Architectural Visions
Nature produces patterns across scale. When you look at the very small or the very big, you will find familiar shape systems, flows of energy through a medium producing a universally consistent arrangement of space and its constituent elements. You see it in the branching of a river delta, but also blood vessels and vapor patterns in atmospheric layers when you fly above them. You see it in the shapes of clouds and shapes of organs that collectively are creatures. Forms not only follow their function but also respond to a deeper expression of what drives evolution, how resources are prioritized to create life.
Living systems must balance a play between the conservation of energy and the risky need to expend that energy for growth and seeking existence beyond stasis. This is the stuff of creation. I take that flow and let it guide architectural forms that are in tune with their environment.
That my structures can so easily be cast as ‘alien’ speaks to the limitations we have on terrestrial architecture. Probably my earliest influence from common culture would be the picture books of Dr. Seuss, who drew impossible and silly structures, but ones that were of their own world and served its inhabitants well. Later I encountered the work of architects Antoni Gaudí and his heir-apparent, Santiago Calatrava. These influences I share with my architect father, who was himself trained by an organic master, Bruce Goff. My father encouraged my exploration of the works of Frank Lloyd Wright and Eero Saarinen. At 22 I started drawing organic forms as architectural objects, inspired by a proposed tower designed by Calatrava to top NY’s Cathedral Church of St. John The Divine, my first big patron as an artist. I saw that a building could be made of curves. All lines in architecture do not need to be straight. We can build our dreams of space and form and not be limited by our rulers.
Within the Architectural Vision Series I seek an architecture that is not just built on top of the world, but of it and in harmony with it, utilizing the inherent patterns in natural systems.
Living systems must balance a play between the conservation of energy and the risky need to expend that energy for growth and seeking existence beyond stasis. This is the stuff of creation. I take that flow and let it guide architectural forms that are in tune with their environment.
That my structures can so easily be cast as ‘alien’ speaks to the limitations we have on terrestrial architecture. Probably my earliest influence from common culture would be the picture books of Dr. Seuss, who drew impossible and silly structures, but ones that were of their own world and served its inhabitants well. Later I encountered the work of architects Antoni Gaudí and his heir-apparent, Santiago Calatrava. These influences I share with my architect father, who was himself trained by an organic master, Bruce Goff. My father encouraged my exploration of the works of Frank Lloyd Wright and Eero Saarinen. At 22 I started drawing organic forms as architectural objects, inspired by a proposed tower designed by Calatrava to top NY’s Cathedral Church of St. John The Divine, my first big patron as an artist. I saw that a building could be made of curves. All lines in architecture do not need to be straight. We can build our dreams of space and form and not be limited by our rulers.
Within the Architectural Vision Series I seek an architecture that is not just built on top of the world, but of it and in harmony with it, utilizing the inherent patterns in natural systems.