Lisbeth Sachs in the 1939 explanatory report for the “Competition Project for a Spa Town Theater in Baden” 1939, cit. in: Rahel Hartmann Schweizer, ed., Lisbeth Sachs: Architektin Forscherin Publizistin (Zurich: gta Verlag, 2020), 41; trans. eds.
In part two of Of Grammatology (1967), Jacques Derrida develops the term and the logic of the supplement: an externality, an addition, an accessory matter that is “central.” See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967), trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). In Dissemination, he writes: “Adding, here, is nothing other than giving to read.” Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (1972), trans. Barbara Johnson (London: The Athlone Press, 1981), 63.
Ingeborg Bachmann, Senza Casa (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2024), 70; trans. eds.
Hartmann Schweizer, ed., Lisbeth Sachs (see note 1), 196.
A floor plan (“Rondo”) and a second, expandable model show the possibilities of the ring- and disc-shaped expandability of the building towards the square.
The urban quality of arcades and colonnades is no longer present in many elaborate newer buildings and is also increasingly disappearing within the existing urban fabric, contributing to the desolation of cities. The experience is gone in many places.
This second, rather programmatic part of the essay is an excerpt of a text originally published in German: Rike Felka, Biomorphe Architekturen (Berlin: Brinkmann u. Bose, 2019), 9–31.
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory Of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960).
Cit. Roland Barthes, “The Rustle of Language,” in: The Rustle of Language (1984), trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 76.
The concept of nature is always a problem. Because “nature” is not only the counterpart to “civilization”; nature also has a language and a history. In the architectural context, nature is a decision and always carries meaning, even when it is meant to erase meaning.
Derrida, Of Grammatology (see note 2), 313. Urging caution, Derrida writes: “What comes very late, the latest, can also lead back closer to an origin, or return {revenir}, rather, to the origin before the origin, earlier even than the beginning.” Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 83.
Another possible approach to biomorphic architecture would be to explore its underlying technical and material history.
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970), trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2002), 330.
Roger Caillois, “Generalized Esthetics,” trans. Hans Kaal, Diogenes 10, no. 38 (1962), 131. Emphasis Caillois’s. English translation modified by Rike Felka.
Frank Gehry remarks on his design strategies in: Barbara Isenberg, Conversations with Frank Gehry, (New York Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 127.
