ABSTRACT
Designers looking to natural systems to discover analogs useful in the design of the built environment have an extremely large field of potential information to absorb. We are only at the beginning of the learning curve, shifting the guiding metaphor in architecture from thinking of buildings as static machines or works of sculpture to conceptualizing them as dynamical living systems that are the very nature of Nature. In the nineteenth century, the English Romantic writer John Ruskin declared that architecture was like frozen music, and the American architect Louis Sullivan prescribed that form follows function. Twenty-first century architectural design may be guided more by the ideas that architecture is music and form follows flow.
