The mythic garden: abundant, autonomous, ideal; studded with fertile trees and overflowing with plenitude. Eden: gifted to Eve and Adam, who basked in ecstasy and the fruits of excess—up until the original sin. The apple is eaten, and together they gain consciousness, to be exiled into the agony and beauty of human life. Pain. Desire. Responsibility.

In our dispatch this week, we read architectural historian Nora Wendl's 'Almost Nothing', which repositions Edith Farnsworth as central to the making of the Farnsworth House. Farnsworth, perceived as the erased and difficult Eve to Mies van der Rohe's clear genius—the allegedly sanctified Adam. The lodged apple remains a visible reminder of the shared sin he alone was allowed to transcend.

In Rashid Johnson's 'A Poem for Deep Thinkers', we encounter multivalent Black selfhood: reckoning, altering, returning. His work maps the journey from lore to human, from exile to embodiment. Tosin Oshinowo speaks about her Biennale Architettura project, designed as a self-contained space, like Eden. She reflects on colonialist and capitalist models, which are fuelled by the exploitation of those in the 'developing' world'.

Tied to reality and outside of it, Eden is still here. It is occupied. If it was ever promised, we must ask: who has been cast out, and who continues to feast from the tree?