Organic Style in Architecture: Harmonizing with Nature in Design Sam, May 8, 2024May 8, 2024 Organic style in architecture is a subject rarely discussed in our modern times, and is certainly difficult to practice due to its broad definition.This article aims to provide a framework in which organic architecture can be studied and practiced thoroughly.Table of Contents ToggleWhat is Organic Architecture? History of Organic ArchitectureOrganic Architecture Characteristics Integration with NatureUse of Natural MaterialsFluidity and Curvilinear FormsHarmony with Surroundings Organic Architecture Examples 1. Fallingwater2. Casa Batlló 3. The Lotus Temple 4. The Hive 5. Sagrada Família6. Casa Organica Notable Organic Architects1. Frank Lloyd Wright2. Louis Sullivan3. Antoni Gaudí4. Alvar AaltoFrequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on Organic Style in Architecture.What Does Organic Design Mean?What is the Most Prominent Organic Architecture Example?What is Modern Organic Architecture?What are the Benefits of Organic Design in Architecture?Where Does Organic Architecture Get It’s Inspiration?Recommended PostsConclusionWhat is Organic Architecture? Organic architecture is a philosophy of architecture which promotes harmony between human habitation and the natural world. This is achieved through design approaches that are sympathetic and well integrated with its site, so that buildings, furnishings, and surroundings become unified, interrelated, and part of a holistic interplay.Organic architecture is also known as “architecture of life”. The phrase was invented by Frank Lloyd Wright and became the title of a collection of the famous architect’s writings. It is his belief that the term “organic” should be construed to mean a new version of naturalistic or romantic style, but instead the buildings should fit into their location and environment and appear to grow from the site. Frank Lloyd Wright used the term organic architecture to describe his environmentally integrated approach to architectural design.The word “organic” describes a visual and conceptual connection to nature. What Wright tried to achieve is to blend the building and the environment into a unified interdependent composition. He believed that architecture should not interfere with the natural state of the landscape. Building should look like it was a natural growth from the site. By doing so, Wright is able to achieve simplicity in design, a fundamental part of organic architecture. This is very much evident from his built work, the falling water house.Simple geometric forms are used throughout the building, be it the residence, or the guest house and they are interlocked with the natural forms of the prevailing rock and the flowing water of the falls. Though the building appears to be complex structurally, it is in fact unified as a single entity, which is very much part of the environment upon which it is built. Wright kept the design concept very much a part of his approach in the Prairie houses. The use of a low sloping roof, open floor plan and integration of the exterior and the interior are all significant features of each house designed in this period. This method which is drawn from the Japanese, is an example of sustainability. The houses provide a shelter which is good to live in and they embody a healthy and comfortable way of life. In Wright’s case he wanted to propagate the American way of living seen as a parallel to nature, which he believed gave a sense of genuine freedom in a classless society.Now that we understand what organic architecture means, let’s delve into it’s history.History of Organic ArchitectureThe organic architecture philosophy aims to create a harmonious relationship between human habitation and the natural environment. To do this, design strategies must be considerate of and well-suited to the site, resulting in a cohesive, interconnected system of structures, furnishings, and landscape that work together harmoniously.Sullivan believed ornamentation to be function and argued that “form follows function”. Similarly, building off the work of Viollet-le-Duc Sullivan formulated the idea that “a building’s form should grow from the nature of the materials and methods of construction, as well as from ideal functional requirements.” His ideas on the matter were elaborate and closely linked to modernist and postmodernist views on the matter. Sullivan’s influence in turn helped define Wright’s early ideas and gave rise to what was at the time a revolutionary concept.The term “organic architecture” was thought to be invented by Frank Lloyd Wright. However, it was first created by the father of biologist, Goethe, when he made comparisons of architectural form to that of a plant. Through his talk of organic architecture, Goethe brought forth a metaphor that would change the path of architectural design. It is from Goethe’s beliefs and Wright’s myriad writings that the definition of organic architecture is drawn. To maintain simplicity, Wright states “that form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union”. This, at its core, is the definition of organic architecture. However, the concept goes deeper than a mere aesthetic approach, which is a common misconception in understanding organic architecture.From his understanding and through the meaning of his words, the substance of them can be seen through his work. Wright’s passion and belief in what organic architecture is can be seen throughout his years of practice. In 1931, Wright built and completed what was to be known as one of the best examples of organic architecture, the fallingwater. The house