The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture

Charissa Terranova, Meredith Tromble, Charissa Terranova, Meredith Tromble, Charissa N. Terranova, Meredith Tromble

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367873394
  9781138919341
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317419501
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture collects thirty essays from a transdisciplinary array of experts on biology in art and architecture. The book presents a diversity of hybrid art-and-science thinking, revealing how science and culture are interwoven. The book situates bioart and bioarchitecture within an expanded field of biology in art, architecture, and design. It proposes an emergent field of biocreativity and outlines its historical and theoretical foundations from the perspective of artists, architects, designers, scientists, historians, and theoreticians. Includes over 150 black and white images.

Part I Biologies and Architectural Histories

This part provides an overview of biology in modern architectural history. The seven chapters cover a 110-year span, beginning with German biocentrism in 1890 and its role in shaping the biologically based functionalism at the German Bauhaus, 1919–1933, and concluding with an analysis of the language of genetics and eugenics in postmodern and millennial neo-modernist architecture, 1990–present. Biology incarnates in various forms here.

In the first two chapters, the geographical context is Germany and Switzerland, where biology materializes within philosophies of architecture shaped by turn-of-the-century Lebensphilosophie [life philosophy], theoretical biology, Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s fusion of poetry, philosophy, and natural science. Through the Bauhaus, biological thinking never fully manifested in an architecture of literal biomorphic shapes and structures, but, as Oliver Botar shows, rather in varied political influences and positions across the spectrum rooted in biocentric thinking, ranging from László Moholy-Nagy’s socialist-inflected biofunctionalism and biocentrism and Hannes Meyer’s anti-Nazi Marxism on the far left to the “temptations of National Socialism” felt by botanist Raoul Francé, psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn, and psychologist Ludwig Klages on the far right.

By contrast, Anna Sokolina’s chapter focuses on two structures, the First and the Second Goetheanum buildings located in Dornach, Switzerland designed by Rudolf Steiner between 1913 and 1928, which decidedly manifest the expressive form of a biological, organic architecture. The design of Steiner’s buildings was steeped in his own metaphysical “anthroposophy,” a philosophy of transcendental connection rooted in lived material experience. The buildings constitute an architectural paean to Goethe’s holistic view of the world in which aesthetics and scientific observation are ruled by the same intellectual processes.

In “The Dwelling–Garden Dyad in Twentieth-Century Affordable Housing,” Chapter 4, Sarah Bonnemaison and Christine Macy write about three modern housing developments based on design philosophies rooted in the garden city vision of Ebenezer Howard. This chapter is equal parts revisionist and additive, in that it reframes two quite well-known projects from Germany and France, while introducing a new housing development in Halifax, Nova Scotia to the modern architecture canon. If the first two bear a sense of top-down organization, or design from the state, the third project was bottom-up and grassroots. All are recast here in terms of a complex-biological-systems approach within architecture. Bonnemaison and Macy focus on landscape, gardening, and ecology-based programming at the New Frankfurt housing district designed by Ernst May and built in Weimar Germany in the 1920s, the Unité d’habitation designed by Le Corbusier in Marseille, France built in the late 1940s, and the Tompkinsville settlement built in Nova Scotia, Canada in the late 1930s, a government-led reconstruction project led by planner Thomas Adams.

In “Birds of a Feather: Habit, Habituate, Habitat, Habitivity,” Chapter 3, Hadas Steiner looks to biology, zoology, patterns of animal habitation, and public spectatorship in a chapter devoted to the design of Northern Aviary at the London Zoo in the mid-1960s. The chapter brings together the natural sciences, taxonomies of the living, and experimental architectural design in the British context, rooting the cybernetic thinking of the mid-twentieth-century British architect Cedric Price and cybernetician Gordon Pask in the “proto-ecological accounts” of eighteenth-century clergyman and naturalist Gilbert White, nineteenth-century naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin, and twentieth-century biologist Julian Huxley.

Chapters 5 and 6, Peder Anker’s “Ouroboros Architecture” and Marie-Pier Boucher’s “Architectures of Aliveness: Building beyond Gravity,” follow a decidedly ecological theme. They are based on the biology of survival envisioned for otherworldly living—architecture based on outer space inhabitation—during the mid- to late twentieth century. Each author teases out early attempts at sustainable design that situate the reaches of the firmament and its possibilities of hosting a utopia of expansive architectural and urban space as guiding lodestars. Extra-planetary architecture, spaceships, and space modules are prototypes. Population crisis, neo-Malthusianism c. 1970, and Michel Foucault’s biopolitics are themes here.

Anker describes “Ouroboros,” an ecological architecture named for “a mythical dragon which survived by eating its own tail and feces” designed in 1976 by architectural students at the University of Minnesota. The building was a self-sustaining ecological house inflected by Thomas Malthus’ famous dictums on population that helped shape Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as they were revisited with urgency in Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) and The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (1972).

In Chapter 6, Boucher’s “Architectures of Aliveness: Building beyond Gravity,” weightlessness in architecture takes on a substantially theoretical quality. Boucher weaves an intricate brocade of ideas, central to which is Austrian modernist Frederick J. Kiesler’s correalism and professor at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France Gilles Clement’s program of research on the “implications of reduced gravity conditions and its impact on mental habits.” Boucher recasts health and the human body in terms of “architectures of aliveness,” the promise of imagined structures “that force their inhabitants to transform gravity into energy and to modulate that energy into a flux that connects the body with its own potentialities.” The body without weight here is mobile and becoming: literally moving between and across borders and philosophically at home with the permeability of life and death.

