How biomimicry changed architecture
The story of an extraordinary lily.
Walk into a magnificent space and your mind opens to possibilities that seemed impossible just seconds before. But where exactly do the ideas for a magnificent space come from?
One of the best secular architectural experiences you can have—where the whole space seems to create a symphony of experience around you, is when you step into the British Museum’s Great Court and you are both inside and out, under the lattice skylight and yet facing what feels like exterior walls. It’s the type of space that fills your mind with awe, transcendence, ambition, opportunity, inspiration, or whatever else you need to feel at that moment…
The great court used to be outdoors, then architect Norman Foster enclosed it. I had a picnic lunch with Mr. Foster right before his “spaceship ring” of Apple HQ opened. We were over an hour north of San Francisco, yet he arrived to the lunch on a bicycle. He had been biking in the area for several hours before the meal and seemed invigorated instead of tired. His intense workout would have been impressive for a 20-year-old, but he was already more than a half of century older than 20.
We sat and ate and discussed design.
He makes buildings, yes, but he also bridges time, place, and space.
What can we learn from Norman Foster? First, many of us underestimate our own potential, yet as far as I can tell, he does not: He’s fit although he’s old; He’s astonishingly successful, employing tens of thousands of people all over the world, operating an enormous business, even though he’s a designer; and although he won prizes early, he just kept going winning more and doing even greater work.
Secondly, we can learn about a secret twin stash of inspiration: history and nature.
The Great Court at the British Museum directly connects back to the Crystal Palace designed for the Great Exhibition of 1851 by Joseph Paxton, which featured a “green house” style construction that Foster has more or less said “transformed architecture.”
But where did this innovation in 1851 come from?
The answer is a lily pad. The “Queen of the Amazon” lily caused a stir in Victorian England as scientists raced to grow one. Horticulturist Joseph Paxton was the first to succeed and he did so by building a green house to keep the soil and air warm enough for the plant to flourish.
When the 1851 Exhibition was near, 250 designs were rejected for the project, then Paxton, who was not a trained architect, showed the underside of his giant lily leaf and explained that the solution to the problem had already been solved by nature.
All we need to do is make panes of glass supported by steel frames, just like what he had done to build his green houses. The Crystal Palace was a hit, and astounded visitors and planted a new idea in the minds of architects everywhere—the pane and frame. In the 1990s, when Foster was doing his designs for adding a roof to the British Museum, he reached back through both the history of architecture and nature to modernize Paxton’s lily.
Takeaways:
Like Normal Foster, you have vast potential. So go for it!
Like Paxton, you can reach past your own area of expertise into another field to create breakthroughs that narrow “specialists” miss.
Nature can inspire and inform via biomimicry.
BONUS: I wonder if Foster’s bike rides and Paxton’s field work are examples of how the body might influence the mind for a type of super-cognition… below for more on that particularly delicious idea.
Super-cognition
Here are a few ideas for the most simple and direct activities we can do to best prepare our minds for super-cognition and creative breakthroughs. I’ve cited research for each claim. Let me know if you have heard of others and I’ll edit this post, add them in, and credit you.
Try these suggestions to prepare your mind for creative work and intellectual excellence.
Take a walk. Harvard and Stanford agree on at least one thing: walking can increase your creativity.
Breathe deeply. Yale School of Medicine tells us why: deep breaths reset our vagus nerve signaling that we are “under stress.” And increased stress reduces creativity. So if you want to be more creative, the first step is to remove the stress-signals in your environment. While you can’t always control every aspect of your environment, deep breathing is one action you can nearly always take. So three deep breaths before any creative task. Do this every time.
Take a shower. Writer Aaron Sorkin famously takes 6-8 showers a day when he writes in order to trick his brain into thinking it’s a “fresh start” and get himself going when he gets stuck.
Prime your mind. Do a small exercise of divergent thinking before you do a creative task. Such as look around your desk and try to think of a very unusual use for a common object. Or ask chatGPT to give you a pair of seemingly unrelated items and challenge yourself to think of a way to combine them. Repeat this 10 times. These small “warm ups” for divergent thinking greatly increase your chances of doing creative work. Here’s the science from NIH.
Palms Down. Stand with your palms facing the ground and bend your elbows a little bit, doing the “palms down” motion of a person in control who is grounded, calm, and in control. If you don’t know this move, see Sports Psychology for Artists.
Your creative friend on the internet,
Buckhouse