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Barry Wark reimagines ecological aesthetics. The Scottish architect and artist seeks to blur the distinction between the natural and built environments with objects that embrace ambiguity, providing only subtle cues of their materiality and composition.
These hybrids between natural formations and artifacts first came to life as hyperrealistic digital objects displaying signs of age, weathering and decay, contrary to the gleaming conventions of 3D-rendering. The aesthetic was inspired by Wark’s upbringings in the damp, mossy and gritty environment of Glasgow, where lichen and other organisms adorn the stone facades of many historic buildings throughout the city.
Wark’s vision was most recently materialised in Nadarra, a sculptural wall made of multiple 3D-printed sand components that is now part of the permanent collection of the Dubai Museum of the Future. At first glance, the wall looks like a natural surface, eroded and striated, yet, under closer examination, one is able to read familiar codes such as order and grids that suggests something designed.
Nadarra’s ambiguity is at the core of Wark’s ecological aesthetics. He argues that the uncertainty of the origin of this object, coupled with a subtle familiarity is what makes us not only consider it as our but environment, but also appreciate its connection with the natural world.
Be it through age, weathering or decay, Wark’s projects are a continuous effort at displaying the inevitable effects of the connectedness of climate and buildings. They are a call for a reconsideration of the categories of natural and the artificial.
In this interview, we speak with Barry Wark in both London and New York, the cities he has chosen to live and work in. He offers an insight into the sensibilities that shape his work and creative process, explores themes of interconnectedness, cemeteries, and architecture, and explains why avoiding the term ‘nature’ might help us foster a better relationship with the planet.
Marcela Spadaro: Are you one of those people who stare at others on the train? I know I am…
Barry Wark: I'm fascinated by people—their stories, histories, and the choices that shape them. The world is rich, diverse, and endlessly nuanced, and I find it sad when people close their minds to all it has to offer. Beyond my interests in architecture and the environment, what truly captivates me is the individuality of people. Why do they dress a certain way? What draws them to their passions? What led them to their decisions? It’s almost like trying to capture a sensibility, something intangible yet deeply meaningful. Too often, we reduce people to labels—he’s Italian, she’s an accountant—when in reality, they are so much more. It’s those subtleties, those layers of complexity, that I find fascinating and would love to understand.
I also find so much of our built environment incredibly banal and underwhelming. That’s why I love cities like London and New York where you turn a corner and suddenly, you see something created with real heart and soul. It doesn’t have to be a building; it can be anything. What fascinates me is when someone has strayed from the expected, ignored the template, and tried something new. I think that’s why I walk around so much, always observing, always looking. I try not to be glued to my phone because I’m drawn to the people and places that break out of the ordinary. I want to understand what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and what it means to them. It’s about more than just design—it transcends disciplines and ideas. And at the core of it all, that curiosity, that impulse to observe, has shaped how I see the world.
What Is The First Memory That You Can Connect To Your Work?
I remember my first year of architecture school when we were given a task: to hand-draw an old building in Glasgow. I had no patience for it—I already knew how computers could make the process so much faster. That was my young, impatient mindset. My tutor wasn’t impressed and criticized my rushed, messy drawing. I just shrugged and said, “Well, I could’ve done it on the computer.” He didn’t like that answer. But then he asked, “What do you actually like about the building?” I remember saying, “I love the decay.” I was fascinated by the cracks, the plants growing through them, the patterns time had left behind. Even then, in my first year, he looked at me and said, “Well, thank God you’re not training to be a dentist!”. And here I am, over 20 years later, still drawn to the same things. I don’t obsess over where that fascination comes from—I’m more interested in why I do what I do. I understand its value, its trajectories, but ultimately, all these ideas, instincts, and influences are swirling around somewhere. And I think that’s true for all of us.
When I asked you to choose a place to meet up in London, you chose the cemetery in Stoke Newington. What do you find interesting about cemeteries?
If we walk through a cemetery without anthropomorphising it—just seeing things as they are, it’s essentially a forest. Whether it’s a cemetery, a garden, or a park, at its core, it’s still a forest. In our urban environments, tree-lined and tree-covered spaces act as free air conditioning, naturally cooling our cities. So, if we adopt that as a strategy for future urbanism, we start to see a different kind of relationship between buildings and nature. Take these objects around us—Wark gestures towards weathered tombstones, headstones, and urns, covered in moss, overgrown with plants—this is what happens when nature takes over. And in a tree-lined built environment, this kind of integration would be inevitable.
Some might argue that this only occurs in dense, unmanaged spaces, but that raises a bigger question: What do we want our cities to be? Do we want to plant more trees and embrace urban forests? Or do we want to keep building rigid grids of glass and steel, relying on artificial cooling, consuming more energy—energy we can’t afford to waste? When I look at these objects, I don’t see them as irrelevant. They force us to consider urbanism on multiple scales. What if a city functioned like this? How would it regenerate itself? How would its aesthetic qualities evolve over time? These are the kinds of questions we need to be asking.
