The faster trees grow, the straighter they tend to be. Compare the straight spears of fast-growing bamboo with the twisting boughs of old oak in ancient woodland. The former grows quickly skyward in a single season, whereas the latter slowly develops, year on year.
In the twists and turns of an old tree’s branches we see captured in its geometry the changing environmental conditions it has experienced — the availability of light, direction of wind and even how much water it had to drink. A partner dance fixed in its branches.
This is construction of a sort that responds to the changing conditions. That adapts. That is the best structural response to what happened next.
The shapes we find in the living world are built up on site, layer by layer, ring by ring, branch by branch. Each a best-fit response to what happened that season.
Engineers don’t grow things. Not in this sense of contextual layering up and extending.
Instead, we cast, extrude and slice. It’s easier to design and cut things in straight lines, cast flat shapes, pack things that are regular cuboids and transport things that all look the same.
Whereas the living world evolves shapes to suit the site, we’ve evolved our designs to suit the factory, the quarry, the motorway and the drawing board. We make in one place and take it to another. Ready-baked forms with few of the specificities of place built in.
More fundamentally, the living world designs in context and engineers tend to design in the abstract.
Abstraction is helpful! It makes things simpler, easier to calculate, define, arrange, and scale up. But it also separates us from context and the consequences of our decisions.
Given nothing in the landscape, nor in the living world is straight, everything we make straight is an imperfect fit, an inefficient response.
A wobbly table on the non-flat surface of the reality.
Straight lines are sign that things have been done to a place. That variations have been ignored or cut off. That something has been abstracted and rendered easier — but at what cost? What has been flattened? What has been undervalued? What has been overlooked?
Nature does so much so little. And we can learn to do the same. But this asks more of designers.
Design that layers.
Design that experiments on site.
Design that is a long-term response to place.
I believe we would recognise this kind of design straight away. And we would find it intrinsically beautiful.