Introduction

Biology is not one thing but many: the scientific study of life spans beliefs, facts, and practices from agriculture to astrobiology, and scales of life from microscopic to galactic. In this volume, we survey creative practices informed by biology that are similarly fecund and variegated. Our investigation is interdisciplinary at two levels: in traversing both art and science, and in connecting art and architecture through the theme of biology. Within art and architecture, the use of biology emerges historically from “biocentrism,” a nineteenth-century biological view of the natural world defined as a sense of Gestalt, or life as a totality of relations. The late nineteenth-century German biologist Ernst Haeckel hewed a path for biologists approaching science through the wonder of organisms and art together.¹ He is known for vibrant renderings of life in various forms, from colorful imaginings of microscopic radiolarians to comparative studies of embryos from different species. The biology of the time connects with the origins of abstraction in art through the painter Wassily Kandinsky, who owned Haeckel’s book Art Forms of Nature² and spoke of “protoplasm” and “cells” in describing the development of abstract painting as “subject to natural laws.”³ Our anthology begins here, at the turn of the twentieth century, with two chapters devoted to the deep history of biology in art and architecture, Oliver Botar’s discussion of biocentrism and the Bauhaus (Chapter 1) and Anna Sokolina’s case study of the Goetheanum (Chapter 2).