Author: Gabriel Boyajian

“Cities are not static Objects but active arenas marked by continuous energy flow and transformation of which landscape and building and other hard parts are not permanent structure but transitional manifestations. Like a biological organism the urbanized landscape is an open system”

This quote is taken from Alan Berger’s Drosscape essay and it evokes a relevant yet broad question. Can our urban environments be considered organicist? Originally I thought that New York City with its very regimented grid could be considered organicist because it seems like a collection of building types or cells with different forms that become a unified whole. Our current urban cities have extensive and clear systems with noticeable profiles and act like an animals feeding off each other consuming and producing. The streets, sewers, and electrical systems unify these massive monsters of life. But as soon as you zoom in scale does the City still act like an organism? Looking at one building it’s hard to think of it as a living thing. In an Essay titled ”How to Design with the Animal” Edward M. Dodington continues this discussion stating that we should view our cities as landscapes rather than living beings. We must see our built environment not as a Terra Firma but as a moving shifting landscape; as James Corner puts it, a “Terra Fluxus” a ground constantly in movement, and change. Urbanity as the way I see it is a collection of animals not a single beast that has been created and inhabited by sentient beings. Thus I have concluded that we should not see our urban environments as organicist. Even though they contain a great deal of ecologies they do not act as a unified whole and must only be considered as an environment or “urban landscape”. I am convinced that Organicism relates only on smaller scales and every new building after the next is one mutation after another some good and others bad. Collectively when viewing all these mutations whether it be rural, suburban, or urban they don’t create a single whole, but rather a man made jungle of disorientation.

REFERENCES

Berger, Alan. Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.

Waldheim, Charles. The Landscape Urbanism Reader. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.

Dodington, Edward. How to Design With the Animal:Constructing Post Humanist Environments. Houston : Proquest LLC, 2009.

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.