Inseminations. Juhani Pallasmaa

Читать онлайн.
Название Inseminations
Автор произведения Juhani Pallasmaa
Жанр Архитектура
Серия
Издательство Архитектура
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781119622239



Скачать книгу

biophilic beauty

      Also, the countless vernacular building traditions of the world with their impressive features of adaptation to prevailing local conditions, such as climate and available materials, were not much thought about until Bernard Rudofsky's exhibition Architecture Without Architects at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1964.9 Anthropological studies have revealed the cultural, symbolic, functional and technical refinements of the unselfconscious processes of construction mediated by illiterate and embodied traditions. However, vernacular traditions still remain as a curiosity in architectural studies, although the deepening of research in the sustainability of human settlements and ways of constructions will certainly awake interest in this neglected area of human building culture.

      The interest in animal architecture among architects and architectural scholars has remained totally anecdotal although inspiring documentation on animal constructions has existed since Reverend John George Wood's remarkable treatise Homes Without Hands published in 1865.10 Karl von Frisch's Animal Architecture of 197411 was instrumental in re‐awaking my own by then already forgotten childhood fascination in building activities of animals. Michael H Hansell's books and exhibition in Glasgow in 1999 have provided scientific ground on the functioning principles as well as materials and ways of constructing among animals.

      The book La Poétique de l'espace (1958) by the French philosopher of science and poetic imagery has been one of the most influential books in the recent theorizing of architecture surprisingly includes a chapter on nests.12 He quotes the view of Ambroise Paré written in 1840: “The enterprise and skill with which animals make their nests is so efficient that it is not possible to do better, so entirely do they surpass all masons, carpenters and builders; for there is not a man who would be able to make a house better suited to himself and to his children than these little animals build for themselves. This is so true, in fact, that we have a proverb according to which men can do everything except build a bird's nest”.13

      In relation to the size of their builders many animal constructions exceed the scale of human constructions. Others are constructed with a precision unimaginable in human construction. Artifact‐building animals teach us that the organization of even simple animal life is complex and subtle. Close studies by scanning electron microscope (SEM) reveal mind‐boggling refinements of structures in a scale invisible to the human eye and totally beyond the capabilities of human builders, such as the microscopic structural ingenuities of spider or caddis fly larva constructions.

      So far, the institution that has made the most serious research on the internal logic of certain animal constructions and their adaptability in human architecture is the Institute of Lightweight Structures at the University of Stuttgart directed by Frei Otto, a notable architect and constructor. These studies have focused on net and pneumatic structures.14

      After mentioning some parallels, I would like to point out certain significant differences in animal and human architecture. Let me begin with the time factor. Animal building processes are the result of immensely long evolutionary processes, whereas our own architectural history is very short in comparison.

      Spiders and their web‐building skills have evolved, perhaps, during some 300 million years; The Economist published high‐resolution X‐ray micro‐tomograph images of 312‐ million‐year‐old fossilized arachnids that had eight legs but lacked spinnerets and presumably could not produce silk. When such periods of evolutionary development are compared with the meagre couple of million years of human development since Homo erectus stood up on two legs, we can easily expect animal building skills to exceed ours. There were surely animal architects on earth for tens of millions of years before Homo sapiens put together his first clumsy structures. As I said earlier, our conventional concepts of architecture are restricted to constructions that have taken place over roughly 5000 years of Western high culture.

      Sverre Fehn, the great Norwegian architect, once said to me in a private conversation: ‘The bird nest is absolute functionalism, because the bird is not conscious of its death’.15 This aphoristic and cryptic