The New Nouveau

Tord Boontje is the Paris-based, British-educated, Dutch-born designer who has been hired by American store Target to "develop a creative concept that extends beyond products to include an in-store environment, packaging and the art direction of the advertising campaign." (Source)

His work often features laser-cut floral designs and hi-tech printing techniques for tables, vases and other home furnishings and is reminiscent of Art Nouveau seen through the lens of 21st century computer design.

If I'd asked a designer to epitomize Modern, Yet Organic design, Boontje couldn't have done a better job.

Link to his website.

Glacier architecture

Strictly speaking, ice isn't organic. But the forms taken by frozen water are among the least linear geometric shapes, in particular the glacier - a frozen river-mountain.

Rome architect Massimiliano Fuksas' New Milan Trade Fair (2002-2005) may be a building with an incredibly unromantic name, but the sweeping canopy which acts as a flowing sister to the alp-lined horizon is one of the most beautiful roofs imaginable.

There's an article and photo here.

Link to the Massimiliano Fuksas site.

Shedding light on organic design

A number of designers are producing light fixtures and shades which are beautiful, original and inspired by natural forms. Here's a non-exhaustive overview:

Renowned architect Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher have collaborated on the design for Vortexx, which looks a bit like a spiraling neon vortex, yet deserved a better name.

New Zealander Jeremy Cole is producing a range called Aloe, inspired by the succulent of the same name.

Ingo Maurer's Birdie's Nest doesn't necessarily reflect his general esthetic, but is eye-catchingly kookie-krazy-kurvy.

Brits Jason and Lucy Boatswain, working under the name Diffuse, produce a range of translucent porcelain lighting which is friendly, pretty, and more reserved than some of their contemporaries' designs.

Compatriot Paul Cocksedge makes huge ceramic tube sponges and then puts lights in them. Weird and fascinating.

Something was wrong with the Glofab website when I visited, but I can tell you that apart from being a lighting fixture which looks like a microscopic piece of plankton under a microscope, it is also made in Sweden.

Finland's Janne Kyttanen and Jiri Evenhuis from the Netherlands have teamed up as Freedom of Creation. They, like many other organic, yet modern designers, use computer-controled lasers to craft their products. Their lighting units are often based on the patterns of seeds in the centre of flowers or the arrangement of plant leaves.

The WTC and the sins of modernism

This well-argued piece by Todd Seavey on reason.com explores the inhumanity of modernist architechture through the lens of the World Trade Center and its proposed replacement(s). On the way, he skewers some of modernism's canonical darlings, such as Le Corbusier.

Link

The Jeanne Gang gang

Chicago architect Jeanne Gang has dabbled with organic design in the past, for example her Wrinkled rug, but the proposed Aqua Tower (completion scheduled for 2009) is a shimmering totem of liquid curves.

Apparently designed as a solution to a paucity of views for downtown Chicago's inhabitants, the Aqua Tower nevertheless succeeds in creating an exterior which is beautiful, appealing and fascinating.

Link to the Gang site.

'Political' Organic Architecture

This is what it says on the website of Chicago architecture practice Qua'Virarch:

Founded May 2003 in Los Angeles, Qua'Virarch is an award-winning practice committed to producing political works of architecture, art and urban design which produce new feelings about the limits of atmosphere.

Sounds a bit ephemeral, right? But when you look at the recent works (most unrealized), it becomes clear that Qua'Virarch founder Paul Preissner is developing an esthetic which echoes something very solid, muscular and most definitely organic.

Here's what was written about the 2nd-place entry for the competition to design the Gyeonggi-Do Jeongok Prehistory Museum in South Korea:

The given site for the Museum is situated on a naturally steep terrain. For that reason, the design arose as the spatial continuation of the landscape and its organic (somewhat monstrous) metamorphosis into the building.

The site of the building occupies the negotiation between extremes in topography. This allows for the landscape to appear uninterrupted by the project and to appear as though site and building are beautiful confluences of natural forces.

It's a shame that their entry didn't win.

Link to the Qua'Virarch website
Link to an article about their entry for the Gyeonggi-Do Jeongok Prehistory Museum competition (scroll down for English)

The Christopher Alexander viewpoint

The UC Berkeley professor has just published The Nature of Order, a 2,000-page tome on what's wrong with modern architecture. It turns out that it's the architects:

Blame the architects, he says, who are shills for a bankrupt modern society, "very much as if we were the advance-men, the ad-men, paid to make a series of unworkable social forms palatable to people by making something inherently bad seem glamorous." Twentieth-century architecture, he adds, has been "a mass psychosis of unprecedented dimension," "a form of architecture which is against life, insane, image-ridden, hollow." (He told Peter Eisenman, in a 1982 debate, that highfalutin architects were "fucking up the whole profession of architecture.")

Without having read Alexander's book, on reading the article excerpted above in the Village Voice (link below), it seems to me that his diagnosis is remarkably similar to the one I'm trying to communicate with MYO. Basically, surrounding people with geometric forms will never make them as happy as natural forms would.

Link