i.
Lisbeth Sachs repeatedly worked with round forms, giving them an internal motivation adapted to each building task. Today, round and flowing forms are still regarded as exceptional or marginal phenomena, even though progress in construction techniques and the increased availability of pliable and castable materials has made them easier to build than in the analog age. Sachs’s language of round forms is a discussion on the convention of angularity. Through this, she broke free from thinking in oppositions. This engagement culminated in her biomorphic-surreal proposal for a youth center floating on Lake Zurich (1971)—a design that refused to be constrained by established architectural syntax and vocabulary, inspired by Hans Arp’s three-dimensional abstractions. The sculptural nature and underlying aesthetic principles of biomorphic forms at first glance contradicts the rational accessibility requirements of modernity and conventional notions of functionality.
The Curve as Transitional Line
Round forms are found throughout architectural history mostly as extensions of angular spaces. They constitute spatial ornaments we can stroll around in, and that, as a surplus, not only represent but also embody urban qualities. The glass lobby in Sachs’s Baden Kurtheater project (1939) was initially shell-shaped in plan—a truncated round form. The lobby was meant to “be taken out of the building’s massing as an independent structure and positioned as an oval into the oval clearing of the park’s lawn,” surrounded by trees.1 With the round form’s generous curvature, transparency, and its placement in relation to existing trees, the architect emphasized the free-floating, supplemental character of the extension, whose formal language contrasted with the angular form of the theater’s exterior (but not with its interior). Forms are never asemantic. Sensitive to its surrounding context, the round structure prefigured and complemented the idea of a possible synthesis associated with the theater, creating a space before and after where visitors could accustom themselves to a spatial and temporal shift—in anticipation, in an encounter, or in departure. The fully glazed lobby, which in summer is partially shaded by the surrounding trees and in winter extends the outdoor luminosity toward the inside, is more than a transitional space, more than an addendum; it plays a mediating role.2
The circle has been a primary shape used in the architecture of theaters since antiquity, depending on the conditions of the site. The ancient Greek and Roman amphitheater exemplifies the evident nexus between a shape and its meaning, recreating the moment of “coming together in a circle” to watch a performance. Its built form provides the necessary comfort with tiered seating for visibility and acoustics, allowing spectators to stay for hours and focus their attention on the essential. The circle, while an abstract and seemingly neutral primary shape, is a motivated and motivating form. The shape itself carries meaning, although this meaning can be viewed in a different light and probed anew again and again. In the period between the initial proposal and its actual construction (between 1939 and 1952), the glazed oval lobby of Sachs’s Kurtheater was ultimately transformed into a polygon, in an effort to adapt to the main building and to facilitate the use of planar windows. The timber roof structure of the pavilion, which opens up to the park, semiotically translates into the idea of being protected by a canopy. The subtle diplomacy between the angular and the circular is echoed in the arced forms of the staircase flowing toward the auditorium and the hints of curvature in the bar counter. In its formal language, curved lines represent a discreet transition.
The Roof as Parasol
The glazed lobby’s roof was originally intended to be lined on the inside with paper, which would have created an association with Japanese parasols rather than the branches and leaves of an expanding canopy. This idea of a parasol radiating airiness found itself realized in Sachs’s Kunsthalle in Zurich, which existed for the summer of 1958 on the occasion of the Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work (Schweizer Ausstellung für Frauenarbeit, SAFFA). The roof’s white membrane rested upon a steel column painted in white, from which the broad, sweeping roof extended volumetrically in an intricate lattice of crossbeams. Three parasols of various sizes were used to house the exhibition space, keeping each other company and standing close together. Among the design’s intricacies, the roof’s circular shape was repeated in a circular wooden console orbiting the central structural column. This console, which was used to display books or as seating, asymmetrically circled the column, therefore eschewing the traditional uniformity suggested by circular geometry and creating a visual counterweight. Furthermore, polygonal cut-outs in certain areas of the three exhibition pavilions’ floor slabs framed the plants and grasses growing outside, and also created drainage points.
The temporary structures could only be closed off from the outside by drawing white curtains, which underlined the seasonal character of the tent-like architecture and provided shade. Like the Kurtheater in Baden, the Kunsthalle displayed the architect’s dialectic diplomacy: through their angularity, the rectangular concrete walls—which were slightly asymmetrically inserted into the structures and supported the roof while providing surfaces to display artworks and objects—created a skillful contrast with the curves of the roof structure. Viewed in plan, the distribution of the concrete walls within the circular shape is not simply radial, but looks like a random throw of pick-up sticks. The outer edges of the parasol roofs were surrounded by ring-shaped concrete beams clad in brightly shimmering aluminum, which emphasized the curvature of the pavilion buildings. The reflective materiality of the rings also underlined the futuristic aspect of the ensemble.
