Phloem

Trees speak for us. In ancient myths, a knife stuck into a tree was a window into the gods, into the voices of the forest. Trees provide us with the papyrus, the hemp, for our words. Their rings chronicle the lives of trees. The erosion that creates fissures in their bark tells another story.

Trees remove harmful gasses from the air. They provide wood for houses. They shelter us. They listen to our secrets. In return, they only whisper in the breeze. They are discreet.

Buckminster Fuller told Hugh Kenner’s children that fire was just the sun unwinding from a log. Trees store the sun against a rainy day. They draw poems out of poets, paintings out of painters, pavilions out of architects. They line our streets. Their canopies bend over us. In the fall, they shed leaves for children to play in. Leaves that incubate seeds for next spring.

Inside, trees leave a record of the weather, etched into the cork of their cambium. They are two-way streets. They turn the sun into sugar, and channel it down into their roots. They soak in water from the soil, and draw it upwards into their leaves. The very anatomy of trees causes motion from the holes, hairs, moisture content, and growth of its cells. A tree is self-sustaining. It waters and heats itself; pine trees can keep doing this for five thousand years.

Trees are a link to the next generation. They are our posterity. They are the empty sheets we write on. And the record we leave behind. The feel of the tree in a page, in a binding, connects us to the earth. Francis Kéré’s pavilion Xylem inserts people into the trajectory of the tree, between sections of trunk. They sit on trunks, and are shaded by trunks. They become the vesicles through which the tree talks. They are both the plasma of the tree and its ectoplasm. They are the inner and outer layers of its fiber. Ectoplasm is of course both the outer membrane of a cell and its spiritual residue, as bark is the skin of the tree which dies and becomes its armor. But it is also its face, its mask, and its interface with us.

In Xylem, we become the spirits of trees. We are its inner core, its heartwood, its id, and its interface, the bark, its ego. By resting in its heart, we can function like its id, without ego.

In Mali and in Burkina Faso, the Dogon people know that sitting makes people more agreeable, so their toguna, their huts, have low roofs, as does Xylem. They are for talk.

So Xylem is a toguna, where we become the hearts of the tree. We become the spirits of the wood, and inherit the calm, the quiet, of the forest, which Francis Kéré has instilled in his pavilion.