The conference room had that particular afternoon lull, broken only by the soft rustle of blueprint paper and the distant hum of the HVAC system. The project architect smoothed his hand across the large-format drawings spread across the table, his coffee growing cold in its ceramic mug.
“The cantilever here,” he said, pointing to the dramatic overhang sketched in precise lines, “creates this ethereal floating sensation. People walking through the garden below will feel the building hovering above them, and those inside will have an unobstructed view of the landscape rolling away beneath their feet.”
The structural engineer picked up her reading glasses and leaned in closer. The fluorescent lights caught the gray threading through her dark hair as she studied the same lines that had captivated the architect, though her eyes traced different concerns.
“I see the vision,” she said, her voice carrying the weight of two decades spent calculating load paths and failure modes. “But this seventeen-meter cantilever is going to require post-tensioned concrete beams at minimum. We’re talking about massive transfer girders, probably steel composite. The foundations alone will need to resist significant overturning moments.” She straightened, meeting the architect’s eyes. “It’s not impossible, but the engineering is going to drive the architecture more than you might want.”
The architect’s shoulders sagged almost imperceptibly, and he let out a quiet breath that might have been a sigh. There it was again—that familiar deflation he felt whenever his colleague’s methodical mind began translating his spatial aspirations into cold structural realities. He knew the cantilever would be complex. He had sketched preliminary structural concepts himself afterall. But hearing it laid out in precise terminology somehow made the elegant gesture feel heavy and cumbersome. His fingers drummed once against the table’s edge as he watched her pull out her phone, no doubt already calculating the exact beam depths that would inevitably constrain his vision.
This exchange plays out in design studios and construction trailers around the world. The architect sees space, light, and human experience. The engineer sees forces, materials, and the immutable laws of physics. Both perspectives are essential, and their creative tension often produces the most innovative solutions.
Such a scenario isn’t limited to construction sites or design studios. I encountered it in our production facility, where the blueprints were molecular diagrams and the building material was biochar. The conversation revealed how the same fundamental tension between function and structure shapes not just architecture, but scientific understanding itself.
My colleague, a soil ecologist, sees biochar with the architect’s eye. For him, organic carbon in soil was defined by its role in the ecosystem—it was the energy currency that fed microorganisms, the building blocks that soil organisms could metabolize and transform. He was uncomfortable with the word “organic” when discussing carbon. “When we add organic matter to soil,” he explained during one of our meetings, “we’re essentially stocking the pantry for the entire soil food web.” This distinction between structure and function isn’t just academic—it shapes how we classify materials, predict their behavior in soil, and evaluate their role in climate mitigation and ecosystem health.
I view the same material through a different lens. In chemistry, “organic” has nothing to do with life or function—it’s purely structural, describing any compound built around a carbon skeleton. This definition emerged from an historical accident: 19th-century scientists believed organic compounds contained a mysterious “vital force” that could only be produced by living organisms. When Friedrich Wöhler synthesized urea from inorganic precursors in 1828, he demolished vitalism, but the terminology stuck. So, the word “organic” was redefined as a structural classification based on carbon-hydrogen bonds, divorced from any notion of biological activity.
When we pyrolyze biomass to create biochar, we transform the temporary scaffolding of cellulose and lignin into something far more permanent. The result is a network of highly stable aromatic carbon structures—like steel beams—that can persist in soil for centuries.
To me, biochar remains unequivocally organic. The carbon backbone is still there, just rearranged into a more stable configuration. But from my colleague’s viewpoint, this structural transformation fundamentally changes the material’s function. The soil organisms that could easily digest fresh plant matter find biochar’s condensed aromatic rings largely inedible. The pantry has become the pantry shelf.
Both perspectives capture essential truths. The material retains its carbon-based structure while assuming a completely different ecological role. This is where precise language becomes our shared blueprint. Terms like “pyrogenic organic carbon” honor both the structural reality that chemists recognize and the functional transformation that ecologists observe. It acknowledges the material’s carbon foundation while specifying its thermal origin and unique properties.
These moments of disciplinary friction aren’t obstacles to overcome—they’re the foundation of genuine collaboration. Just as the most innovative buildings emerge from the creative tension between architectural vision and engineering constraints, the most robust scientific understanding develops when different perspectives challenge and refine each other. Whether we’re designing skyscrapers or studying soil carbon, we need both the architect’s imagination and the engineer’s rigor to create something that is not only beautiful and functional, but built to last.