Kunsthalle; photo by Fred Waldvogel. Hartmann Schweizer, ed., Lisbeth Sachs, 110.
Synthesis and Segment
Austrian novelist Ingeborg Bachmann said about the function of art and architecture: “We enter … its singular composition, which derives from its forms.”3 It is the forms that have an effect, that make a difference, and that affect content. Through forms arises particularity, a “singular composition.” Reduced to the essential and skillfully deconstructed, the circular form is also the basis of a 1966 design by Lisbeth Sachs for a theater in Winterthur, which never moved beyond the proposal stage. Its circular form has not only an inviting but also a mysterious function. It signifies and facilitates receptivity, which takes on a dimension of commitment, insofar as in drama, unresolved conflicts are negotiated and revisited in a collective framework, adapted to the needs and problems of the present day. Something internal is made audible and visible. The circular form, expressing and enhancing the collective aspect, suggests—regardless of anyone’s particular viewpoint—an idea of synthesis.
The rejected competition entry deserves elaboration as it belongs to Sachs’s series of abstract biomorphic designs that are characterized by discretion: neither too metaphorical, nor too plain, and not in mere opposition to the right angle. The design is based on “horizontally stratified and vertically mirrored arcs of circles.”4 The round form reinforces associations with an amphitheater, whose auditorium is reduced here to a semicircle. A second semicircle tempers the symmetry and perfection of the circle, which encloses the multi-tiered back-of-house and its machinery in an upright arc cut out from a semispherical volume. The round form of both the outer shell and the interior is fragmented, however without creating the impression of incompleteness or rupture. Rather, it suggests the possibility of making further distinctions within the segments or adding to them. It is a delicately segmented and proportioned model capable of extension and growth.5 The main building also features various, well-proportioned roof terraces that provide free, unoccupied space for the imagination. The design’s urban qualities are apparent in the ground-floor colonnades located underneath the auditorium on the side of the building that faces the square.6 The colonnades counterbalance the building’s hermetic appearance, give it a certain elegant lightness, and provide an all-seasons liminal space that offers itself as a meeting place or as an invitation to linger on under the building’s shelter.
ii.
A biomorphic formal language is by no means limited to allusions.7 The morphology itself changes, and in turn, like in nature, so does the modus vivendi. Walls are no longer straight; rather, they wrap around an inside and against an outside. They are made from soft, pliable materials; they become a cocoon, a shell, made for transformations to take place within. The body appears in places and ways that one would not expect. With its passage through abstraction and into a different order of magnitude, the idea of the body becomes something else in biomorphic architectures: a different body. Working with bodily forms means becoming part of the energies that model the form of organs, animals, plants, and mineral forms. They flow into the sculptural and, on the one hand, make up for a distance, an alienation from the body on a formal-semantic level. On the other, this proximity to the body is not without ambivalence. Due to a dimensional shift, the molding of the asymmetrical, the inclined, the bulging, the pressed-in, or the wedged can also give rise to strangeness.
In no way is biomorphism an attempt to reduce a cultural phenomenon such as architecture to a copy of a natural model or to zoology. The transitional forms of biomorphic architecture, its fluid metaphors, are condensed thought, a way of thinking that manifests itself above all in that which cannot be imitated, or for which no familiar terms are at hand. Even if it is about the idea of a renewed continuum, the conventional opposition between nature and culture keeps its inherent tension and its methodological value. This opposition is not simply nullified and replaced with a questionable, socio-biological perspective. Instead, it is negotiated through the variably legible semiotic character of architecture, once passed through a process of abstraction. Biomorphic formal language is not a matrix used to bring essentialist or socio-biological content, but rather the evolution of an alternative (and at last buildable) path in architecture history—a way of thinking about the world as an arabesque. Its forms embody a critical opposition to the toxic stew produced by a technocratic modernity. Images of biomorphic architecture crystalize a non-naïve need for another reality that hints at what has been missed.
By way of dynamism and malleability, the idea of the body is called into play in a new and certainly more direct manner. Biomorphic architectures present a shifted, estranged, and abstracted image of the body. This stands in contrast to architecture's traditional conception of the body—whether human, animal, or plant—as something rational and objectified, and hints to the fact that the old, inherited belief in rational lines has lost its grip on our changing reality. It no longer does justice to our situation, nor does it reflect it. The belief in the factual omnipresence and omnipotence of the ratio as a higher, geometrically deduced principle slowly melts away and reaches its ever more apparent limits. Nature perceptibly and insistently poses us its questions. They revolve around neither more nor less than the “redemption of physical reality.”8
Jugendhaus Zurich, project 1971/80; model. Hartmann Schweizer, ed., Lisbeth Sachs, 119.
