288 RA 20 09 We could explore a comprehensive evolution of genera- tive laws underlying the diversity of natural forms. The idea that these forms might “engender an art which could itself parallel the Strategies of effect and productive forces of nature was a recurrent concern of architects and design theorists convinced of the adage, first explored by Mimesis: Naturalized Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and other German Romantic theo- rists, that nature is characterized by underlying unity in variety”.4 Architectures and But Goethe’s investigations barely had any repercusion on the architecture discipline for more than a generation, until, “they were Architecturalized Natures popularized by his disciple and friend Alexander von Humboldt with his Cosmos lectures in Berlin (1827-28)” (figs. 02 and 03). The author Miguel Guitart reminds us that in 1828: “Schinkel helped Humboldt decorate the interior of Berlin’s Schauspielhaus The architect has taken nature as a model for centuries, tracing […] to receive the first convention of natural scientists. […] [Some projects two general lines of approach to architectural design: one that by] Schinkel were also designs in which a search for the primordial forms reinterprets natural structures in a direct way, and one that of architecture brought the quest for the new into close dialogue with the romantic tradition of morphology. […] Thirty-five years later, Friedrich Adler explores the potential of natural materials as a means to propose celebrated the Bauakademie as both a revival of Goethe’s idea of the new structures and spaces. While the former represents a recu- primordial seed and as an impetus for a new generation of natural historical rring architectural presence, as their production is visually and and architectural research”5. conceptually understandable by a larger public, the latter may be less common, making up a range of unexpected solutions since For Schinkel, the meaning of the Bauakademie was their application is limited mainly to purely natural resources or based as much in its terra-cotta ornamentation as in its brick environments producing exercises of architectural nature. construction: “One must not understand the word ornament or decoration to signify the imitation of something that lies outside the object and its essence or essential idea”. 6 This intense exchange of ideas developed progressively after the fruitful and close collaboration between the scientist Humboldt and the architect Schinkel, both highly influenced by Goethe. The Ger- man writer had, in fact, written Metamorphosis of Plants in 1790 as “the source for all morphological explanation and study”. 7 (fig. 04) Bergdoll sustains that for Goethe “all previous natural history had concentrated on superficial taxonomies of form rather than on what he called the ‘inner economy’ of organic form. Goethe noted the morphological signs of development within each plant and explained the stages of plant development, which could reveal the generative and formal unity of the natural world”. 8 In Schinkel’s words: “Architecture is the continuation of nature in her constructive activity. This activity is conducted through that natural product: Mankind”.9 Later on, two additional authors deserve our atten- NATuRe AS “In the wildest nature, there is not only the material of the tion for their approach and understanding of the role of nature in A bASIC ModeL most cultivated life, and a sort of anticipation of the last the configuration of the built environment: Gottfried Semper and result, but a greater refinement already than is ever Viollet-le-Duc. Gottfried Semper was inspired by Humboldt’s per- attained by man”. severant vision that “the study of history and of nature were parallel Henry David Thoreau1. quests for truth: ‘We find its noblest and most important result to be a knowledge of the chain of connections by which all natural forces “Man comes from nature and returns to it”. are linked together, and made mutually dependent upon each other; Peter Zumthor2. and it is the perception of these relations that exalts our views and ennobles our enjoyments’”.10 (fig. 05) Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le- Architecture as the constructive science for mankind’s Duc wrote in the late 19th century that “Architecture as an art is a intellectual and physical inhabitation has often departed from nature human creation. Such is our inferiority that, in order to achieve this as a basic model. However, more specifically, a very interesting pe- type of creation, we are obliged to proceed as nature proceeds in riod takes place between the 18th and the 20th century, when, as Barry the things she creates. We are obliged to employ the same elements Bergdoll states, “research into the form-giving mechanisms of nature and the same logical method as nature; we are obliged to observe […] turned to forms resonant with natural laws of growth to guide their the same transitions”.11 quest for a vocabulary freed from the imitation of historic styles”.3 Inspired by Semper’s interest in natural relations and After the thesis posed by Abate Laugier