There are some extraordinary architects amongst the animal kingdom. Our fellow mammals include many a burrow-digger or nest builder. The beaver is somewhat notorious for his ability to shape an entire landscape, redirect rivers, create lakes with dams and harvest and employ large numbers of trees. The beaver lodge is also extraordinary; a dry and cozy space with only underwater entrances.
The birds, of course, are the nest-builders par excellence, from little round, mud swallow's nests to giant flat eagle's aeries. One of the most handsome and amazing sort of nest are those woven by the weaver birds. For instance, in southest asia the Baya weaver's hanging woven nests, which are can be individual or in large colonies, are suspended often from thorny palm or acacias to make them inaccessible to predators. Southern Africa's sociable weaver builds huge, communal, multigenerational complexes. My favorite is the bowerbird; the males build bowers to attract the females and decorate them with coloured objects they find or pilfer. I was introduced to the bowerbird by David Attenborough's wonderful description.
Such beautiful, organic nests have inspired human copycats to make some very whimsical achitectural spaces, with little more than the branches and vegetation employed by animals. Consider the high-end nests built by South African advertising-creative-director-turned-nest-maker Porky Hefer, who is inspired by weaver birds. Biomimickery in tree houses and even additions to homes!
Jason Fann builds nests for people as extensions on homes, and even the Treebones Resort, where you can spend a night one of his nests.
Jason Fann builds nests from tree branches from mainly eucalyptus trees in forests local to him in Big Sur, California. He weaves them together (with some counter-sunk screws to hold the structure) and builds spaces large enough for say, eight people to sit, or a couple to sleep - including in the Treebones Resort, a sort of treehouse nest hotel.
Philip Dougherty makes sculptural works directly from living trees. They allude to nests and other examples of animal architecture, as well as human activities like basketmaking. He too weaves branches and twigs together.
Philip Dougherty works directly with living trees to make works of architectural sculpture (via webecoist)
The Great Swallow by Benjamin Verdonck
The Great Swallow, a 2008 Rotterdam performance piece and sculptural human-sized swallow's nest by Benjamin Verdonck, takes biomimickery of nests to astounding and perhaps absurb heights.
Physicist Arie van 't Riet specializes in radiation physics, and very low energy x-rays in particular. He began making artwork employing x-ray nature photographs, where radiography intersects fine art. His colourized x-ray photos of bioramas are a sort of see-through wunderkammer. He creates entire scenes in x-ray form. It makes me think of how the natural world might look if my eyes could see in x-ray wavelengths (or those back-of-the-comic-book x-ray specs really worked).
As a printmaker, I also appreciate how he's worked with Hans van 't Riet to produce Toboyo prints, or photo-polymer etchings, using UV light to transfer the x-rays to a plate which was inked and hand-printed. There's something poetic about using one non-visible wavelength to photograph right through lifeforms and show their structure, and then use another non-visible wavelength to bite an etching plate and print onto paper- combining the high tech with the centuries-old artistic medium.
Transparent flowers, revealing their skeletal structures, are also the subject of architecture-student-turned-artist Macoto Murayama's work, but his is a very different medium. He uses computer graphics, 3dsMAX software usually employed in architecture (or animation), to model and then Photoshop and Illustrator depict the anatomy of flowers. It's like a specialized form of scientific illustration, as he bases his images on his own careful dissection of flowers
Minerals and crystals are so common in contemporary culture I decided to make a second post on crystals. The distinction is sometimes a bit arbitrary, as many minerals are crystals, but today's post is about art and things which celebrate the wondrous shapes of crystals, and remind you (if mathematically inclined) of group theory. Often, you see crystalline forms growing out of everything from fashion:
I recently saw a building inspired by the chemistry of salt (↬The Fox Is Black). Architect David Jameson designed the NaCl House of Bethesda, Maryland, USA, to be white with a crystal-like structure mimicking mineral rock salt. While the lines are as rectilinear as most buildings, the varying scales, like a natural crystal, are unexpected and beautiful.
Crystals seem to be omnipresent in a lot of popular art and culture, but I had not previously seen their influence on architectural design (at least not in such an obvious and direct fashion).
When I was searching more more information about this, I found the proposal by Faulders Studio for the GEOtube Building for Dubai, which would be able to grow and expand, as it features a self-built exoskeleton made from accumulated sea salt deposits. Built of a structure of 'vascular pipes', the mesh around the building would employ solar power to pump salt water from its pond (which in turn would be pumped the 4.6 km from the high salinity Persian Gulf) to the roof, and then down through the vascular pipes (driven by gravity). The salt water would be misted from the pipes and salt would accrue on the mesh through evaporation (as shown in the images of meshes above). The water there is so salty that the building's transparent skin would rapidly take on a new crystalline appearance. After 15 to 20 years, the architects predict the skin would be opaque; then the salt could be harvested, and one presumes, the process begun anew. This strikes me as an innovative way to let the extremes of the local environment actually serve to benefit of, and to some degree, build the edifice. (&↬web urbanist)
What brought this to mind today, was actually CBC radio, who were playing a tribute concert to the late Kate McGarrigle. It included a cover of her composition, 'The Salt Song' by Jane Siberry, who called it a frighteningly honest love song. Here, I've found Kate and her sister Anna's own version for you. I find it delightful, happy yet bittersweet, though not salty, and effortlessly accurate.
I'm sorry to have neglected this blog of late. I've been busy with a number of things, so I thought I'd bring you a metaphorical miscellany of things which have been occupying my mind. One of the things that has been taking my time has been working on visualization of scientific data. The intersection of art and scienc being close to my heart, I attended a workshop with scientists, graphic designers, journalists and other communicators, and as such have been thinking about new ways of visualizing both for understanding and for explaing results. Complex networks of data are known as 'hairballs' (for, I think, obvious reasons). There are a number of oper-source packages for dealing with plotting and representing such monsters. Many of these programs are Python-based. As a result, I've been trying to teach myself some Python. I found this data visualization of the history of the code I'm trying to learn so I can make more exciting and effective visualizations an ironic thing to stumble upon. It's also quite pretty with all the overlapping, translucent layers:
Check out similar visualizations at code swarm "an experiment in organic software visualization."
Speaking of layers of overlapping, translucent layers, I found this "Photo Opportunities" project by Swiss artist Corinne Vionnet quite beautiful. She found and combined hundreds of perhaps cliché tourist photos of famous locations and layered them to create something impressionistic and beautiful:
Swiss-based architect and programmer Michael Hansmey employs algrithms as design tools. In 'Subdivision: Ornamented Columns' he used iterative subdivision as a means of creating elaborately ornamented columns with millions of facets, beginning with an ideal Doric column. The layers are laser-cut from 1mm sheet to create these 2.7 m glorious columns. Read about his process here. I just imagine what Gaudí would do with such technology at his disposal.
(I saw this in a couple of places - most recently via Thersic.)
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