Biomorphic forms and the shifts in meaning they portend are still taboo in the field of architecture. “Biomorphic” is blacklisted by suspicion of being “ahistorical,” “solitary,” “atopical,” or outright “trendy.” Any magazine article about new biomorphic buildings first has to dispel prejudices. They are always the same. Within biomorphic architecture, not only does the doxa of the cube dissolve and the repressed nature return—like an oil stain expanding in all directions—but also the “euphoric theme” of the erotic body appears through curved lines. Less an immediately perceptible likeness than a “value generator,” as Roland Barthes formulates: what becomes apparent is that the body produces these values and rewrites them.9 The taboo of the round form also has to be read in this light. More, not less, is needed, beyond superficial refusal mechanisms, conformity paradigms, and stereotypes.
With biomorphism, many previously unseen forms emerge; three-dimensional neologisms that contradict the anti-formal tradition in architecture. The concern with form is quickly dismissed as “formalist” or “aestheticist.” The “anti-formalism” prevalent in the field of architecture is part of a series of anti-intellectualist reflexes. Instead of asking for the semantics and individual responsibility of a form, the question is whether it has a practical justification, a functional use, a purpose. The cube is seen as “neutral” and therefore needs no questioning. Biomorphic architecture is not only a counter-movement to orthogonal power and a reaction to the overvaluation of a functionalism that neglects other possibilities and has desolating negative effects; it is explicitly formalist, aestheticist, metaphorical, and singular, but not without responsibility. The desire is for a form.
However, built natural forms are constructed illusions of the natural.10 The fictional power and the associated irritations produced by biomorphic architectures are the effect of an artificiality that represents a quasi-natural state by way of abstraction. Nature is art. It is a manufactured naturality that is necessarily calculated in detail and that attains a natural quality by constructing an illusion. In architecture, a natural form, to use a term coined by Jacques Derrida, is a “supplement of origin.” It is the ex-post construction of a presumed “origin,” of which one can never be sure, which fundamentally evades us to a certain degree, and which therefore has to be supplemented, although the replacement may very well be better than the original.11
Biomorphic architecture is both a highly technical, manufactured construction, and at the same time, a pulsion of the imagination, of the capacity to create fictions whose ornaments we can stroll around in.12 Like dance halls that lie under the artificial skies of their painted ceilings, natural forms in architecture are representatives. They show that the need for nature is indispensable and interminable. Nature is activated by an artificiality that is just as present as the metaphor of nature. The latter is at once unburdening, mysterious, and instructive, because its development is motivated by the desire to dissolve linguistic and therefore intellectual boundaries. The ubiquitous architectural language guided by straight lines recedes and begins to undulate across the paper. Thanks to natural metaphor, the inexpressible can unfold in the extant world. Biomorphic design is a passage through a process of artificialization that removes space and things from the familiar, pragmatic-rational sphere and brings us closer to nature in a new way. The materials—often fluid plastic that trace every bend—also contribute to the artificialization of the natural. New images are created that set memory in motion. Inspired by his Finnish surroundings, Alvar Aalto took puddle shapes as a starting point, from which he then derived high-rise buildings that look different from every side.
Early-twentieth-century Modernism does not and cannot form a simple “counterpart” to the biomorphic. Modernism set itself the task of dissolving fixed preconceptions of space through abstraction and reduction, making them permeable while fulfilling the primacy of the spaces’ amenity value. Already on paper, the architectural object is subjected to two requirements that must be carefully balanced: the opening up of rigid, prefabricated ideas through successful abstraction, and the creation of distinctiveness and homeliness through visual means. The figurative function has always played a role here. Adorno writes: “Aesthetic comportment is the capacity to perceive more in things than they are; it is the gaze under which the given is transformed into an image.”13 It is this gaze that paves the way to biomorphic architecture, and yet, from within, it sustains a connection to early-twentieth-century Modernism. The latter has imprinted itself on biomorphic architecture; it is the indelible and constitutive prerequisite for a design that, contrary to all appearances, neither springs from a desire to start with a clean slate, nor represents a naïve negation of the merits of the past.