was built over waterfalls, where the landscape and sounds of the waterfalls filled the house constantly. It was a house built from and for the landscape. Wright had said, “I want to live with the waterfall, not to leave it,” leaving clear indication that his goal for the building was to live with and amongst the nature of the site. The house itself was then constructed of local sandstone, in order to give the appearance that it had risen from the grounds of the site.This use of materials coincides with another part of Wright’s idea of organic architecture, of never using materials and applying them to a point where they do not belong. Essentially, the architecture must be the proper use and balanced architecture of the materials at hand.Now let’s discuss the most notable features of this architectural style.Organic Architecture Characteristics Here are the main characteristics of organic architecture:Integration with NatureOrganic style in architecture efficaciously reduces the needs of energy, water (another really precious resource nowadays), and materials, by using the principle of integrating the building with nature.This way of intervening in the environment was proposed for the first time consistently and incrementally, and it constituted not only an aesthetic approach but also a practical and philosophical effort. A philosophical effort in that in organic architecture, there is a cosmic vision where all elements, natural and artificial, are part of a rational unity. A practical vision in that all of the buildings are thought in their relation to nature, according to climatic conditions, and the use that the owner wants to make in that building.Use of Natural MaterialsFor the construction sector to be sustainable, it is necessary to minimize its environmental impact. Building with natural materials offers us a wide range of benefits that are perfectly adaptable for use in organic architecture.Natural materials are those produced by nature and contain characteristic elements from rocks, vegetable materials, and animal species. Throughout history, nature has been the primary source of construction materials for civilizations worldwide. The abundant production and mechanical properties of natural materials have allowed humans to extract, transform, and use them in their constructions.Fluidity and Curvilinear FormsOrganic architecture emphasizes the implementation of architectural elements such as fluidity and curvilinear forms, in addition to a fascination with design innovation and aesthetics with soft, flowing, and continuously changing lines.The oldest temples and architectural constructions in antiquity can be taken as an argument neglected by many present-day architects, that architectural objects need to have not only symbolic and stylistic meaning, but also to fulfill certain technical functions, particularly those of vital importance – constructive, engineering, and providing stability.Harmony with Surroundings Organic architecture is a philosophy of architecture which promotes harmony between human habitation and the natural world through design approaches that are sympathetic and well integrated with their surroundings. Buildings, interiors, and sites become part of a unified, interrelated composition. This philosophy seeks a steady state of harmony between the structure’s natural, adaptive forms and the technology of human civilization.We really can’t talk about organic style architecture and it’s characteristics without discussing the notable buildings that implemented organic architecture in their design. Let’s look at a few of them below.Organic Architecture Examples A vast number of architects, engineers, and builders, and numerous laymen, including people in various art fields, believe in the idea of organic architecture. However, there are relatively few buildings that represent organic architecture. Let’s take a look at some of these buildings below:1. FallingwaterLocation: Mill Run, Pennsylvania.Designed By: Frank Lloyd Wright.Fallingwater Building.Source: Laurel Highlands.Fallingwater, weekend residence near Mill Run, southwestern Pennsylvania, that was designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright for the Kaufmann family in 1935 and completed in 1937. The house’s daring construction over a waterfall was instrumental in reviving Wright’s architecture career and became one of the most famous 20th-century buildings.Life magazine called it Wright’s “most beautiful job” as it told of the four apprentices who helped build it by hand in little more than a year. Fallingwater was the country house built to celebrate the Kaufmanns’ success but ended up being much more. In 1963 Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., gave the house to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, and in 1964 it was opened to the public for guided tours for the first time. Nearly 4,000,000 people have experienced Fallingwater and its natural setting since then.An architectural wonder, a piece of the Kaufmanns’ Pittsburgh, and a reflection of Frank Lloyd Wright and America, the legacy of Fallingwater is a complex and romantic cultural story reflecting the love of art, architecture, and conservation.2. Casa Batlló Location: Barcelona, Spain.Designed By: Antoni Gaudí.Casa Batlló.Source: Wikipedia.Casa Batlló is located in the heart of Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona, Spain. It was designed by the great architect Antoni Gaudí as a residential building and was reconstructed between 1905 and 1907. The building was commercially unsuccessful and was purchased in 1904 by Josep Batlló y Casanovas, a Catalan