These two objects—pictured above—one a pristine white cube, the other a deeply fluted, textured form, cannot resist their connection to the biome. Over time, layers accumulate, adding color, pattern, and complexity. If you scrape away the surface, you reveal the once-perfect, white volume beneath. But this is what buildings would naturally look like if we didn’t constantly clean them. Architecture, as it stands, is in a constant battle against this process. Curtain-wall facades, self-cleaning surfaces—cities are increasingly designed to resist any visible sign of their relationship with nature. But when I design buildings, I try to embrace this interconnectedness rather than erase it. When is a block of marble just marble? When was it nature? When did it become an artifact? And when will it return to nature again? Through design, how can we highlight that cycle rather than suppress it?
That’s the sensibility I’m always trying to embody in my work. If we allowed buildings to reveal their interconnectedness with the environment, they could act as ecological wind dials—markers of the world around us. They could help us better understand the behavior of sun, water, and vegetation in real time. So, can architecture help us connect with how our climate is changing? I wonder—if we had engaged with these signals over the past 30 years, would we be in a different place now? Would we have responded sooner to the climate crisis instead of only recognizing it when record-breaking temperatures make it impossible to ignore? For me, it’s also about resisting the numbing effect of daily life -avoiding the kind of anaesthesia that blinds us to the fact that our built environments are changing, radically and rapidly. If we want to keep them habitable, we can’t just bury our heads in the sand. We need to rethink how we live and how we build.
The potentially morbid thing is that nearly everyone buried here—everyone with a tombstone—was likely more "important" than you or me in their time. They had money, status, social power. And now? Just weathered stones, overgrown with moss, lichen, and vines. Forgotten. You have no idea who they were. That realization could be sad, but I don’t find it sad at all. If anything, it’s a reminder: we’re here now. Live your life. Try to make the world a little better. There’s something humbling about walking through a graveyard. It strips away the noise—the emails, the to-do lists, the constant demands. It reminds you that, in the end, what matters is simple: be happy, be kind, do good work, and enjoy what you do.
Going back to the this interconnectedness you mentioned above—of buildings and their environment—that translates into a sort of “overgrown” aesthetic. How do you confront the discomfort some people may feel towards something that looks rather un-kept, abandoned or un-cleaned?
Dissolving the perceived distance between ourselves and everything else on the planet—embracing true interconnectedness—can sometimes feel unsettling. But if we, as architects, want to use spatial experience to promote ecocentric thinking, we must learn to cultivate comfort within the uncomfortable. Take the interior space from this image, the one with the two beds. It unsettles us so deeply that our instinct is to reject it. Yet the image of the barn facade (picture below) might be considered weathering or, even better , patina. In my work, I strive to create a space where we don’t instinctively reject this collapse between the human-made and the natural. A space where interconnectedness isn’t something to resist, but something to engage with—something to live with.
In connection with this topic, I also think that the whole concept of clean and dirty is fascinating. Take the kitchen, for example. Food comes out of a packet -it's clean. You place it on the counter—still clean. But the moment it hits the floor? Suddenly, it’s dirty. And what about a dinner plate? When does it stop being clean? Is it when you’ve finished eating? When you put your cutlery down a certain way? When the leftover food is scraped into the bin? At what exact moment does something cross that invisible line? We create these boundaries, deciding—almost arbitrarily—when something is clean and when it isn’t. Even in school, we’re taught: now it’s dirty, now it’s clean. But who decides that moment? And why?
Also in relation to this idea of ‘interconnectedness’ you often say that “nature” is an unhelpful concept in conversations about the environment. What do you mean by that?
These ideas come from philosophy—Tim Ingold, Morton, Bennett, and others. The basic principle is this: if I asked you to point at nature right now, what would you do? You’d likely point at a tree, some mud, a leaf, or an insect. But the truth is, you can’t actually point at nature. Nature is a human construct—something we’ve created to bundle together everything in the world that isn’t us or our artifacts. In doing so, we’ve essentially othered it, to use a contemporary term. This separation makes it harder to talk about true interconnectedness. But what if we stopped labelling things as "nature" or "artifact" and simply acknowledged them for what they are—a tree, a person, a camera? That shift in perspective could open up a much more productive way of understanding the world.
You were born in Glasgow and have lived in both London and New York. Which of these places has influenced your work the most?
