ABSTRACT
Calling on nature to justify new architectural form was by no means exclusive to modernists such as Erich Mendelsohn or Alvar Aalto.1 As Caroline van Eck convincingly demonstrates in Organicism in Nineteenth-Century Architecture (1994), organicism has been part of architectural discourse from the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century.2 Since then, and perhaps spurred by the emergence of widespread discussions around ecological sustainability and “landscape urbanism,” architectural historians such as Mary MacLeod, Detlef Mertins, Oliver Botar, and David Haney have revisited the work of European modernist architects through the lens of their fascination with the biological world. Mertins recalls discovering “themes of architecture and biology in the Werkbund discourse and in a whole series of architects and artists of the period … [who were] stimulated by the discourse of biocentrism in the 1920s and ’30s in Central Europe,” as it was promulgated by biologist Raoul Francé under the rubric of “biotechnics.” Mertins claimed that:
[P]lants or organisms could be seen as prototypes of human technology …. One of the ideas that comes to the fore at that moment is that form is not an a priori; it’s not predetermined. Form is seen as the result of a process.… The architects and artists of the 1920s saw in Francé’s biotechnics an argument for a scientific understanding of things like functionality—that form is the necessary result of a function—and of optimization.3
This idea—that form could emerge as a dynamic process in response to the forces of nature—inspired many architects in the “heroic” period of modernism and continued through the 1960s in Frei Otto’s lightweight structures and Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, both of which emulate nature’s methods of construction. It persists in present-day design work that uses self-organizing algorithms (originally written for cell research) to develop “emergent” and “responsive” architecture and biomorphic designs.