drawings made

by the German biologist

C. G. Ehrenberg

while looking through a microscope

In Sickness and in Health (1996) by American painter

Ross Bleckner

Microscopic views of plant cells

Microscopic views of plant cells

Microscopic views of plant cells

Patterns

in

human

design

Notice similarities between human and natural design

Which are natural and which ones are not?

How many forms of symmetry?

Microscopic views of diatoms for the next slides

Art Nouveau

Victor Horta in Brussels: Tassel House

Art Nouveau

Louis Sullivan in America: Guaranty Building

Art Nouveau

Louis Sullivan in America: Designs for Interior Forms

“René Binet modeled the multi-story main entrance to the fair on the form of microscopic radiolaria (a creature with a striking crystalline exoskeleton).“

“Only Redon’s pencil could give life to these monsters”.

“Only Redon’s pencil could give life to these monsters”.

"When life was awakening in the depths of obscure matter," Origins, 1883. Lithograph. Art Institute of Chicago.

Belgian architect Henry Van de Velde created walls that seem to swell as if they were breathing, and a roof that undulates as if it were alive.

Frank Lloyd Wright designed the walls and roof of a single-family home so that it appears to emerge from its landscape site, like fungus growing on tree bark or ice crystals forming on a frozen rock.

In Willits House, Wright conceived the interior spaces of the living room, dining room, and kitchen …as spaces flowing into each other like

protoplasm in living cells or light moving through a crystal.

Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao

Assignment for Art and Microscopic Nature:

1] Compare organic and human-made designs– use terms such as shape, joined shape, pattern, curve, angle, depth (color was affected in some slides)

**Identify two examples and compare them; identify two other examples and compare them as well.

2] Evaluate designs.

**Identify two examples (can be examples used in previous question, or not), tell how they make you feel, and try to explain why [“I like the spiral shape because it reminds me of windmills and wind blowing.”]

3] Select a shape and name 3 objects similar to it.

4] On slide 16, faces are drawn on microbes. What is the literary term for this type of symbolism? (Hint: giving human qualities to nonhuman things)

5] On slide 19, tell me one way in which the house resembles fungus or ice crystals.

6] On slide 20, tell me one way in which the interior space of the house resemble liquid or light in a cell.