Organic Architecture



Organic Architecture

 '''The straight line belongs to man - the curve to God. 'Antoni Gaudi ''

Organic vegetables, organic bread, organic toothpaste... the word has been used as a kind of talisman to ward off the evils of consumer societies in which so many things, from what people eat to the homes they live in, have become mass-produced, unsettling and even unhealthy.

A  Organic architecture is an equally loose term, yet it conveys an idea of buildings designed to grow naturally from the ground they stand on. It conjures too the idea of buildings that are made of natural materials, that seem somehow to belong in a way that Classical temples never do. It also conveys the idea of buildings that make a play on natural forms and employ geometries that have little to do with Euclid and mathematical perfection, as well as suggesting buildings that are designed to be wide open to the elements.

В  In extreme cases, as with the work of Antoni Gaudi, buildings really do seem to be plants or animals growing naturally out of the ground rather than being projected unnaturally into the sky. Gaudi created a form of architecture made up of what appeared to be bones and sinews, or tendrils and shoots. Architects like Bruce Goff and Herb Greene shaped a shaggy architecture that might be home for animals and insects as well as human beings. Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the century's most influential architects, left a legacy of Organic buildings that fit into the depths of rural America as they do in the grid-iron Manhattan. Imre Makovecz, who founded an entire school of Organic architects and craftsmen in Hungary, described his designs as 'building beings', and indeed at their strange and haunting best they really do feel as if they are alive and breathing.

С  What all the buildings of this type have in common is the sense of being close to nature, either in terms of location or materials used in their construction. Each of the buildings is highly individualistic and none is held back by precedent or convention. They are all in their own way highly emotional buildings, but unlike the architectural expression of Postmodernism, none is cynical, too clever or too knowing. Quite the reverse: most have innocence about them, each an attempt to take architecture into unknown waters.

D  Veering between the eccentric and the proudly magnificent, this loose fraternity of building includes some of the century's most likeable as well as curious. With increasing concern for ecological issues and the natural world, it seems likely that Organic architecture will blossom rather than wilt.

Casa Mila, Antoni Gaudi, 1910, Barcelona Spain''' '''

E  This truly strange building is known locally as la Pedrera, or the quarry. Yet, far from being a heap of stones, it is a brilliantly resolved stone palazzo into which Gaudi has poured sinuous apartments that are like nothing else on earth. The seven-storey building is grouped around two courtyards so that each flat, large or small, is lit. Outside, the block appears to stand on the legs of stone elephants, while balconies and window mouldings jut out like strange lips beneath a roof garden which is like a Dali painting come to life.

F  The architect, Antoni Gaudi l Cornet (1852-1926)was one of the most extraordinary architects ever. A devout Catholic, he lived the life of an ascetic monk and was taken for a tramp when admitted to hospital having been fatally knocked down by a tram while pondering on the construction of his unfinished masterpiece, the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia (Sacred Family). Gaudi's was a highly individualistic attempt to reconcile Architecture to Nature. The truly remarkable thing about Gaudi's work is that it is always logical in its own wilful manner: he may have looked at the world in a way very different from the majority of twentieth-century architects, yet he is never gratuitous and never sinks into kitsch. So demanding is the alternative logic of Gaudi's sense of structure that it is obvious why he left no real followers, or no one competent to take the risks he did.

Sydney Opera House, Jorn Utzon, 1973, Sydney Australia''' '''

G  It's fair to say that this highly memorable building put Sydney on the international map in a way that it had never been before. In truth, the Sydney Opera House is both brilliant and frustrating at one and the same time. No one can doubt the thrill of its roofline - whether you see there in those remarkable roofshells the beaks of seagulls, shark fins, waves or wimples - and the fascinating story there is to be had of its construction. The latter was left largely to Peter Rice, a very young structural engineer who was to be awarded the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture before he died in 1992. The interiors of the building, though, are rather pedestrian: the thrill of the exterior fails to survive the long haul through the lobbies to the auditorium itself. This is probably because Jorn Utzon (born 1918), the Danish architect, resigned - or was pushed off the project - in 1966 and the building was completed without his special genius. Rather like Gaudi, Utzon continued to work on the design of his buildings as he went along, so that we do not know quite how he would have finished his most ambitious work. His other buildings, mostly in bis native Denmark, are all inventive and combine an intriguing marriage of experimentation with new materials and technologies and Organic forms.