Organic Arcitecture

The term "Organic Architecture" was coined by the famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), though never well articulated by his cryptic style of writing:

"So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal and the teaching so much needed if we are to see the whole of life, and to now serve the whole of life, holding no traditions essential to the great TRADITION. Nor cherishing any preconceived form fixing upon us either past, present or future, but instead exalting the simple laws of common sense or of super-sense if you prefer determining form by way of the nature of materials..."
- Frank Lloyd Wright, an Organic Architecture, 1939.

Organic architecture is a philosophy of architecture which promotes harmony between human habitation and the natural world through design approaches so sympathetic and well integrated with its site those buildings, furnishings, and surroundings become part of an unified, interrelated composition.

The philosophy grew from the ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright's mentor, Louis Sullivan, who believed that "form follows function." Wright argued that "form and function are one." and the Art Nouveau architects of the early twentieth century incorporated curving, plant-like shapes into their designs. But in the later half of the twentieth century, Modernist architects took the concept of organic architecture to new heights. By using new forms of concrete and cantilever trusses, architects could create swooping arches without visible beams or pillars

Organic Architecture is also translated into the all inclusive nature of Frank Lloyd Wright’s design process. Materials, motifs, and basic ordering principals continue to repeat themselves throughout the building as a whole. The idea of “Organic Architecture” refers not only to the buildings' literal relationship to the natural surroundings, but how the buildings' design is carefully thought about as if it were a unified organism. Geometries throughout Wright’s buildings build a central mood and theme. Essentially “Organic Architecture” is also the literal design of every element of a building: From the windows, to the floors, to the individual chairs intended to fill the space. Everything relates to one another, reflecting the symbiotic ordering systems of nature.

New Organic Architecture is a manifesto for building in a way that is both aesthetically pleasing and kinder to the environment. It illuminates key themes of organic architects, their sources of inspiration, the roots and concepts behind the style, and the environmental challenges to be met.

The organic approach to architecture has an illustrious history, from Celtic design, Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts, to the work of Antoni Gaudí and Frank Lloyd Wright. Today there is a response to a new age of information and ecology; architects are seeking to change the relationship between buildings and the natural environment. In the first part of his book, David Pearson provides a history and assessment of organic architecture. The second part comprises statements from thirty architects from around the world whose work is based on natural or curvilinear forms rather than the straight-line geometrics of modernism. Each statement is accompanied by full-color illustrations of one or several of the architects' built projects.

THEORY:

Organic architecture is a living tradition that is taking on new and exciting directions. It is not a unified movement but is diverse, perverse, contradictory, and mercurial. Always controversial and difficult to pin down, it is best experienced "in the round" with all one¹s senses by visiting real buildings. Sometimes called "the other tradition", it has a long and celebrated history, from Ancient Greece to Art Nouveau. Organic architecture is rooted in a passion for life, nature, and natural forms, and is full of the vitality of the natural world with its biological forms and processes. Emphasizing beauty and harmony, its free-flowing curves and expressive forms are sympathetic to the human body, mind, and spirit.

In a well-designed "organic" building, we feel better and freer.

The fact that the rectilinear, orthogonal mode came to dominate the 20th century is a reflection of materialist values of an industrially driven age.

The post-industrial age is awakening to a new world, which also echoes an older and wiser vision. The re-emergence of organic design, represents a new freedom of thought; an expression of hope for the future. This is affecting most fields of design from products and furniture, lighting and textile design to architecture, landscape architecture, and interior design. As this occurs, organic design is becoming less a fringe style than a mainstream design trend.

The new "free style" approach has also been influenced by modern philosophy as expounded by such writers as Fritjof Capra, and scientific ideas as diverse as advanced astrophysics, chaos theory, and James Lovelock¹s Gaia theory (that describes the living Earth, "Gaia", as a self-regulating super organism). There is a parallel here with the effect that Charles Darwin's revolutionary theory of evolution had on Victorian architecture, inspiring decorative natural forms and motifs. Modern information technology and the rapid spread of computer-aided design (CAD) to all fields of architecture and design, has helped to free up design and designers' creative processes. With the latest three-dimensional design software it is much easier to design and model sophisticated and complex shapes and forms. No longer need the straight line, right angle, and cube be the dominant features. Using the "strength through shape principle", curved forms such as arches, vaults, domes, and spheres are stronger, more efficient, and more economical than the equivalent rectilinear structures. Both modern and traditional materials can be used organically: new lightweight, tensile tent structures emulate the idea of the Native American Indian tepee, while modern curving earth or strawbale-built walls and vaults rediscover an ancient vernacular.

