After billions of years of evolution, nature has learned what works and what lasts, surely it is many steps ahead of us. There have been always movements or styles and also theories in architecture to try to get a connection with nature (Cristancho, 2004). Being close to nature is something that motivates architects, however, adding vegetation to architecture, or making sustainable decisions does not mean we are closer to nature. We should go beyond using nature for aesthetics to study and apply principles that are found in natural environments and species (Myers, 2021). Since the beginning of architecture, it tried to be connected to the natural world, it is a need humans have, we come to nature, and we are still part of it even if we live surrounded by an industrial world. It is undeniable that humans benefit from nature, we recharged from it and we also give something in return, it is a reciprocal and harmonious relationship. Nowadays we know for a fact that this relationship is good and necessary for our daily lives, however in the previous centuries this was a hunch, people felt better when connected to nature, so they constructed with it and incorporated it into architecture. We can agree that over the centuries the role of nature has been always present, from the beginning with the primitive hut 1 until today when we are trying to reconnect with nature - even if we never fully disconnect - as that first hut did.
1The Primitive Hut is a concept that explores the origins of architecture and its practice. A theory by Marc- Antoine Laugier in the 18 th century built on ideas of nature by the roman architect Marcus Vitruvious. The concept explores the anthropological relationship between human and the natural environment as the fundamental basis for the creation of architecture. The idea of The Primitive Hut contends that the ideal architectural form embodies what is natural and intrinsic.
fig1. Frontispiece of Essai sur l’architecture by Marc-Antoine Laugier. Allegorical engraving of the Vitruvian primitive hut
2 Art Nouveau is an international style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts, known in different languages by different names. The style was most popular between 1890 and 1910 during the Belle Époque period that ended with the start of World War I in 1914.
3 Art Deco is a style of visual arts, architecture and design that first appeared in France just before World War I.
4 Gilles Deleuze (1925 – 1995) was a French philosopher who wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art.
5 Pierre-Félix Guattari (1930 – 1992) was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter.
Not long ago, with Art Nouveau2 we can see the attention to detail like nature would give to a building, an architectural style that aimed to create nature-inspired buildings with the new industrial advances. Whereas Art Deco3 went very geometrical which made the distinction away from nature. At the beginning of the 21 st century, Frank Lloyd Wright introduced the idea of organic architecture, which is a reinterpretation of nature that passed through humans’ minds, builds something closer to nature, and respects the properties of the materials. After the industrial revolution, there were many attempts to get closer to nature again and that is why many movements and theories arose. One of them is the fractals theory from Mandelbrot, which are structures whose appearance and configuration are not altered by the scale with which it is observed – it presents a complex structure in all the scales. These fractals are present all over nature’s creations and are the base for some designs nowadays since they are a way of understanding and organizing the chaos of nature. Another theory to try to understand nature is the one from Deleuze4 called the fold, which is a geometric abstraction of the essence of complex systems – like the one we can encounter in nature. Together with Guattari5, he developed the idea of the rhizome, which has an extra level of complexity and randomness than
the fold.
If we get closer to the present, Biomimicry makes its appearance, an architectural practice that focuses on learning and mimicking strategies from nature to apply them in design challenges. Nevertheless, it stays on the surface and takes nice and natural shapes to create nice and pretty buildings that do not play by actual natural rules but that claim sustainability. Contrary to Wright, here the image is more important than being close to nature. Then the appearance of Bionics6 makes sense since it tends to assimilate not only form but also function in its designs. In the same line of thinking, BioDesign7 comes to play and has a cybernetic interpretation of nature while trying to condensate new relationships like creativity and nature and machines. I personally think that we should replicate biological organisms’ behaviors and living systems since biological solutions could replace many of the technologies we rely on; lately, Biodesign works toward this idea and proposes a collaboration between designers and biologists. As William Myers describes, “Biodesign refers specifically to the incorporation of living organisms or ecosystems as essential components, enhancing the function of the finished work”.
6 Bionics is a the science of constructing artificial systems that have some of the characteristics of living systems. Bionics is not a specialized science but an inter-science discipline that may be compared with cybernetics.
7 BioDesign is the integration of design with biological systems, often to achieve better ecological performance.
