Houstonia’s The Must List tells you about something going on in Houston that you absolutely cannot miss.

Picture downtown Houston. Specifically, the parts without views of Discovery Green or Market Square Park. Forests of metal, glass, and concrete, punctuated by the occasional neon orange traffic drum. It’s stark and mottled with contrasting textures, crumbling in spots and undergoing ear-splitting repairs in others. This is especially true of the north part where Architecture Center of Houston makes its home. Artist and landscape architect Falon Mihalic has made that section of the city just a little greener with their Verdant Laboratory, on display now in the ArCH lobby until August 22.

Here, Mihalic utilizes a multimedia milieu of live plants, paintings, ceramics, and video to craft a wonderland that’s at once a glimpse into their creative process (their sketchbooks are laid out for visitors to flip through, and a massive section of the show is dedicated to a curiosity cabinet stuffed with the organic findings, artistic works, and books they find inspiring), a celebration of the natural world, and a gentle reminder of what we lose when legislators continue to neglect climate change.

“I think of my studio as a laboratory where I’m testing different ideas. And that word ‘verdant’ is one of my favorite words,” they say.

The exhibition lives up to the name. Verdant Laboratory provides a refreshingly lush slice of paradise, reflected in the gentle greens and blues of striking mixed-media paintings like No Lot Is Vacant—which notes that the city’s many “empty” lots are actually themselves self-contained ecosystems—and Tropicalization, a ceramics piece utilizing reclaimed clay, terrazzo tiles, and post-industrial glass to craft an oyster bed overtaking magnolia petals. The sculpture simultaneously comments on warming ocean waters while also showcasing Houston’s truly unique place in the biosphere.  

“Houston is at this sort of nexus of all of these different types of bioregions,” Mihalic says. “We have arid not that far west. We have Pineywoods not that far east. And really, we’re at the southern tip of the prairie complex of the Midwest. And then that meets the coastal plain of the Gulf of Mexico.”

On a table near the front windows sits Microclimates in the humid subtropics. Mihalic has filled handmade pots with a variety of grasses indigenous to the region. Some of them, such as the Malpighia glabra, also known as the Barbados cherry, are edible. Others, like the Scutellaria, have medicinal properties. The artist provides explicit instructions to touch the plants: Interaction facilitates appreciation, and Mihalic notes that local nurseries are more eager to stock and encourage customers to purchase native plants than they were a decade ago. Carex grasses especially, owing to their role in flood mitigation.

“[Carex] is growing in people’s lawns, but people don’t necessarily recognize that they’re an amazing native plant that can soak up a lot of stormwater,” Mihalic says. “And now, with what I’ll call native plant advocacy in the design professions, you can get six different varieties of native Carex.”

The consequences of ripping up native grasses like Carex are illustrated in the provocative installation pieces Bayou Beacon and Cloudy Ecologies: wind and tide in the Galveston Bay Estuary. Cloudy Ecologies blends science and art together, turning Hurricane Beryl’s wind patterns into a wispy mural studded with industrial glass reclaimed from the auto industry. In Bayou Beacon, Mihalic projects several years’ worth of data collected from the White Oak Bayou flood gauge onto a sheer screen. Viewers watch the ebbs and flows of the waters, which surge dramatically during the 2016 Tax Day floods and Hurricane Harvey in 2017. When wearing the optional headphones, which features soundscapes corresponding to the water levels, Harvey blares like a siren.

“Bayou Beacon is interesting because it's a way of reflecting. That’s how I see it,” Mihalic says. “There’s no call to action about it. It’s more of like, I’m making a space for someone to come and sit and reflect and have their feelings. Because I don’t know that we had a lot of opportunity to do that.”

ArCH flooded during Harvey, and has undergone a redesign to make it more resilient against floodwaters. American Institute of Architecture Houston Chapter associate director Jennifer Ward says that the organization was given the option to sell its building along Congress Street, but they opted for a different path forward, one that dovetails with Verdant Laboratory’s core ruminations: What if humanity embraced living with nature’s whims rather than fighting them?

“Instead of leaving, we decided to adapt. We decided to be an example of what it means to live with water,” Ward says. “There’s no drywall in the space other than this wall. The idea is that we could clean the walls and then move back in rather than being displaced for years… You can see examples of how buildings and organizations all along Commerce Street have adapted to our climate or are trying to adapt to flooding, because it will flood again.”

Mihalic and Ward both believe that Verdant Laboratory’s message of returning the local environment (and the people living within it) to a healthier, more balanced place is more implicit than explicit. When coupled with the tactile aspects of the live native plants, curiosity cabinet, and Mihalic’s sketchbooks, visitors are invited to formulate their own concepts and ideas of what living with nature rather than against it can look like. That’s kind of a necessity in Houston.

“I feel like [in] our city, as we move along in time, dealing with the ecology is becoming more and more, like, paramount,” Ward says.