Organic thinking can also be seen as part of the expression of the feminization of society (or re-balancing the feminine in Western society). This approach is not new. It is a very old tradition stretching back to times when feminine values were more prevalent. This way of thinking can be traced back to Earth Mother goddess cults and can be seen in the beautiful and flowing art and artifacts of the Anatolian, Minoan, Etruscan, and Ancient Greek cultures. There is a correlation too between straight line and rectangle, and angular, masculine design and mechanistic politics.

Inspired by the non-linearity and creative forces of nature and biological organisms, organic architecture is visually poetic, radical, idiosyncratic and

Environmentally aware; it embodies harmony of place, person and materials. Organic architecture is multi-faceted, free and surprising.

Yet its myriad images, ever changeable and overlapping, all grow and flower form the same seed--the inspiration of nature.

ROOTS AND CONCEPTS:

Primitive vernacular architecture was innately organic, based on natural forms and structures and simple, local materials. More deeply, it was part of a spiritual continuum of survival and fertility, life and death that linked earth to spirit.

Egyptian and Ancient Greek civilizations studied natural forms and the human body and abstracted them as geometry. They used the circle, ellipse, Triangle, and rectangle to derive harmonious proportions for their shrines and temples and so promote harmony between themselves and their elemental gods and spirits of Earth and cosmos.

Renaissance and rationalism:

With the Renaissance came renewed interest in Classical theories of proportion based on human form. Michelangelo held that knowledge of the human figure was vital to a comprehension of architecture. Alberti remarked that a building must appear whole like an organism and Leonardo da Vinci made his famous drawing of Vitruvius's homo quadratus. But the Renaissance also brought new science. When Descartes stated "I have described the earth, and the entire visible world, as if it were a machine" he heralded the Age of Reason and gave birth to modern scientific method.

With this new age came a conviction that architecture was a science, too, and that each part of a building, inside and out, had to be integrated into one system of mathematical ratios. The opposing visions of holism and mechanistic science began to diverge into separate camps.

For the people and by the people:

As a reaction to the dominance of this overly scientific view sprang the desire of the Gothic Revival for freedom from Classical rules and a return to what were seen as truer spiritual and holistic values. New architectural principles proposed by Ruskin, Pugin, and Viollet-le-Duc drew inspiration from the forms and processes of nature and promoted medieval building traditions such as hierarchy of functions and forms, structural expression, truth to materials, craft skills, and rich polychromy and ornament. The Oxford University Museum, by Deane and Woodward, and the NaturalHistory Museum, London, by Waterhouse, are examples of these principles in action.

"Art for the people and by the people" was the cry of William Morris, one of the founders of the Arts and Crafts Movement. And it was these social

aims (reiterated later by Frank Lloyd Wright) that underpinned the movement's concentration on creativity, naturalness, craft production, and co-operative effort to counter the spread of machine production and poor quality mass-produced goods. Red House, Bexley Heath, Kent, by Philip Webb, echoes the medieval but is highly original in its internal layout. Its asymmetrical massing and creative use of materials embodying, as Morris wished, the concept that a building should be like an organic being.

The rejection of 19th century stylistic imitations for a simpler, more abstract approach with natural continuous forms paved the way for the wilder fantasies of Art Nouveau. Exotic sources, such as those from Islam, Japan, and the Far East, and folk art were used in novel ways to create this shimmering new modern style. Its influence quickly spread throughout Europe, from Munich's Jugendstil (youth style) to Barcelona's Modernistas, and on to the USA. But it was the deep, and sometimes near pantheistic or mystical, affinity with the natural world that was the universal source of inspiration. Typical was the use of long, curved, asymmetrical lines somewhat reminiscent of Celtic art. Inspired by the delicacy of such living forms as sinuous vine tendrils, flower stems, buds, and insect wings, the line could be gentle and graceful or powerful and tense like a whiplash. In architecture, ornament and structure became fused into a free-flowing, plastic, organic unity. Structures resembled sinuous vegetative growths, windows appeared as diaphanous membranes, and materials an exotic palette of brick, stone, mosaic, terracotta, wrought and cast iron, stained glass, and wood veneers. Victor Horta's revolutionary Hotel Tassel, Brussels, exemplified this style as did the light and elegant Glasgow School of Art by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. So too did the robust and curvilinear furniture and interiors of Horta's