textile industrialist.Gaudí was appointed as the architect of the building’s renovation on October 17 of the same year. The house is located in downtown Barcelona, 43 Passeig de Gràcia. It is located next to the Paseo de San Juan, which is at the top of the list of the most haunted places in the city.The façade is divided into two different cadences, that is, horizontal upper lines (crossed by 2 large balconies) and three vertical lines that recall human bones. The house served as a residence for the Batlló family until 1954. During the Spanish Civil War, the Batlló family, who were sympathizers of the right, condemned the assault on the house, after which windows closed and the main floor cleaning went down to two.3. The Lotus Temple Location: New Delhi, India.Designed By: Fariborz Sahba.The Lotus Temple.Source: Bahaipedia.The Bahá’í House of Worship in New Delhi, often called the Lotus Temple, signifies the lotus’s symbolism to many different religions. It has become one of the most visited buildings in the world since it opened to the public in December 1986.The building consists of 27 marble-clad “petals” on a steel frame, which consists of nine surfaces and nine access reverberation panels. Since its completion, the Lotus Temple has been hailed as one of the world’s most popular and innovative architectural feats. Thus, the structural significance has also advanced the field of building sciences more generally. It has been honored with various awards, including the global award for the scientific paper with a focus on the structural behavior of the petals entered in the prestigious IASS-SLTE 2014 Symposium in Madrid.4. The Hive Location: Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.Designed By: Lina Primero.The Hive.Source: Wikipedia.Completed in 2011, this metal bubble and its interiors comprise 26 ‘onion rooms’ – to use the architects’ jocular terminology – each devoted to specific activities: such as a public restaurant on the ground floor, an IT laboratory in a small, freestanding annex, and a garden covering the ‘roof’ of the so-called butterfly wing on the first floor. Each room is equipped with services and access ramps in the form of tubes. Longitudinal linking galleries penetrate these tubes, passing through numerous cone-shaped windows that help alleviate the diffused light which filters constantly through the structural mesh cover and vacillates over the ceiling that calls to mind a celestial firmament.5. Sagrada FamíliaLocation: Barcelona, Spain.Designed By: Antoni Gaudí.Sagrada Família.Source: Britannica.The Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia—often simply called the Sagrada Familia—is undoubtedly one of Barcelona’s most remarkable buildings. Its construction has been accompanied by a host of stories that together reflect societal progress, cataclysms, and fanaticism. The architectural description of this monumental structure falls beyond the editorial mandate.It is impossible to describe the Sagrada Familia to someone who has not seen it without descending into a litany of superlatives or making basic factual errors. Spanish contemporary José Ortega y Gasset says: “The sight of this church striking us standing is beyond what one can understand when it is told to him.”6. Casa Organica Location: Mexico City, Mexico.Designed By: Javier Senosiain.Casa Organica.Source: Vogue.Casa Orgánica, the first project by architect Javier Senosiain, is one of his most emblematic works. Being small in size, the work represents a good sample of some of his most characteristic traits. Although the project is very small in size, it remains one of Senosiain’s most interesting works and represents a good sample of some of his features that will be developed on a greater scale in other works.The Hummingbird House, besides being the nickname of the project, is one of the most recurring images in the mind of the architect and a symbol of the relationship with nature he is looking for with his architecture. This house is compact and has the organic forms that characterize the scenic, creative, and surrounding interferences that the architect always wanted to achieve with his work.Openings have been provided in a way that it is difficult to distinguish between interior and exterior, to bring inside out and nature with inner space into the scene, resulting in light airs, vegetation, and natural surroundings from the house and to reconnect the inhabitants.Finally, let’s recognize some of the outstanding organic architects that spear-headed this architectural style.Notable Organic ArchitectsHere are some of the most influential organic architects:1. Frank Lloyd WrightUndoubtedly, Frank Lloyd Wright is the best example of this concept. His philosophy stayed in the structural space, in the poetic call to freedom, and in the space that generates the freedom that the human spirit needs.Frank Lloyd Wright, 1869-1959, was an American architect, interior designer, writer, and educator who designed more than 1,140 structures, including offices, churches, schools, hotels, and museums. More than 500 of them were built. He is a resident genius of the 20th century, with his revolutionary “Prairie Houses” (which were introduced in 1900). His architecture and ideas significantly influenced the architects of following generations and are still highly respected today.Frank L. Wright was the main preacher of organic architecture. His houses built during the 1920s were named Prairie Houses because of the lower flat roof, and they were a great success. With a new approach to architecture, the architect, his work, and his praxis (including teaching design and