Nature Teaching Structures

Abstract

If one is looking for an example of a conceptual design which is extremely appropriate in its morphology, well adapted to the surroundings, structurally and functionally optimised, and has a refined and appropriate appearance – all in one single configuration – you have either an exceptional and rare piece of fine architecture – or a common organism in Nature. That is why Nature makes an excellent object for architectural students to study structures from a conceptual and a morphological point of view. And that is why Nature – who has developed her structural systems by trial-and-error through millions of years – acts as an excellent teacher of these topics. At the same time, the idiom of Nature seems to possess a considerable attraction for students and is able to convey inspiration and imagination to the creative process of shaping architectural structures. In our surrounding living and nonliving nature a number of striking statical and kinematical peculiarities have been observed. The paper will try to isolate and describe some of these observations and their relation to our engineered structures based on human thinking. The paper will deal with basic aspects as geometry, topology, redundancy and kinematic stability of structures in Nature and in architecture.