[ Lost in the Landscape ]

inspired by nature: how plants grow

This is the last in this lit­tle series of posts on how nature has shaped what we do artis­ti­cally, con­tin­u­ing on the post on the book, Inspired by Nature: Plants: The Building/Botany Con­nec­tion.

The ear­lier post talked about the overt nat­ural pat­terns that archi­tects have incor­po­rated into their works. The authors of this book also talk in more con­cep­tual terms about how the way plants grow could also help us under­stand how build­ings are designed.

One of the plant growth pat­terns is that of the epi­phyte, a plant that grows on the branches of another plant. In this way the sec­ond plant can gain access to higher lev­els of light high in a for­est. Just think of the many trop­i­cal orchids and bromeli­ads that use this strat­egy, liv­ing high in the tree­tops, enjoy­ing the brighter light and pro­tec­tion that a tree­top loca­tion affords.

Find­ing a par­al­lel in the archi­tec­tural realm the authors pro­pose this project by the Dutch firm, Kor­te­knie Stuhlmacher Archi­tecten. The Las Pal­mas Par­a­site sits on top of another struc­ture in Rot­ter­dam, The Nether­lands. By using the struc­ture below, this lit­tle green addi­tion takes advan­tage of the views and sun­light avail­able dozens of feet up with­out the need to build a tall foun­da­tional under­struc­ture to get it up so high in the rooftops. Although called a “par­a­site” even by the archi­tects, the project sits fairly benignly on its host, enjoy­ing the loca­tion, but not drink­ing up its pre­cious plant juices. To prove this point, the lit­tle struc­ture was dis­man­tled a few years after it was planted here on the rooftop, prob­a­bly with min­i­mal effect on the ware­houses below. [ source ]

A true par­a­site has a more marked effect on the health of its plant host. Plants like mistle­toe and dod­der use another plant for sup­port, as do epi­phytes, but they also tap into the host’s reserves and draw nutri­tion directly from it, some­times con­tribut­ing to the death of the host.

Archi­tec­tural equiv­a­lents of this are prob­a­bly a lot more com­mon­place than that of the epiphyte–You prob­a­bly have a neigh­bor with a room addi­tion or remodel that seems to suck the life juices out of the orig­i­nal build­ing. This book pro­pose a cou­ple exam­ples of archi­tec­tural par­a­sites, one of them being this Fire and Police Sta­tion in Berlin by Sauer­bruch Hut­ton Archi­tects. Here the bright red-and-green glass struc­ture hangs onto the frame of the orig­i­nal tra­di­tional brick struc­ture. I’m not sure it’s suck­ing the host’s juices dry, but it cer­tainly is mak­ing itself felt more assertively than with the epi­phyte above.

And the last exam­ple I wanted to share was one employ­ing the plant char­ac­ter­is­tic of the for­est canopy. The trees of trop­i­cal forests grow up and up, often cre­at­ing a thin con­cen­tra­tion of green­ery high above the for­est floor, with tall naked tree trunks sup­port­ing the high-altitude garden.

An archi­tec­tural equiv­a­lent is the Sharp Cen­tre for Design in Toronto, built by Alsop Archi­tects. This oth­er­worldly build­ing hov­ers high above the build­ings below, like high tree­tops hov­er­ing high above the shade-loving plants of the under­storey far below. [ source ]

Wild, eh?

None of these projects “fit it” in any tra­di­tional sense. The new build­ings don’t rely on mim­ic­k­ing how the exist­ing archi­tec­ture looks. But to me these build­ings have the same sense of happy coex­is­tence that well-paired plants in the gar­den have. You can appre­ci­ate the indi­vid­u­als, but together they make some­thing new and interesting.

September 24 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • places | Tags: architecture • inspired by nature | 2 Comments »

inspired by nature: patterns (coda)

After read­ing yesterday’s post on nat­ural motifs in archi­tec­ture, Linda shared this photo that she’d taken recently on her recent trip to Europe. One of her stops was Barcelona’s famous Parc Güell, designed by Antoni Gaudí, where she found this haunt­ing detail of palm fronds dec­o­rat­ing a fence.

Ever since I saw a lyri­cal doc­u­men­tary on Gaudí in the 1980s (I’m pretty sure it was Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Anto­nio Gaudí) vis­it­ing the park has been on my list of things to do…someday.

Archi­tec­ture and the botan­i­cal world of course have a spe­cial rela­tion­ship. Early shel­ters were con­structed of branches, twigs, thatch, fronds, logs, and other plant prod­ucts that would pro­vide shel­ter from the ele­ments. It some­how seems fit­ting that mem­o­ries of those early days of human civ­i­liza­tion live on in how we dec­o­rate our built envi­ron­ment, long after many of our build­ing mate­ri­als now come about through indus­trial processes and not through nat­ural ones: Even as we seek shel­ter from the nat­ural world, we con­tinue to need to cel­e­brate it.

Yes, humans seem to find ever darker things to do to each other and the rest of the planet. But quiet cel­e­bra­tions like this of what’s truly impor­tant con­tinue to give me guarded hope for the species.

September 23 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape • landscape design • places | Tags: Antoni Gaudí • Barceloa • fences • hardscape • inspired by nature | 1 Comment »

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 »

inspired by nature: colors

I wrote ear­lier about how the euca­lyp­tus trees in my area had started to shed their bark and men­tioned how there were some inter­est­ing col­ors com­bi­na­tions that were hap­pen­ing as part of the process. The trees have con­tin­ued shed­ding bark all sum­mer and now into fall.

Not long ago I was talk­ing to Linda about col­ors, and she’d men­tioned being struck by some of the same col­ors her­self, and how some­day she thought it might be inter­est­ing to make a quilt using some of those unex­pected jux­ta­po­si­tions of color.

For fun, I’ve taken some pho­tos and made color palettes based on them using the tools at colourlovers.com. Most of the com­bos come from col­ors on the bark, but the last one below derives from the col­ors of new leaves against the berry-red shades of the new stems.

These are all on the lit­eral side. You could take any of these pic­tures and get a lot wilder–especially into the plum-grape-purple territory.

The titles for the palettes–“widomaker”–comes from the dark nick­name gum trees have in Aus­tralia because of their casual habit of drop­ping branches onto unsus­pect­ing folk below. It’s not hyper­bole. Twice, just this past year, I’ve come within less than fifty feet of hav­ing big branches dropped on my head.

Color by COLOURlovers


Color by COLOURlovers


Color by COLOURlovers

September 21 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape • plant profiles | Tags: color combinations • eucalyptus • exfoliating bark • inspired by nature | No 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 »