planning) are still highly esteemed and related to by students who usually regard their master with a deferential honorific.2. Louis SullivanNo architect of his day had a greater impact on American architecture than Louis Sullivan, a flamboyant and innovative itinerant who traversed the nation creating a new architecture which, while an outgrowth of Victorian client and cultural values, directly opposed all contemporary architectural dogmas. In an age nostalgic for a picturesque past, Sullivan infused contemporary architecture with a revitalized form of ornament based on natural laws, building materials, and technology.Architect Louis Sullivan is known for his functional yet beautiful designs. For this, he is usually referred to as the first truly modern architect. As the most excellent American architect of his time, he is credited as the mentor of more than 100 architects. But, even if he is best known for the forms of skyscrapers or high-rise buildings he designed, Sullivan also labored every means to talk persons out of applying the low forms in their own individual work.To him, those who conscientiously did so were nothing except sycophants, rogues, who must be persuaded to build mere dwellings. On the other hand, Sullivan tried his very best to encourage skilled individuals to help the American citizens shed such regressive thoughts and become conscious of themselves.3. Antoni GaudíGaudí’s design process and innovations lay the seeds of organic style architecture, rigorously systematizing with a scientifically-minded and artistic approach; architectural production that is never agnostic to the relationship space has with structure and the environment and that seeks to realize Natural Form in the Modulated Estrus, a phrase I have coined to represent the inherent, suggestive complexity of Gaudí’s architecture in context with the evolution of the Universe.The complexity of his forms and the unique heterogeneity of his works made him an enigmatic figure, and one that most of academia did not know how to appreciate until decades after his death. Now his work is studied in architecture programs at the world’s top universities because many of the structural solutions he proposed were discovered before their time.4. Alvar AaltoThe name, Alvar Aalto, has strongly influenced the immediate perspective of organic architecture and it is only natural that he be considered so important, given the transformation he experienced in the years 1925–1928, let’s be precise with the construction of the building for the Alajärvi Municipal Library.Aalto begins by making furniture, above all, at the time of his first architectural works and always afterwards. His furniture is usually characterized by adopting the organic and fluid forms of the traditional ones. But it is the formal similarity with what is happening at the time, for example in France, at the very beginning of the history of a more or less futuristic industrial design that always makes it difficult for critics to consider Aalto as organic.At a first sight and often and willingly if it remains so, it seems that these buildings of Alvar Aalto – also after the period of the “Classics” characterized by the use of stone and massive wooden beams and the intense construction work with Arnos, the blacksmith and friend “heater of elements” – are the result of a constructive and decorative practice assessments of the time, the late twenties. In 1933, Alvar Aalto built the Paimio Sanatorium with these intentions.Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on Organic Style in Architecture.What Does Organic Design Mean? Organic design is simply using natural and sustainable materials, plants, curved shapes, and warm colors in building spaces.What is the Most Prominent Organic Architecture Example? Fallingwater is the pinnacle of organic architecture. It perfectly captures the organic architecture philosophy, which is the harmonic fusion of nature and art.What is Modern Organic Architecture? Contemporary organic architecture blends midcentury contemporary, bohemian, and minimalist elements. Organic materials, organic textures, and shapes inspired by nature coexist with clean minimalism and crisp lines. Warm, inviting, soulful, and exquisite is the modern organic décor made possible by the addition of natural textures and shapes.What are the Benefits of Organic Design in Architecture? Sustainable and energy-efficient design concepts are naturally compatible with organic design. These houses frequently use eco-friendly materials, energy-efficient appliances, and passive design techniques, taking inspiration from the effectiveness of natural ecosystems.Where Does Organic Architecture Get It’s Inspiration? Their inspiration from nature is one thing they all have in common. Designing facades and interiors often incorporates organic elements like leaves, shells, plants, and human anatomy. Recommended PostsOverview of the International Style in ArchitectureOverview of Avant-Garde ArchitectureExploring Geometry in ArchitectureThe Marriage of Form and Function in Architecture. ConclusionIn conclusion, a definition of organic architecture and its style is hard to find, but in appearance, organic style architecture is natural and that is emphasizing form and function a lot. This is an alternative for modern architecture and its architecture of negation. Organic architecture is architecture for building up and not for breaking down. Today’s world needs value and attempt like existed in the past, and we can take it to our future.Total0Shares Share 0 Tweet 0 Pin it 0 Share 0 Articles
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