inspired by nature: patterns

I picked up a book the other day, Inspired by Nature: Plants : The Building/Botany Con­nec­tion, a trans­la­tion of a Span­ish archi­tec­ture book by Ale­jan­dro Bahamón, Patri­cia Pérez and Alex Campello.

It looks at the rela­tion­ship of plants and archi­tec­ture in inter­est­ing ways, from the conceptual–relating how build­ings are designed in ways that mimic plants, to the more overt–seeing how rec­og­niz­able plant forms are incor­po­rated into struc­tures. Here are some great projects fea­tured in the book:

Erick van Egeraat Asso­ci­ated Archi­tects. Dutch Embassy, War­saw, Poland. Photo by C. Richters [ source ]

Embassies these days have to employ pro­tec­tive mea­sures. The stem-and-leaf fenc­ing on this one is ter­rific, work­ing as a part of the over­all com­po­si­tion as well as serv­ing a defen­sive purpose.

Klein Dytham Archi­tec­ture. Leaf Chapel, Kobuchizawa, Japan. [ source ]

The vine-inspired open­ings on this wed­ding chapel light up at night in an amaz­ing way. And dur­ing the day the sun­light fil­ters into the inte­rior. The pat­tern­ing reminds me of the kind of designs you find on fab­rics and every­day objects. It’s cool to see it blown up onto architecture.

René González. Cis­neros Fontanals Art Foun­da­tion, Miami, Florida. [ source ]

Ceramic tiles give a strong feel­ing of stalks of bam­boo on the walls of this build­ing, but they’re abstracted in inter­est­ing ways. You almost might not real­ize that they’re bam­boo in ori­gin if it weren’t for the stands of golden bam­boo planted nearby.

All­mann Sat­tler Wapp­ner Architek­ten. Süd­west­met­all Offices, Reut­lin­gen, Ger­many. [ source ]

Leaf designs cut from metal sheets com­bine the reg­u­lar geom­e­try of a grid with free-form nat­ural shapes that defy being ratio­nal­ized into neat squares. The pave­ment under­foot also par­tic­i­pates in this inter­ac­tion of nature and human thought.

All these projects seem a lit­tle beyond my capa­bil­i­ties to pull off at my lit­tle house. But then that project with he bam­boo tiles might be just the coolest solu­tion for the new bath­room shower…

September 22 2008 | Categories: rambles | Tags: • • • • • • | 2 Comments »