Lisbeth Sachs’s designs are far removed from any supposed arbitrariness, ahistoricity, or resemblance to contemporary banality. And just like early-twentieth-century Modernism, biomorphic architecture must be defended against tendencies toward banalization. The Bauhaus was swept away by the flattening of its ideas, and what remains are a few gems in a pile of pebbles. Biomorphic architecture too, in the age of its buildability, has had to contend with waves of “blob” architectures. Since its figurative character is more pronounced when compared to orthogonal architecture, the resulting image, when not handled appropriately, risks becoming a gaffe. Its figurative aspect can rapidly exhaust the viewer’s eyesight. That is why one of the fundamental questions posed to architecture was and remains whether it should depict anything at all. The question can be answered in the affirmative, but—as always in architecture—only on the condition of a reduction that both appropriates and strips away the content. Biomorphic architecture’s metaphorical character requires the architect to control figuration down to the smallest detail on all levels—formal, material, and technical. At the same time, as with metaphor in poetry, it is important to not simply determine its meaning, but to also allow meaning to drift. Metaphor implies a change of meaning at every step. Due to its sensitivity to context, it possesses a dynamic that lies in the metamorphotic nature of its flowing effects of meaning.
Carpeted floor and wall, headquarters of the French Communist Party, 1965, by Oscar Niemeyer. Photo: Rike Felka.
Biomorphic architecture is a paradoxical amalgamation of natural form and technology, which, insofar as they interlock, enter a state of synthesis in which their underlying tensions remain visible. The use of forms reminiscent of nature is not a simple critique of industry or technology; neither are all materials used of natural origin. Rather, there is experimentation with liquid construction materials such as concrete or plastics, whose lava-like properties co-initiate and shape the formal language. Synthetic materials and surfaces often replace traditional materials of natural origin.
Many biomorphic architectures embody paradoxes. The interplay between kinetic flow and rigidity is especially apparent because architecture stands fundamentally opposed to temporal progression. It is an excerpt pulled from the flow of time, one that stays. However, the idea of processuality is foregrounded in the formal language of biomorphic architecture, because it gives form to the tension between material and process. The cured, windswept, and weatherproof result is as important as the process that led to its form. Even if a concert hall rises like an undulating ocean, its metallic waves are rigid. Its architecture shows the idea of matter in movement, the idea of dynamism, but remains something entirely different—the opposite. The processual aspect, the sculptability of the sculpted—and, by extension, the humanmade—is emphasized. Its mutability demonstrates the ability to adapt to new circumstances, but also its subjection to the respective state of the history of technology and materials. Biomorphic architecture oscillates between the representation of movement, which lends it physicality, and the durability of the result. Actually solid, it creates the impression of softness and liquidity, as if it could flow on or be blown away like snow; as if the form could still change. Cast and bent materials appear to be suspended between two states.
Today, there is an unprecedented formal variety of buildings. A question that may be asked of biomorphic architecture is about its process that leads to a certain form. According to Roger Caillois, forms are produced either “by chance, by growth, by design, or by mold.”14 All of this can also create mixtures in a form-finding process. Form-finding is controlled by several factors and tendencies that can come from both inside and outside. Ideally, a form can develop freely without geometry. Then, the form can be queried as to whether it is suitable for a use, a desired mode of existence, modified accordingly, and finally tested for its manufacturability. A second question that may be asked of biomorphic architecture is how its forms might be constrained. Can prototypes or adaptable repetitions be found to assess these figures’ effect? Here, historical periodization of biomorphism is helpful: there is the analog phase, which is still strongly related to the site with its physical presence (Antoni Gaudí, Alvar Aalto, Antti Lovag, Ulrich Müther, etc.), and then there is the phase of designing with digital technologies (Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, Zaha Hadid, etc.), in which the effects of industrialization, technologization and globalization appear as symptoms of de-localization. The experience of space and spatial practices are today put into question, are stymied, and are made obsolete by “information.” Biomorphic architecture—with its reference to nature-like forms, its design modes based on liquefaction, its different notion of built volume, and its reference to forces that have already been inscribed in the earth on site—is a reaction to this situation. What both phases have in common is the exploration of a different formal archive beyond the classical and historical, although the architects in question here have passed through the classical and carry on this internal experience as an indispensable attribute.
There is a paradigm shift that becomes even more apparent in the second phase and that constitutes the basis for one of the main criticisms from the established architecture world: Gehry, remarking about his Cloud lamps, has said that a shape does not originate through internal processes; rather, what counts and carries into the design process is an external form that subsequently gets modified in accordance with demands of the interior.15 The form is independent from its use, and it is not generated from within. It is unbound. From an outer form, one progressively arrives at an inner form. The pathfinding process and sequence is different. First, there is form, then a functional and logical justification. Of course, when developing biological and botanical forms, one intuitively considers from the outset how the external forms might relate to the wishes for the interior—where, for whom, and what should be built. The search is for a passage to the organic. The spontaneous talent, the wild intuition at work here, searches for a path and, as in poetry, forms a metaphor.
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.