The part concludes with Christina Cogdell’s “Gene in Context: Complex Biological Systems as a Model for Generative Architecture,” Chapter 7, which focuses on recent theories of genetics, complex biological systems, evolutionary computation, and generative architecture. She focuses on the rhetoric and realities of DNA, gene manipulation, and the greater genome project and how it informed and created computational design in various university “architectural laboratories.” After reviewing the ideas and techniques of early proponents of evolutionary and genetic architecture, Cogdell positions generative architecture against the backdrop of theories of biological self-organization and emergence in nonlinear complex adaptive systems. At the center of Cogdell’s study is the work of LabStudio, a hybrid research and design network co-founded by Jenny E. Sabin and Peter Lloyd Jones in 2006, with active members based at Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and in Los Angeles. In conclusion, Cogdell interrogates radical propositions of growing an actually living genetic architecture in contemporary architectural practice.

The Biocentric Bauhaus

Oliver Botar

DOI: 10.4324/9781315687896-1

We see a young man standing tall, a look of intense concentration on his face. His eyelids are lowered. Behind him stands a woman (Figure 1.1).¹ They are outdoors under a gray sky. Her tanned right hand is visible as it lightly touches his shoulder, her eyes downcast. Their contact is intense, but not erotic. His focus seems inwards, towards his body, which is what engages the woman. We know that the young man is the Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy, and, judging by his age, that this photograph dates to the Bauhaus’ Dessau period (1925–1928). We do not know who the young woman is, but we are reasonably certain that she is conducting “Gindler Therapy,” a practice of bodywork developed by Elsa Gindler in close association with her partner from 1926 onwards, the biocentric Swiss music pedagogue Heinrich Jacoby, a therapy that intended to make the recipient more aware of both her environment and her own body.² Given the prevailing image of the Dessau Bauhaus as a kind of fortress of hard-nosed rationalistic thinking and practice, one might ask oneself “What was Moholy-Nagy, clad in his overalls, doing engaging in this practice?”

Figure 1.1 Photographer unknown, untitled [László Moholy-Nagy receiving Gindler Therapy from an unidentified woman] (?), n.d. [c. 1925–1930], modern print from vintage negative. Source: Hattula Moholy-Nagy Archive, Ann Arbor.

The Standard Narrative

The standard narrative of the Bauhaus goes something like this: The first phase was expressionist/occult, the tone being set by the expressionist nature of aspects of the Bauhaus Program, and by Johannes Itten’s tenure there from 1919 to 1923. The tenor of the second period from 1923 to 1928 was established by the “rational” approach of László Moholy-Nagy, and continues this narrative, when collaboration with industry became the mantra of the school. This was followed by the functionalist/Marxist phase from 1928 to 1931 under the second director Hannes Meyer. The last phase of the Bauhaus, in this standard history, was characterized by the architecture-oriented, apolitical directorship of Mies van der Rohe from 1931 to early 1933. While not falsifying history, this traditional scheme oversimplifies it.³ Since the early 1990s, I have been arguing that the “biocentric” worldview—with all its political complexities and contradictions usually swept under the rug—played an important role in the development of twentieth-century art. While clearly a precursor to today’s vast and powerful environmental movement, Biocentrism has been an embarrassment to many because of its ties to National Socialism. In this chapter I argue that though the School itself was decidedly on the anti-Nazi side of the Left–Right political spectrum, there were Nazis who supported the Bauhaus because it was a locus of biocentric thought. In light of this, the history of modernism, and therefore of the Bauhaus, is in need of revision.⁴ It is also important to situate the “biocentric Bauhaus” within its network of the Central European, and therefore international, biocentrically minded individuals. To this end, I have structured the chapter according to the cast of characters, highlighting their specific regional identities and origins.

The Biocentric Discourse Intersection

Biozentrik is the German term that I have adapted for use concerning the early twentieth-century world view that, based on Darwinism, neo-Lamarckism, biological determinism, Nietzscheanism, and a materialist Nature Romanticism, rejected anthropocentrism and espoused a Monist, neo-Vitalist and ecological view of the world. International in character, but decidedly grounded in Central Europe, this “Biocentrism” was the forerunner of today’s environmentalism.⁵

The two salient elements of Biocentrism were, first, what the German philosopher Max Scheler termed Vitalmystik [vital-mysticism] and the related kosmovitalen Einsfühlung [Cosmo-vital feeling of unity], i.e. the Romantic sense of wonder at and unity with nature; and second, biologism. As a worldview biologism privileges biology, applying its concepts and methodologies—such as evolution and “the survival of the fittest”—over other spheres of knowledge.⁶ There are two ideological poles of political scientific thinking based on biological observation, what we would, since Foucault, term “biopolitics,” that pervaded Western culture in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth. First, there is the Thomas Huxley- and Herbert Spencer-inspired “Social Darwinism” that attempted a biologistic legitimation of capitalist competition; and second, Prince Peter Kropotkin’s ‘Elysée Reclus’ and Pierre-Paul Prudhon’s Anarchism, which wished to justify altruistic social cooperation employing analogies from “nature.”⁷ At the turn of the last century, many major central European public intellectuals such as the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, the historian Oswald Spengler, the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Biologies and Architectural Histories
• Part 2 Biologies and Architectural Theories and Practices
• Part 3 Biologies and Art Histories
• Part 4 Biologies and Art Theories and Practices
• Index