More than being Scottish or European, more than any label I could attach to myself, Glasgow defines my core outlook. What fascinates me about the city is its layered history. It’s a grand stone city, built on the wealth of the British Empire—let’s call it what it is. That exploitation enabled Glasgow to construct something beautiful. But by the time I was growing up, industry had declined, and these once-majestic stone buildings were being reclaimed by their environment, simply because there was no money to maintain them. That’s the biome I connect with—not sunlit landscapes of dry air and bright green plants, but something else entirely. Wet. Cold. Damp. Mossy. Gritty. That’s Glasgow. That’s its architecture, its streets, its atmosphere.
And while the city itself has a certain harshness, its people are the opposite—warm, welcoming, resilient. They get on with it. They don’t let the place weigh them down. That sensibility—of place, endurance, and adaptation—is at the core of who I am and how I approach architecture. Outside of family and friends, Glasgow is my foundation. It shaped how I see the world—its culture, its biome, its architecture, its philosophy of life. But now, I’ve spent nearly half my life not living there. And that’s where these binaries and contradictions come in. I grew up in Glasgow, but I spent 15 years in London—a city with a completely different sensibility, one that also shapes me in its own way. Still, if I trace everything back, the real place is Glasgow. It’s the genesis of my values, the root of how I exist and practice architecture.
How do you interpret the idea of "context" in your projects?
I find context to be a fascinating concept—one that can mean many different things. In my work, I think about biomes rather than context in the conventional architectural sense where it’s often about aligning buildings, following programmatic expectations, or mimicking the structures next door. Instead, I focus on the climatic biome of a place, because while cultures and meanings shift over time, biomes and climates remain relatively constant. Expanding our understanding of context to this level is challenging, though—where do you draw the boundary of your thinking? At a certain point, it leads to a kind of overwhelming, almost trippy, global perspective.
One useful way to approach this is through the concept of a patch -a defined area that connects to others but retains its own characteristics. A city, for instance, is a patch. In practice, designing with this expanded sense of context is incredibly complex—it's impossible to account for everything at once. So much of my work involves speculation—prototyping potential architectures that respond to their biome through geometry and material adaptation. The way a building engages with a desert biome, for example, is entirely different from how it would relate to a temperate forest. Certain materials, geometries, and structural approaches are better suited to specific climatic conditions. So in that sense, my work is deeply contextual—but not in the way architects traditionally define context.
We’ve started this interview stating that your work reimagines ‘ecological aesthetics’. Could you describe how aesthetics play a role in your work?
When we think about what we, as humans, find visually engaging, I’d argue it’s organised complexity. If something is too banal, we register it instantly, understand it, and disregard it. If something is too chaotic—disorganised complexity—we also tune it out. There’s a sweet spot that captures our attention, a balance between order and complexity that gives our minds something to engage with. This idea has roots in evolutionary biology and psychology. Consider a plain white plasterboard wall—it’s too simple, too flat, and doesn't hold our interest. On the other hand, a tangled mess of cables feels cluttered and unstructured. We’re drawn to complexity that has organisation—patterns that allow us to make sense of what we see. This idea of organized complexity is central to my work.
I think about how textures and patterns can be designed to invite colonisation by moss, vegetation, and lichen—creating a visible interconnectedness between buildings and their biomes. There’s a potential new territory emerging here, one that could be seen as a form of ecological ornamentation in architecture. The word ornament is often loaded. Traditionally, the distinction between ornament and articulation is that ornament carries meaning, whereas articulation does not. But we’ve largely lost ornamentation in architecture, because there’s no longer a shared cultural language for it. Many buildings today are designed with one dominant meaning: financial efficiency. This results in flat, minimal, and often ungenerous facades. I think it’s time to reclaim ornamentation—but with a new purpose. If ornament can express a building’s relationship with its environment, it can regain relevance. This idea of environmental ornamentation—a meaningful articulation of a building’s ecological connection- is something I’m deeply interested in exploring.
Continuing on the topic of aesthetics, would you say that you strive for coherence or beauty in your work?
Coherence is a tricky thing to achieve without slipping into banality. If something is banal enough, it can feel coherent to everyone. But coherence often depends on specific knowledge what makes sense to one person might not to another. In that way, coherence tends to lean towards the obvious, the predictable. If I had to choose—which goes against everything I stand for—I would always strive for beauty. Beauty has the power to provoke because it embraces ambiguity and subjectivity. What people find beautiful varies dramatically depending on their background, culture, and experiences. That makes beauty a far richer and more dynamic pursuit than coherence. For me, stimulation is always preferable to banality. But ultimately, I'd rather not choose at all. I’d rather do the work and let others decide whether it is coherent, beautiful, or something else entirely.
Your work incorporates new technologies like 3D printing. How important are these tools in your creative process?
