Language Is a Design Tool
Jeanne Gang on Words and Architecture
Jeanne Gang speaks at Architectural Record’s Sustainability in Practice symposium at Illinois Tech
At The Raygency, we spend a lot of time focusing on clarity: saying what you mean, saying it well, and making it matter.
So when Jeanne Gang spoke at Architectural Record’s Sustainability in Practice symposium and described language as a constitutive force in architectural practice, I was reminded of my architectural theory course at Harvard, when K. Michael Hays described architecture theory as a constitutive force, too. Jeanne said:
“Each of us has to own the words we use to describe what we’re doing,” she said.
“Not just the industry speak—but the words that actually shape the work.”
Gang’s keynote traced a wide-ranging arc through decades of sustainable design thinking—from early ideas of “green buildings,” to today’s more nuanced understandings of regeneration, biodiversity, and embodied carbon. But what I found most intriguing was her focus on vocabulary itself: the words we choose, the metaphors we employ, and how the way we talk about design influences what gets built.
Words That Build, Not Just Explain
Gang didn’t just critique the language of sustainability; she called for its reconstruction. Words like “green,” “regenerative,” and “reuse” are vital, but overused. Blunted, they become emptied of urgency.
In their place, she offered a new kind of ecological poetics, one rooted in biology and shaped by metaphor. Most notably, she explored the idea of grafting: a horticultural process where two distinct organisms—say, rootstock and scion—are fused to form a single, more vigorous plant. They don’t blend or dissolve into one another; they coexist, each offering something the other lacks.
“It’s a response to a wound,” she said, showing images from her new book The Art of Architectural Grafting. “It’s how plants heal. They grow extra material around the wound to make it stronger.”
It’s a beautiful (and radical) model for adaptive reuse. Neither preservation for its own sake nor a tabula rasa approach, she articulated a design strategy based on a rigorous study of existing conditions, resilience, and co-authorship across time.
Language as Infrastructure
For those of us working at the intersection of design and communication, this talk felt like a modern manifesto.
At The Raygency, we believe that how you talk about your work is part of the work. More than messaging, words are a form of design. Language is a tool that defines the relationships between your project and its audience, between your ideas and their impact.
We often meet clients—architects, academics, institutions—who are doing incredibly important work but are frustrated that it isn’t being seen, understood, or funded. More often than not, the issue isn’t the work itself. It’s the language around it.
That’s where we come in.
We help clients:
Rethink their narratives, to move from jargon to clarity
Translate technical ambition into public meaning
And find metaphors—like Jeanne’s “grafting”—that open new doors of understanding
Designing the Future, Word by Word
Jeanne Gang closed her talk with a range of examples: a coal-burning power plant reborn as a student center; a limestone-framed campus rising above Parisian train tracks; a Denver hotel with mycelium leather ceilings and windows shaped like aspen tree eyes.
Each project stood on its own. But beneath them all was the same idea: that design is dialogue. That architecture—like language—is iterative, contextual, and responsive.
As Gang reminded us, even the most sustainable structure starts with a story.
Let’s make that story count.
If you’re ready to rethink how you talk about your work, we’re here to help. leah@theraygency.com