[ Lost in the Landscape ]

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: Allmann Sattler Wappner Architekten • architecture • botanical designs • Erick van Egeraat Associated Architects • inspired by nature • Klein Dytham Architecture • René González | 2 Comments »

botanical fabrics and quilts

One of our fab­u­lous wed­ding presents was the offer to make us a quilt. We could pick the design. We could pick the fab­rics. How gen­er­ous was that?

That got me look­ing at fab­rics in a totally dif­fer­ent way. One of the things I real­ized was how many of the designs had botan­i­cal ori­gins. Here are just a few of the plant-based ones that I found inter­est­ing. Some are fairly real­is­tic, some are so styl­ized that you have to look hard to see the botanical-ness of the inspi­ra­tion. But no mat­ter how abstracted from the orig­i­nal, the gar­den lives on in the fabric.

And after por­ing through all the fab­ric choices there was the issue of the design. There were so many options…traditional quilts, dou­ble wed­ding rings, strip and curves designs, water­color quilts…books and books filled with inter­est­ing designs. And then I ran across the online cat­a­log of the 2002 Quilt Visions quilt exhi­bi­tion at the Ocean­side Museum of Art here in San Diego County.

Liz Axford. Bam­boo Boo­gie Woo­gie I,60″ x 44″, hand-dyed cot­tons, machine pieced, machine quilted. [ source ]

The quilt looked like it wouldn’t be ridicu­lously dif­fi­cult to piece. How­ever, being an art quilt, it had lots of over-the-top labor-intensive details going on with it…stuff that to me looks like there’s hand dye­ing and pos­si­bly hand-printing involved. Unfor­tu­nately, the museum site didn’t list the specifics. And they didn’t even list the artist! I did see the print cat­a­log of this show, and I’ll post the artist as soon as I can research who she was. [Note: Thanks to Linda, I’ve got the cat­a­log in my hands, and I’ve now been able to fill in some of the infor­ma­tion the web­site lacked.] I found it inter­est­ing that the brief writeup in the cat­a­log said that she had been inspired by bam­boo, and that she was a mem­ber of the Inter­na­tional Bam­boo Society–You can really that influ­ence in her design.

For­tu­nately, what I was most inter­ested in was the con­struc­tion method. Commonly-available fab­rics could lend a sense of the orig­i­nal but also take the design into dif­fer­ent ter­ri­tory. I played with dif­fer­ent fab­rics com­bi­na­tions and ended up with a ten­ta­tive first draft selec­tion of thir­teen fab­rics, includ­ing two of the ones pic­tured above. And play­ing with the basic con­struc­tion method and enlarg­ing it I came up with the Pho­to­shopped mockup below.

At this point I’m just play­ing. I sus­pect that almost everyone’s first quilt attempts may not have a lot of sub­tlety to them, and I worry that this is a lit­tle that way. But like I said this is just a work­ing draft that will prob­a­bly change when looked at by a sea­soned quil­ter. What’s fairly easy to do on screen may be ridicu­lously dif­fi­cult in real quilt­ing life. And these are fab­rics thrown together from look­ing at them online. I’m sure that actu­ally select­ing real-life fab­rics will change the result.

But gosh all this is so much fun–You can eas­ily see why quilt­ing is a $3.3 billion-a-year industry!

September 01 2008 | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: botanical designs • fabrics • inspired by nature • quilts | 7 Comments »