After reading Benyus biomimicry essay I wanted to dive a little deeper into other types of design using animals as design inspiration. The three major types I came across were Biomimicry, biomorphic, and biologist design. Biologist design intrigued me because it is directly rooted in science and research the human mind and body. Salingaros writes in his essay, “The idea of a biological connection has been used in turn by traditional architects, modernists, postmodernists, deconstructivists, and naturally, the ‘organic form’ architects.” Much like organicism the term has been used in arguments for many different architectural styles and rationales of thinking. The main source he draws from is Steven Pinker a professor of psychology at MIT. Pinker has in my opinion an amazing rationale expressed in his book, The Blank Slate, “The belief that human tastes are reversible cultural preferences has led social planners to write off people’s enjoyment of ornament, natural light, and human scale and force millions of people to live in drab cement boxes.” I was struck with the idea of ornament in organicist design, because it brings up the question should ornament be integral to the design process. I think this is very interesting because modernists were void of ornament claiming it superfluous and flamboyant. When looking at this with a biomimic sensibility animals including humans use ornament for self-expression, mating, and warning signs. Architects like David Ruy mix ornamentation with technology and have it work in a multi-performative way. Ornament should be considered an integral aspect of architecture and should not be looked past in a design process, if anything it should be the architects job to make sure ornament is used to make a project more unified. These ideas and facts have lead me to understand that biologist design should really be synonymous to organicism. This is because of the technological and the systematic experiments resulting in scientific data. Biologist design subverts the ephemeral ideas of biomorphic and looks solely at the biology.
Benyus, Janine M. Biomimicry: Innovation inspired by nature. New York: Harper Perennial, 2002.
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Viking-Penguin, New York, 2002.
Nikos A., Salingaros. University of Texas at San Antonio, “TOWARDS A BIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM: LESSONS FROM STEVEN PINKER..” Last modified March 2003. Accessed September 7, 2013. http://www.math.utsa.edu/~yxk833/pinker.html.