compatriot Henry van de Velde. The latter, however, later rejected ornament and what he saw as sentimental and degenerate romanticism of Art Nouveau for a clean, logical and rationalist style that embraced the machine. With the re-appearance of the dominant straight line and right angle,

van de Velde's cool and restrained Art School, Weimar, and Werkbund Theatre, Cologne, ushered in the Bauhaus, the International Style, and the predominant course of mainstream modern architecture. But before this took hold, Expressionism had a brief but influential life with such renowned buildings as the Einstein Tower, Potsdam, by Erich Mendelsohn. Intended as a vision of new monolithic concrete architecture, he aimed to create streamlined exteriors and organically flowing interiors that defied traditional structural laws.

From inner purpose to outward appearance:

But it was in the USA that organic architecture began its great modern flowering. "By speaking generally, outward appearances resemble inner purposes" was one way Louis Sullivan described his famous axiom that form follows function--a key concept for organic design. Influenced by the massive Romanesque style of H.H. Richardson's Marshall Field Warehouse, Chicago, he evolved his own monumental round-arched style first used in the AuditoriumBuilding, Chicago, and his unique feathery and vegetal Art Nouveau ornament. At first, he used this sparingly to adorn specific parts of his otherwise plain functional steel-frame offices but later, his mature work attempted to fuse function and ornament into a unified whole.

Perhaps it was the Celt in him from his Welsh mother that gave Frank Lloyd Wright a special love of nature. It was certainly reinforced via early readings of Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc and working with his mentor Sullivan. He wished his buildings to be part of nature and would often choose sites close to woods, rock formations, or even waterfalls as with Falling Water, Pennsylvania. Like "a thing growing out of the nature of the thing", the concept of the building would emerge naturally out of the site. If nature was absent, he would provide ample space for plantings in and around the building or turn the building inward and fill the centre with trees and plants. He disliked static symmetry and preferred the dynamic irregularities of nature and of Gothic architecture, where according to Ruskin a plan might "shrink into a turret, expand into a hall, coil into a staircase, or spring into a spire". He developed geometrical themes beyond the rectangle and experimented with circles and spirals divided into 30 and 60 degree angles such as the Jacobs House, Wisconsin, an innovative solar hemicycle, and culminating in the dramatic springing coil of the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Linked to his earlier desire to produce low-cost homes and communities, which he termed "Usonian", he called for a universal organic society via his new "Declaration of Independence".

NATURE'S FORMS :

Patterns and forms in nature, such as the spiral and fractal, are products of internal laws of growth and of the action of external forces, such as sun, wind, and water. Architects learn to use natural forms from observing living structures: trees, bones, shells, wings, webs, eyes, petals, scales, and microscopic creatures--as illustrated in the following pages. They are the very forms of life and growth and have been key inspirations in organic architecture, whether for ornament, as in Art Nouveau, structure, as with Gaudí, or metaphor, as with Makovecz.

The dynamics of form pioneering students of nature's forms, whose influences are still felt today, included Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749‹1832), Ernst Haeckel (1834‹1919), and D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860‹1948). Goethe studied natural forms and coined the term morphologies.

He also applied ideas of metamorphosis to art and architecture, the dynamics of form active in all living organisms, whereby an orderly and cyclic transformation can be traced in all plant forms from seed to calyx to blossom to fruit (and to seed again)--a concept central to the development of organic architecture.

Biologist and zoologist Ernst Haeckel studied Radiolaria (plankton) and was captivated by their exquisite geometrical forms and complex patterns.

He is best known for his work Art Forms in Nature with its magnificent illustrated plates by lithographer Adolf Giltsch. Such stunning illustrations had an immediate impact on Art Nouveau and the work of Hermann Obrist, August Endell, and Louis Comfort Tiffany. Architect René Binet not only produced a book of ornament based on Haeckel's illustrations, but also designed the monumental entrance gate to the 1900 Paris World Exposition,

as a vast radiolarian. Haeckel, himself, used beautiful jellyfish forms as ceiling decoration in his former home, the "Villa Medusa".

