Caged Birds, Mannequins and Biomimicry in Architecture

3D (Starch) Print inside of a Birdcage. Masters of Architecture Thesis, 2009

Biomorphic or "animate" form has become increasingly popular among contemporary designers since advancements in computer technology have given us the ability mimic natural patterns and complex geometries. These techniques often produce incredibly beautiful objects with little if any critical attention to the implications using animate life as a reference for static architecture. The desire to make an artificial creation appear “natural” has been present in art and design practice from the very beginning. A long lineage of architects have progressively attempted to embody universal truths through the recollection of particular geometries. For most of our history these aspirations have been cosmological or overtly religious. During modernism they were based on a faith in humanist rationality and the machine.

The drive to create artificial intelligence, to fabricate life, is difficult to separate from a deep desire to become divine masters of our world. To make animate the inanimate implies total understanding and control. It is to become powerful and god-like. And yet we must learn time and again that life cannot be controlled or predicted. In fact the effort to own life definitively destroys it. A caged bird is the ultimate degradation of our relationship with natural world. It is a humiliating admission that we have forgotten how to relate to the unpredictability life and other living things. Our caging or arresting of animate form is an act of destruction, not creation. It is a symptom of a necrophilous impulse. Like the mannequin it easily becomes an empty mimicry of something that we think we understand but are unable to sense or feel. When architecture is pursued only as a personification, or a flattened representation of animation, it produces only a stillbirth, an imposter, a thing that cannot possibly behave organically because it refuses to accept a continuously adverse relationship with its environment. Such forms speak of architectures insecurity.

In order to survive architecture cannot be reduced to an alienated object. It must be understood as a silent canvas that embraces the dynamic change of its natural environment. Our responsibility as designers is not to fabricate an image of animation but to establish a background against which animation, movement or change can be registered. Organic architecture may thus be redefined not as a frozen moment of activity (a still life), but as evolving relationship of space, materiality, function and experience.

Architecture is alive because it is an environment ...not an animal or a machine.