Roots + Earth in Adoptee Architecture

Roots, Earth + Finding Ground After Adoption

The Tree Room

Working from a building called The Tree Room naturally brings me back to the language of roots and earth. It’s a quiet reminder of the adoption architecture I work with — the way roots form, the way ground is lost and rebuilt, the way stability is shaped in the body. Writing about adoptee roots and earth from here feels fitting, because the name of the place echoes the structure I’m describing.

When I think about roots and earth for adopted people, I recognise how complex these words can be, especially for those adopted in the closed‑adoption era. For most people, roots come from family lines, familiar stories, and the ground they were born into. But for adoptees, the architecture begins with a severance and a forced reconnection. The loss of the original roots — and the first earth — can happen before language, memory, or self. When that happens, the body has to create a different kind of stability.

Roots

In adoptee architecture, the roots grow differently. Instead of growing down into family history, adoptee roots begin with a severance and the downward direction is no longer available, because the original root is severed and the body cannot anchor into ancestry or continuity — and at the same time cannot root into the new family history because it doesn’t recognise the structure of the root system — the usual pathways for rooting disappear.

This creates a structural contradiction: the adoptee is held between two incompatible root systems, required to stabilise within a system that doesn’t understand the cost of holding both.

What develops is not downward rooting but a structural adaptation — a way of grounding, surviving, and growing shaped by severance, mismatch, and the absence of any ground that can hold the adaptive roots system. The roots do not grow down; they reach in all directions, searching for ground.

Earth

Earth doesn’t feel like the place we were born or belonged to, because that ground didn’t hold us long enough to become our foundation. After severance, the body has to create a different kind of earth — a survival earth — made from whatever helps it stay connected enough to live.

This early earth is built from bracing, vigilance, and the nervous system’s attempt to repair the rupture not only by reaching back toward what was lost but also by reaching toward whatever is now available enough to keep us alive. The body tries to send roots downward into this new place, but the earths are too different; the mismatch is structural. The roots cannot take.

The earth the adoptee has to find isn’t the old earth or the new earth. It’s an in‑between earth — a structural surface the body creates to hold the adaptive root system.

Orientation work creates a different relationship to Roots + Earth

With architectural work, we can see the early earth we built to survive, and we can see it from a different position. From the outside‑seeing place, the early earth becomes visible rather than defining. Once the architecture becomes visible — the severance, the survival roots, the earth — the body can orient differently. It can notice ground that was always there and feel it as safe enough to stand on.

From here, the roots we have now are no longer survival roots. They are roots we can put down in ourselves, into an earth we can finally recognise, choose, and grow into. This earth becomes a foundation strong enough to hold the roots we place there.

About the author: Jo Western is an adopted person and an architectural observer exploring how early severance shapes the ways we build roots, ground, and stability. She is developing Unbound CIC and writing a book about adoptee architecture