in the 18th century, and the connections, and Viollet-le-Duc’s defense of nature’s methods of later observations on the natural world by French Georges Buffon transition, architects grew more and more interested in the idea of and his Histoire Naturelle (1749-1778), Bergdoll suggests that in the unifying concepts in relation to natural form, in spite of the increas- last decade of the 19th century, Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde ing specialization of science and the “growing fragmentation of the in Brussels; Hector Guimard and René Binet in Paris; Antoni Gaudí in natural order it depicted”. Bergdoll insists on this observation by Barcelona; Hermann Obrist and August Endell in Munich; and Louis sharing an episode “in the discourse between the quest to penetrate Sullivan in Chicago, among many others, explicitly explored nature as to the underlying laws of form generation in nature and the quest for a model for architecture to move away from a predominant historic an architecture freed from antiquarian research”: vocabulary (fig. 01). RA 20 289 “[In the 1860s] The architect Simon Claude Constant-Dufeux subscribed to reinforcing the concept of Critical Regionalism as coined by Alex the doctrine of Eclecticism defined by the philosopher Victor Cousin as a re- Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in 1981.18 The rediscovery of genuine local action against French idealist aesthetics, particularly Cousin’s axiom of ‘Unity solutions that conjoin man-made architecture and the existing natu- in Diversity.’ Victor-Marie Ruprich-Robert transformed Constant-Dufeux’s ral conditions can pose a critical perspective within an anthropoce- influential oral instruction into a published teaching method.12 […] Ruprich- Robert was one of several intermediaries between natural science research nic approach to human contemporary built environment. and drawing instruction in mid-century Paris. […] Ruprich-Robert proposed instead that ornament could help designers escape from historicism […]” FRoM The MASSIVe Having set a certain theoretical and historic eNCLoSuRe To The frame in the approach to the relation These approaches to the exploration of natural models ARTICuLATed MeSh between nature and architecture, we could took place in parallel in France and Germany at the end of the 19th differentiate two general groups of century. A mutual influence developed between German and French construction strategies in architecture: one authors, scientists, intellectuals and architects. And it was Louis that generates spaces through enclosed structures with massive and rigid planes of Sullivan who brought these visions to America. Sullivan traveled from matter, where the gravitational presence of compressive forces Chicago to Paris in July 1874. The American architect was particu- prevails; and another one that generates spaces through the growth larly interested in the new school of ornamental research, the figure of open mechanisms or mobile structures that work primarily in of academic Victor-Marie Ruprich-Robert, and his statements on or- tension, where flexible articulations and knots prevail. The former nament exploration as a mechanism to move away from historicism. structures could be described as enclosures, and constitute Sullivan wrote ‘Ornament in Architecture’ in 1906, highly influenced materially continuous solutions that are largely defined by heavy and by Schinkel’s work some 70 years earlier. Sullivan’s career might be immovable constructions. The latter conform lighter structures that summarized as the gradual realization of an ever-greater coordina- could be referred to as meshes, and are mostly defined by fragile and tion of structure and ornament. A good example is the Guaranty unstable collection of interlocking pieces.19 Building (1894) in Buffalo, where “every surface seems quite literally Enclosures define spaces within scalable limits that to leaf and to flower”13 (figs. 06 and 07). produce experiences whose built form could be described as opaque, At the turn of the 20th century, the German biologist and heavy, dark, and impenetrable, separated from the outer world with oceanographer Ernst Haeckel had captivated a whole generation of which it has no visual connection. The strength of these structures artists with images of jellyfish, coral, and microscopic ocean crea- belongs to the realm of the finished and the static. The continuous tures, especially radiolarian (figs. 08 and 09). Bergdoll gives a good massive envelopes that characterize these architectures pose a description of Haeckel’s direct influence in architecture: gravitational language that links the observer to the earth conceptually and physically by means of vertical forces. These spaces convey a “[…] The lack of a clear distinction between the animal and the vegetable sense of weight, dimension, and concretion to the senses, and relate to realms, were among the subjects of Haeckel’s research into the myriad of the mass and its gravity through a boundary that is constructed by the new species of microscopic life discovered in the sea, and transformed into accumulation of matter.