Zoologist D'Arcy Thompson also set out to define and classify form and studied an astounding range of natural forms from microscopic Radiolaria to shells, insect wings to raindrops, snowflakes to the splash of a pebble in a pond. His thoughtful results are published in his classic work On Growth and Form where he concludes that we must "Šrealise that in general no organic forms exist save such are in conformity with physical and mathematical laws".

Forms of the future .There is an upsurge in interest in nature's designs spurred on by modern science and mathematics and particularly amongst engineers, who are using new computer-modelling technology to twist, fold, and curve shapes to support stresses more elegantly. As science sees further into the microscopic world of matter and uncovers more about the remarkable structures of living things, nature continues to surprise us and teach us how we might build more cleverly, economically, subtly, and ecologically.

Fractal and iterative systems:

When in the 1970s Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term fractal, in his groundbreaking book The Fractal Geometry of Nature, he fundamentally changed the way we look at the natural world. Central to the concept is that of self-similarity --from the macro to micro scales. However far you zoom in or zoom out of a fractal system there will always be an unending cascade of self-similar, but not identical, detail. Fractal geometry describes natural shapes and rhythms such as snowflakes, leaves, tree branches, mountains, waves, and coastlines. Applied to architecture, rhythm and composition become fractal self-similar detail, often referred to as "textural progression". From a fractal point-of-view, Modern

Movement architecture lacks textural progression and harmony with its surroundings, while the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, and other organic architects, show fine fractal cascades of detail from the large (plans and elevations) to the small (windows, doors, and decorative patterns). As Mandelbrot commented: "A Mies van der Rohe building is a scale-bound throwback to Euclid, while a high period Beaux Arts building is rich in fractal aspects।" Fractal geometry opens up endless possibilities for designers interested in expressing the more complex underlying rhythms and random patterns of nature. As music has been found to display fractal distributions, it is even possible to use music to generate natural organic designs.

ENVIRONMENT:

Rectilinear buildings are not ideal "green" buildings. While buildings are mostly still linear, the physical laws governing the dynamics of fluids, heat, light, sound, and force are mostly non-linear. The processes of growth and decay occur, not in straight lines, but in curves and cycles. Yet we continue to design and build rectilinear straightjackets that constrain and block natural energy flows. Curvilinear buildings, on the other hand, work with nature and allow optimum shapes and forms to be developed that are more efficient, economic, and appropriate to local climate and environmental conditions.

It is well known that wind flows, for instance, are best responded to with curved aerodynamic forms that reduce "drag" as seen in the smooth curving profiles of modern cars and planes. Passive ventilation, to avoid or reduce energy-hungry air-conditioning, is also enhanced by aerodynamic shapes. Why then are architects and engineers so slow to bring these benefits to the world of building?

The sun moves in a semicircular path across the sky and yet most buildings are rectangular --their orientation, layout, and straight façades limiting the full benefits of natural lighting and passive solar gain. For cooler climates, however, a curving sun-facing façade, which catches the sun through out the day and the seasons, seems the obvious solution. If feasible, it would be even better if rooms, or even entire buildings, could slowly revolve, ecologically powered, like a garden summerhouse, to track the sun or shade according to the climate or season.

Temperature flows also behave better in curvilinear interiors. Heat is more evenly distributed avoiding corner hot and cold spots. Heat is most efficiently conserved within a compact form, the sphere being the most efficient. Ventilation flows are more easily controlled bringing an altogether more equitable and comfortable indoor climate. In harsh climates, semi-underground earth-sheltered structures can produce zero-energy buildings--ideally suited to organic design.

The shapes and forms of internal spaces affect our feelings. Maybe because natural forms have many positive associations, they evoke feelings of harmony and wellbeing. In esoteric terms, curvilinear structures and forms are said to produce different subtle energy resonances. According to ecological designer and teacher Victor Papanek: "On a near-mystic level, various sensory and subconscious triggers released by such structures flood our minds with a sense of joy and wellbeing." In the past, organic architecture has not always used the "greenest" materials. But this is changing and many more organic buildings are now being designed with an increased ecological awareness to incorporate low-energy, sustainable, and recycled materials and energy-saving systems.

A well known example of organic architecture is Falling Water, the residence Frank Lloyd Wright designed for the Kaufman family in rural Pennsylvania. Wright had many choices to locate a home on this large site, but chose to place the home directly over the waterfall and creek creating a close, yet noisy dialog with the rushing water and the steep site. The horizontal striations of stone masonry with daring cantilevers of colored beige concrete blend with native rock outcroppings and the wooded environment.