D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's Generative Influences in Art, Design, and Architecture

From Forces to Forms

Ellen K. Levy, Charissa N. Terranova, Ellen K. Levy, Charissa N. Terranova

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350191150
• eBook ISBN: 9781350191136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Scottish zoologist D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's visionary ideas in On Growth and Form continue to evolve a century after its publication, aligning it with current developments in art and science. Practitioners, theorists, and historians from art, science, and design reflect on his ongoing influence. Overall, the anthology links evolutionary theory to form generation in both scientific and cultural domains. It offers a close look at the ways cells, organisms, and rules become generative in fields often otherwise disconnected. United by Thompson's original exploration of how physical forces propel and shape living and nonliving forms, essays range from art, art history, and neuroscience to architecture, design, and biology. Contributors explore how translations are made from the discipline of biology to the cultural arena. They reflect on how Thompson's study relates to the current sciences of epigenesis, self-organization, biological complex systems, and the expanded evolutionary synthesis. Cross-disciplinary contributors explore the wide-ranging aesthetic ramifications of these sciences. A timeline links the history of evolutionary theory with cultural achievements, providing the reader with a valuable resource.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Timeline
• Introduction
• 1 Are All Fish the Same Shape If You Stretch Them? The Victorian Tale of On Growth and Form
• 2 Physics in Biology—Has D’Arcy Thompson Been Vindicated?
• 3 The Beauty of the Metacarpal
• 4 “Drawn from Structures Living and Dead”—Art Collections and Connections, Growing and Forming
• 5 D’Arcy Thompson and Dorothy Wrinch: A Friendship, 1918–1948
• 6 D’Arcy Thompson’s Surrealism
• 7 Structures of Light as “An Ethnologist’s Jewels”: D’Arcy Thompson, The Independent Group, and Montage
• 8 Exhibition as Extended Organism: The Evolutionary Agency of Richard Hamilton’s Growth and Form
• 9 The Invisible Motives of Growth and Form
• 10 Diagrams of Entropic Forces: New Growth and Form
• 11 Tracing Threads of the Living Organism
• 12 The Growth and Form of ArtNano Innovations: Inspirations from D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s
• 13 On Growth and Form and Lightweight Structures
• 14 D’Arcy Thompson Going Forward: Seven Views
• Index
• Plates
• Imprint