If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture. - Oscar Wilde
Architecture is human. Despite their exquisite beauty, burrows, hives, nests and anthills are creations of instinct. Design by humans considers options, means and methods of creation, solving problems of desire, beyond functional accommodations.
For architecture, nature provides only indications and analogies, not models to imitate. - Leon Krier
Humanity is distinct from all other life on earth because, for us, instinct is inadequate. So it is with architecture. Outcomes in architecture are twofold. First, like the designs of instinct, human construction must resist gravity, shield against weather, fit its site and be buildable, or it fails at its Prime Directive.
Nature builds up her refined and invisible architecture, with a delicacy eluding our conception, yet with a symmetry and beauty which we are never weary of admiring. - John Herschel
But for human-created architecture shelter goes beyond survival. Like the burrow, buildings protect. Like the hive and the beaver's dam, buildings allow for use beyond protection. But like almost every human act, the value of architecture goes beyond those essential outcomes, and describes our motivations.
Architecture is what nature cannot make. Architecture is something unnatural but not something made up. - Louis Kahn
So the second criteria for the human building is aesthetic. Humans who intentionally make anything perceive the art that it embodies. These outcomes are beyond the necessities accommodated by any construction. The distinction between outcome and motivation exists nowhere but in the human eye and mind.
Nature only sides with truth. - Adolf Loos
Just like every motivation found in the human condition, architecture has conflicting values. The outcomes of architecture, the objective judgments applied to any building beyond the primal realities of the hive, nest or burrow are easiest when motivations and values are left unconsidered. Judging outcomes is the way we rationalize our reactions to anything, including architecture. But those justifications are inadequate bases of apprehension and offer a fully incomplete understanding of how and why things are made. The challenge of apprehension beyond use and experience is understanding the motivations that humans uniquely value.
What is Art, monsieur, but Nature concentrated? - Honore de Balzac
Those uniquely human values beyond instinct are as hard-wired as sex, hunger or sleep. The human condition demands justification for these meanings that we so essentially experience. The rationalization for anything that we cannot prove necessitates faith in the meanings that are crucial to living beyond survival.
Principles that drive equilibrium in nature's design also power human design. - Maggie Macnab
Those human fabrications of defined value and meaning are often applied to things that we actually do not make – like faith and beauty. Religion and architecture are the human grasp at the meanings of primal value the world offers to anyone open to seeing them. When apprehending what we do not control, we need to give up any sense of universal truth or objective certainty that is central to any Canon. Human constructions only serve humans. That is the hardest lesson to learn.
There is no better designer than nature. - Alexander McQueen
This article is part of the ArchDaily Topics: Architecture Without Buildings. Every month we explore a topic in-depth through articles, interviews, news, and projects. Learn more about our ArchDaily topics. As always, at ArchDaily we welcome the contributions of our readers; if you want to submit an article or project, contact us.
