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Nature in Design by Alan Powers, Conran Octopus, £30, ISBN
1840910461

Evolutionary Architecture: Nature as a Basis for Design by Eugene Tsui, John
Wiley, £35.50, ISBN 0471117269

Sci-Fi Architecture edited by Maggie Toy, Architectural Design Profile No.
138, Academy Editions, £22.25, ISBN 0471987123

EVER wondered why our buildings are mostly composed of straight lines, plane
surfaces, parallels and perpendiculars while organic forms are curved? Why is it
that architects don’t imitate nature more closely?

How they once wielded a pen and pencil is one reason: buildings need to be
drawn before they are constructed, and traditional drafting technique depends on
straight edges, T-squares, triangles, dividers and Euclidean geometry. Compasses
mostly provided the curves. Today, though, that starting point is changing:
computer-aided design technology makes the depiction and exploration of complex
curved forms simple enough for any novice architecture student to master. The
ruler no longer rules.

But gravity does. So a second explanation for our upstanding buildings is
that the performances of simply shaped architectural elements are easier to
predict than those of more complex forms. For example, the bending moments and
shear forces in a straight rectangular beam are far less complicated to
calculate than those in a tapered, curved tree branch. In the days of hand
calculation, this mattered. Now that computers and finite-element software do
the job, the limits of analysis and simulation impose few practical constraints
on a designer’s freedom.

Head for the factory floor to find the final piece in the puzzle: it is
easier and cheaper to make simple repeating shapes for buildings. And these
elements with straight lines and flat surfaces are most easily assembled into
architectural compositions when disciplined by simple grids and alignments. But
this, too, is changing.

Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao demonstrates convincingly that
CAD/CAM technology allows the efficient construction of buildings with complex
curved surfaces and non-repeating, non-symmetrical forms.
Computer-controlled fabrication and positioning machinery, driven directly by the
architect’s three-dimensional CAD model of the project, provides the means.

As a result, architects are dividing into two camps—those who do boxes
and those who do blobs. Masters of the box adhere to the established logic of
ruler, grids and mass-produced parts. Champions of the blob, such as Gehry in
his recent work, explore the new possibilities opened up by CAD software, modern
analysis and simulation methods, and CAD/CAM construction technology.

If you want to do interesting blobs, the forms of nature provide an obvious
inspiration. Alan Powers’s Nature in Design is a lavishly illustrated
sourcebook for this approach; its colour photographs of organic forms juxtaposed
with buildings designed on the same lines. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim
Museum in New York is compared to the helix of a gastropod shell. Eugene Tsui’s
Evolutionary Architectureis an idiosyncratic exploration of similar
themes.

There are compelling images in these books, but on the whole, you would be
far better rewarded by re-reading D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s wonderful classic
On Growth and Form.

Maggie Toy’s Sci-Fi Architectureis a lot more fun. It consists of
provocative computer images of young architects’ projects, as yet unbuilt, and a
few metal and glass blobs that senior practitioners have managed to get
constructed. Here, the source is not nature, but the world of abstract formal
possibilities opened up for exploration by sophisticated curved-surface
modelling software. These iconoclasts are inspired not from seashells, but from
the screens of Silicon Graphics workstations. They may shock their elders, but
are inspiring a generation of talented students. We shall hear much more from
them.