes that in the occurrence of the plant's tactics among our built settings lies a process of understanding each other's position which will be beneficial as basis of design thinking.