Architecture, Naturally

Architecture has maintained an oddly consistent relationship to notions of nature throughout history. Nature is assumed to be muse and metaphor to architecture. Fast-forwarding through history, consider Vitruvius’s 1^st century treatise De Architectura that celebrated “the truth of nature” as inspiration to architecture.[1] Or, consider Laugier’s 1755 allegory Essai sur L’Architecture on the primitive hut composed from nature as an origin story of architecture embodying simplicity and purity.[2] And more recently, consider mathematical biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s 1917 On Growth and Form, which served as an inspiration to early generative and computational architecture in the 1990s.[3] These are only a few examples that illustrate the envy by which architecture emulates, references, or adopts aspects of nature. However, as notions of nature have expanded to become increasingly complex and multivalent, architecture’s previously singular understanding of its relationship to nature has shifted. In what way have social attitudes toward nature marked and informed architecture’s complex relationship with nature today?