From the FEB/MAR issue of Seed:
The Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg, Germany. Credit: Zaha Hadid Architects
From Sweden to Botswana, Germany to Japan, master builders are incorporating recent developments in math and physics, as well as elements of biology and other fields, into their designs. The result has been some of the most innovative and interesting constructions of the last several decades. Seed presents five examples of contemporary architecture that have been influenced by science. Welcome to the new architectural revolution.
No shift in architectural practice in recent times has been more fruitful or astonishing than the profession's current embrace of scientific models and ideas. While the Modern movement of the last century famously incorporated the latest advances in technology and industry, there were remarkably few attempts to come to terms with the more radical scientific developments of the era, such as relativity or quantum mechanics.
Advertisement
Today's architect, however, is increasingly schooled in cutting-edge developments in science and mathematics, from neuroscience and computation, to complexity theory and embryology. Indeed, there has been a surprising turn in architectural thinking during the last 15 years that has brought it far from its ancient roots in mechanics—say from the post-and-lintel methods that remained nearly unchallenged for 3,000 years—to what one might call a biological habit of mind. Today's architect is more likely to study problems of form in the natural world than those within the history of his or her own discipline.
Yet the relationship between science and building is neither new nor strange. One could even argue from its pervasiveness that it began in our Stone Age past: Think of the precise snow domes of the Canadian Inuit, the densely thatched conical structures of the Kalahari's San bushmen and the felted hair yurts of nomads on the Chinese and Eurasian steppes.
The right angle, born 3,000 years ago, would continue on through even the great flowering of classical times. While building science remained essentially the artful deployment of columns and beams, the Greeks could not help but add exquisite refinements such as the famous entases--the artificial bulges near the middles of columns that counteract the concaving effects of vision. This beguiling idea was derived from complex calculation systems based in geometry. Later, the Age of the (Gothic) Cathedrals would bring an unprecedented virtuosity and expressiveness to bear on the production of architecture, as well as new techniques of templating stones in order to master the very subtle mathematics required for progressively-changing angles and massing of material. If the late Medieval period was not yet the heyday for science, it was certainly the high point in the technical arts; the cathedrals were among the very greatest expressions they found.
What is commonly known as the 'scientific revolution' is rarely thought to have had an origin in architecture, yet the very idea of the homogeneous and regular space that underlay Galileo's measurements of motion came from the building arts: Two architects in 15th century Florence, Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti (particularly Brunelleschi), devised the modern system of coordinates that made it possible to relate every volume, vault or volute of a building within a single integrated whole. Brunelleschi's insight, based on the power of the vanishing point—the mathematical concept of infinity—that became so popular in painting (and, later, photography), also led to Brunelleschi's solution to the decades-old debate of how to complete the unfinished dome of Florence's Duomo (a combination of measuring wires fixed at the centers of curvature, and dual, self-supporting horizontal rings of stone). Brunelleschi's Santo Spirito Church, the other Florentine "miracle," remains a tour de force in scientific modeling and exposition, using the space of the eye very much like the telescope and microscope did 200 years later.