Reasons To Be Cheerful · 4 hours ago

Imagining the Mossy Cities of the Future

Philip Wallisfurth began with moss and yogurt on a construction fence, spelling out "greener living" to save a tree - and was surprised when strangers stopped to hang flowers in small vases alongside his letters. What followed was a life's work shaped as much by personal loss as by artistic vision: orphaned young, marked by grief, he turned to art explicitly to brighten dark places, finding in moss a material that shares his own stubborn nature. "You can destroy it," he says, "but it simply grows again. It's a fighter." His story runs alongside a serious scientific inquiry into whether this overlooked plant - cooling rooftops in Seoul, softening noise in Berlin offices, growing between the paving stones of Santiago de Compostela - could become living urban infrastructure in an era of dangerous heat. But Wallisfurth's deeper offering may be the quiet reminder that resilience, in both people and plants, is not about being untouched - it's about what returns after the drought.