When architecture and sculpture collide

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When architecture and sculpture collide (1)

When architecture and sculpture collide

While we see a certain gigantic architecture suffering from the Babel syndrome, trying to reach the sky, we, seemingly forget that it is based on the human scale such as defined by the Renaissance.
Praise and love the human scaled Architecture!

This is a Hundertwasser building.Waldspirale Darmstadt / architect: Friedensreich Hundertwasser.

Construction Materials Based on Biomimetic Principles

New Construction materials based on Biomimetic Principles / Pohl Architekten
The COCOON_FS is a structure that integrates architectural sculpture.

 

When questionned about what represents the evidence of human genius, most people answer Architecture. The seven wonders are still in memories. Through time, humankind has tried and succeeded in overpassing the previous tour de force by creating a new one, more impressive, more gigantic, more…as an answer to this permanent challenge.

Yet, Architecture existed not only long before history, but long before humankind! Many species have masterised their own techniques in building their own habitational structures. Whether individual, or collective, animal architectures have shown us many ways of constructions which were not regarded as more than part of zoology.

Humans tend to insist on their superiority, when competition is a (quite primitive) form of evaluating a potential opponent. The Pyramids were named so by the greeks, very pejoratively, out of a form of bread.

As such, they named “crocodile” κροκόδιλος (crocodilos) the impressive Nile’s saurians meaning (small) lizard. Still, Architecture has progressed since the start of industry.

Gustave Eiffel’s well known emblematic tower was built with steel beams. Little is known that its design is curvilinear, based on a hyperbolic paraboloid construction. As a matter of fact, as no one knew how to deal with steel beams, it was erected by carpenters!

Nowadays, industry is growing, inducing many outstanding constructions, but, in the meantime, forgetting quite an elementary, yet fundamental rule: the golden number, divine proportion, as a basic reminder of the true scale which is the human body.

Meanwhile, technologies have been and are migrating from analogy to digital.

Tomorrow, Architecture will not be built but printed. Therefore, modular, and free. So, following the example of nature, Architecture will obey the rules of MORPHOGENESIS, just as natural architecture does.

As a sort of “back to the future” still regarded as primitive, human scaled architecture will probably lead the way, preceeding and forwarding today’s normality.

In that sense, African art was, at first, mocked, then regarded as inferior, until becoming inspirational, as the birds inspired Icarus till the Wright brothers flew for the first time, sixty nine years only before the moon landing…

African adobe sculptural architecture. When architecture and sculpture collide

5 comments… add one
  • Eddie Two Hawks May 19, 2016 @ 16:14

    Great study of architecture as seen through time and the world.

    • Xea B May 19, 2016 @ 18:10

      Thank you Eddie! We are glad you appreciated it!

  • Addé Jun 24, 2018 @ 8:32

    Well, it’s the hen first. Seriously, no one can answer your question yet. Physicists would have the best hypothesis for as far as we can understand them.

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