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  • Morphogenesis – “The Riddles of Form” in Twenty-First Century Science
  • Marco Tamborini

Over the past decades, the notions of organic form and morphology—a scientific field historically associated with the eighteenth century polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)—have stealthy re-assumed a central role in various scientific disciplines. Although the study of organic form was apparently excluded from the main stage of evolutionary theory and biological sciences during the second half of the twentieth century, since morphology was considered as a descriptive and ancillary science unable to contribute to the neo-Darwinian synthesis of evolution1, morphological concepts and approaches have now been re-brought onto the central stage of mainstream science.2

In fact, several interdisciplinary Clusters of Excellence3 have been for instance established in Germany to investigate the enigma and power of [End Page 559] form transformations. These clusters recall and expand Goethe’s and Romantic definition of form, this meant as a complex and ever-changing phenomenon. Within biological disciplines, new research programs have been put forward to explicitly investigate what has been disqualified in biology over the past decades: the very concept of organic form. For example, according to Austrian evolutionary biologist Gerhard Müller, “Evolutionary developmental biology (evo–devo) emerged as a distinct field of research in the early 1980s to address the profound neglect of development in the standard modern synthesis framework of evolutionary theory, a deficiency that had caused difficulties in explaining the origins of organismal form in mechanistic terms (Müller 2007, p. 943). Furthermore, synthetic biologists and nanoscientists are now producing and manipulating a multitude of forms to design and control their possible genesis (e.g., Gramelsberger 2020).

In addition to the renaissance of morphological studies in evolutionary biology, the notion of organic form has deeply influenced twentieth-and twenty-first century architectural and computational design. In the mid1970s, German biologist Johann-Gerhard Helmcke (1908–1993), who collaborated with German architect Frei Otto (1925–2015) in establishing two Collaborative Research Centers4 (Sonderforschungsbereiche – short SFB), wrote: “I wondered if the architects could recognize the beauty of biological objects and then finally build something more aesthetically, and if engineers could understand the many innumerable, biological forms of evolution of constructions in order to learn from them and to build better (and perhaps also more economically)” (Helmcke5).

Helmcke’s hope was rooted in a deep history of interaction and entanglement between architecture and organic morphology (e.g., Steadman 2008). This collaboration found partial international recognition with the establishment of two Collaborative Research Centers in West Germany between early 1970 and late 1980. In 1970, the so-called SFB 64 on “Weitgespannte Flächentragwerke” [Wide Span Surface Structures] was established in Stuttgart. This developed into the SFB 230 on “Natürliche Konstruktionen” [natural constructions] starting from 1984. The peculiarity of these Collaborative Research Centers was that biologists, engineers, architects, artists worked together to investigate form’s intrinsic dynamics (see Tamborini 2020a). The intertwinement between architecture and biology, or rather [End Page 560] between a technical and a biological study of form transformation and manufacturing, reached its heyday in the development of architectural and computational design during the 2010s.

Commenting on these recent developments in an article emblematically entitled Digital Morphogenesis, British architect and theorist Neil Leach noted that “architecture […] is no longer so preoccupied with style and appearance. It is as though a new paradigm has emerged […] the more contemporary architects operating within the new morphogenetic paradigm can be seen more as the controllers of processes, who facilitate the emergence of bottom-up form-finding processes that generate structural formations” (Leach 2009, p. 34).

Furthermore, alongside fostering the production of bio-inspired constructions, the biological notion of organic form is shaping the current advancement of computational design. Today, architects and designers are proposing a shift from a modernist notion of form analysis, which emphasized the design of well-adapted forms, towards computational research, which seeks to set the organizational rules responsible for form generation. In fact, by means of computational tools, architects design the code whose guides form development. Within this computational perspective, “form [becomes] a subsidiary component of environment, and environment … a complex web of influences” (Menges and Ahlquist...

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Additional Information

ISSN
1530-9274
Print ISSN
1063-6145
Pages
pp. 559-567
Launched on MUSE
2021-10-11
Open Access
No
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