Els Altres Arquitectes (The Other Architects), and: Zoomorphic Architecture: New Animal Architecture (review)

Less internationally publicized than the Zoomorphic exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but more intently focused, the show Els Altres Architects at Barcelona's Zoological Museum is by far the more satisfying of the two.

Zoomorphic presents beautiful architectural projects, yet only weakly illustrates the relationships between natural organisms and the works paired with them. In most cases projects are represented by models and drawings, then merely set next to natural objects, as if juxtaposition alone explains similarity or architectural evolution. For example, Foster's 30 St. Mary Axe tower sits next to the sponge, euplectella, and we are told,

The building's shape, structure and ventilation scheme all find a parallel in the class of sea creatures known as glass sponges. These have delicate, elongated exoskeletons. They filter nutrients from water they suck in at their base and expel from a hole at the top, just as Foster's tower circulates air.

Well, yes. But "parallel" is imprecise, and many sponges look nothing like elongated exoskeletons. Did Foster actually study euplectella? The tower has a beautifully engineered structural braid, while euplectella is also beautifully composed of spiraling strands complexly cross-braced from within. So, indeed, visual biomimesis exists, but it is not analytically considered—was the sponge a visual, mnemonic device or an inspirational, biological one? The show provides little guidance to such relationships.

Furthermore, euplectella's siliceous fibers are currently under intense biomimetic observation (Lucent Technologies), since its glassy material is identical to manufactured fiber optics. Yet this animal grows under water—at low temperatures, and subject to low pressure—a process that, if understood, could provoke a revolution in engineering and architectural materials. Is it possible that Foster was looking to such qualities of growth and being? Did he study the sponge's algorithms? It is important to know, because new architecture is not going to arrive on the basis of visual "parallels." If, for example, you could secrete sheets of material the way the sponge grows, you could create a chance of developing an architecture more attuned to biology and hence more attuned to the environment. Because Zoomorphic, subtitled New Animal Architecture, lacks sufficient biological information and specific connections to the generation of architecture, it fails to make more than tenuous, pictorial use of biology and results in an intellectual tease.

The Barcelona exhibition in the Zoological Museum takes us into a 19th-century naturalist's environment. A beautiful enigma in relation to modern museums, this institution's second floor retains a core collection in original cases, traditionally displayed, that now biomimetically supplements the intelligence of the Altres Arquitectes work downstairs.

The show is well conceived and organized, stressing the idea that animals and insects (even amoeba) build naturally and genetically, in a hypothesis Richard Dawkins has labeled extended phenotypes. The exhibition displays such construction with animal/insect houses and housing colonies, accompanied by detailed bilingual wall texts in Catalan and Spanish and an accurate translation available in English.

The tiny, woven, patched, compiled or secreted buildings not only present a world of related structures, they also demonstrate building as a genetic occupation—different but perhaps not totally unrelated to human building, which is generally discussed in cultural terms that should be revised in order to consider human architecture as extended phenotypes.

Els Altres Arquitectes considers materials—twigs, grasses, silk, mud, paper pulp—and relates them both to the natural world and to their counterparts in human architecture. An unnarrated video is set approximately in the middle of the exhibition and projects close-up views of insects and animals in the process of building. Showing a wasp secreting paper pulp and then fashioning it along a nest's edge goes a long way toward stimulating and developing one's thinking about material strengths and secretions in biomimesis—considerations only now beginning to be studied for nanotechnology projects, only now...