Eccentric houses as living organisms: organic architecture is back in vogue
Tilting and curving walls, branching structures, roofs resembling waves and animal coats, sculpture floors. In an age of climatic catastrophes, a constructive fusion with nature.
There has always been a different Modernism. Not the one of white walls, minimalist and austere, but an organic, warm, eccentric and bizarre architecture, which shows itself as a voice out of the chorus, a playful alter ego.
The Modernism that everyone knows - the Bauhaus, Brutalism, the International Style - emerged towards the end of the First World War. But the same can be said for organic architecture, a parallel Modernism developed from the Expressionism of the time, rather than from the mechanistic obsessions of the more conventional moderns. Its reference models are trees and landscapes, caves and forests rather than machines. Even today, organic architecture appears futuristic and, despite being overshadowed by its more serious cousin, has never disappeared. The expression organic architecture was coined by Frank Lloyd Wright who claimed to be its father. Yet it has always existed, and in even wilder forms than those ventured by Wright. The Bavinger House, now demolished, designed in the 1950s by architect Bruce Goff in Norman, Oklahoma, USA, was a chaotic spiral building, with a twisted roof supported by cables pulled from a tree but extroverted, cuckoo-pole-like, with walls made of rough stone. Nothing compared to what was inside: a landscape of mushrooms suspended upside down above a pool and a floor that looked like the result of an earthquake. Its absurd demolition in 2016 has led to a reappraisal of organic buildings, offbeat, magnetic and crazy architecture.
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The main figures of this movement constitute a heterogeneous group. There was, for example, Rudolf Steiner, born in 1861, Austrian esotericist, occultist and mystic, founder of anthroposophy. He is known for almost everything he designed and conceived - in particular the Waldorf and Steinerian pedagogy he initiated and even the Weleda cosmetics brand - except for his architecture. Yet a visit to the Goetheanum, just a few tram stops from Basel, is a revelation. This huge proto-Brutalist concrete monster expresses the organicist aversion to right angles: a building that looks like it was created with a clay mould, where the capital of each column twists and turns into an unusual plan. Steiner was especially concerned that organic architecture should give the impression of having grown and developed like a plant from its seed. It does not seem possible that this visionary structure was conceived a century ago - its predecessor, a wooden dome, was just as wonderful, but was destroyed by fire in 1922.
Links with the world of Gaudí can be discerned, buildings like sand castles with stalagmite-like spires and fairy-tale fantasies. At the same time in Germany, however, Erich Mendelsohn was designing the Einstein Tower, a streamlined expressionist observatory, a stationary building yet full of movement, expressing the way the physicist's ideas distorted the then customary notions of space and time; and other architects, including Bruno Taut, Hugo Häring and Hans Poelzig, were constructing a response to the restrictions of Bauhaus Modernism from a certain fluid freedom.
Organic architecture really seems to flourish in moments of existential crisis: during the Weimar Republic years and then during the Cold War (and perhaps now again, in the era of the climate crisis). The fear of nuclear annihilation probably drove a generation to look underground, to houses that resembled bunkers or elementary caves that could offer protection. Mexican architect Juan O'Gorman abandoned conventional Modernism in favour of organic architecture in his Casa O'Gorman (1948-1954), a natural lava cave in Mexico City's El Pedregal district, another lost wonder.
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