How much should we lean into hyper-articulated, expensive 3D prints? Where and why should they be used? I always think back to visiting Chiesa di San Carlino alle Quattro Fontane in Rome—the Borromini church. The church itself is remarkable, but then you have the four fountains, where volcanic rocks, simply pulled from the earth, possess more intricacy, resolution, and porousness than anything I could ever 3D print. Just raw materials, untouched, yet forming a kind of natural ornamentation that feels richer than anything fabricated. This tension between material cost, permanence, and purpose is central to my work. If something is destined to be overtaken by vegetation, should it be made of a precious, expensive material? Or should it be cheap and biodegradable—something we print, let it age, and then replace? This raises questions about circularity, about materials that evolve rather than just deteriorate. Buildings cannot simply trend toward obsolescence and ruin—if they do, they will be rejected. It has to be cyclical, capable of being renewed. It needs to exist in this in-between state: both new and old, ancient and contemporary, enmeshed, overgrown, and somehow still clean. It has to be all of these things at once. That’s the crucial balance the work is striving for.
Where do you typically carry out your creative work?
As a creative person, I don’t think you ever really stop working. Creativity isn’t something you switch on and off—it’s a constant state of looking, absorbing, and collecting. With something as simple as an iPhone, you can always capture an image, jot down a thought, or document an idea. The work is always happening, even when you're not at a desk. Yes, I might sit at my desk with a big screen—where I need to see everything, click the mouse, draw, and bring the work to life—but that’s not where the creative process truly happens. I can generate ideas lying on a beach with a sketchbook, sitting on a plane, or walking through a city. My workspace isn’t defined by tools, chairs, or even a physical location. The real workspace is my mind—the way I see the world, process it, and shape ideas from it. That’s the tool I carry with me everywhere.
What would you say has influenced your practice the most?
The way I see the world is my biggest influence. But of course, I have references—architects whose work I admire. The single biggest lightning bolt for me, though, was reading the philosophical work of Timothy Morton. His writing is dense, but his ideas on dissolving nature and rethinking how we categorize things were transformative. He explores why it's so difficult for humans to truly grasp ecology and the environment—these systems are just too vast, too complex. The challenge then becomes: how do you make these overwhelming, almost incomprehensible forces tangible and experienceable through architecture? That realization marked a major shift in my work. I moved away from biomorphic sensibilities towards an approach rooted in decategorisation. Instead of mimicking nature, I became more interested in creating geometries and registers that explicitly acknowledge their artifactuality—the grid, the box, striations, recursions—elements that bear the traces of manufacturing, of the digital, of human intervention. And rather than concealing those systems behind something organic-looking, I explored how architecture could embrace both the artificial and the natural: rigid forms becoming overgrown, enmeshed, materially expressive. That, to me, was far more productive than simply creating an illusion of nature. Morton’s work was the catalyst—it set my practice on an entirely new trajectory.
What directions do you see your work taking in the future?
It might sound a bit cheesy, but I’m going to paraphrase Oscar Wilde: if you decide you’re going to be a teacher, that’s your punishment. If you decide you’re going to be a doctor, that’s your punishment. The idea is that rigidly defining yourself limits you—it boxes you in. I’ve found that keeping my mind open to new possibilities, leaving space for unexpected opportunities, has been incredibly productive for me. Some people thrive on having a three-year plan, a five-year plan, a ten-year plan. But for me, that kind of thinking feels restrictive. Instead, I’ve always been working on what architects call the project—not just a collection of buildings, but a broader intellectual pursuit. It’s about methodologies, ideas about space, about life itself. You could almost write a manifesto without needing a single constructed building because the project is bigger than that. That phase of exploration isn’t over for me, but I’m definitely now in a period focused on practice—on how these ideas manifest in the real world. I would never confine myself to saying I’m just a teacher, or just a writer, or just a designer. The subjects I care about—space, design, culture, art—are fluid. They transfer across disciplines. But one thing I do believe is that whatever you put out into the world is what you attract. I’d rather take risks, swing for the fences, and stay true to a vision than play it safe and end up with something banal and diluted.
I’d like to finish our chat referencing a comic from Tom Gauld you’ve shown in one of your lectures—image left. It’s called “Two Rocks Converse” and it depicts how within the span of a brief conversation between rocks, human civilisation is born and vanishes. Would you like to add something to this rather compelling piece?
I believe there needs to be a fundamental shift in worldview. Architecture has the power to generate new spaces and aesthetics, but more importantly, it can shape how we perceive and interact with the world. Through these spaces, we can cultivate new sensibilities—ones that move us away from human-centrism and toward eco-centrism. In the same way, if even for a brief moment, this is what this cartoon does. We must move beyond our own sense of self-importance and recognize that neither we or our artifacts have a separate or elevated existence from everything else on the planet. Instead, I’m looking for architecture that engages that more humble sensibility.
Interview by Marcela Spadaro | Introduction by Juan Cantú | Projects by Barry Wark | Photos by Asiel Nuñez | Video by Tomas Orrego and Asiel Nuñez