New Organic Architecture: The Breaking Wave

The very term "organic architecture" may sound like some faddish throwback to the earth-shoe era, or even something completely new, when it fact it's neither. As explained in the first part of this vibrant softcover assembled by Pearson--director of the green-friendly architectural consulting firm Gaia Environments and author of The Gaia Natural House Book--it's been around for millennia, whenever people built things that worked in harmony with their natural surroundings, made use of local materials, or reflected the laws of science and patterns of nature in their construction. (In other words, everything from Stonehenge and Gothic cathedrals, which seized on the natural rules of physics rather than iron and concrete to reach to the heavens, to the Prairie homes of Frank Lloyd Wright and the sinuous, assymetrical lines of Antonio Gaudi and Art Nouveau, inspired by viewing nature both with the naked eye and under a microscope.)

The second part of the book is a completely delightful, instructive look at recent "new organic" architecture from 30 cutting-edge architects in all corners of the globe (truly), made up of beautiful full-color photographs and usually smart commentary from the architects themselves. The sheer beauty and innovation of most of the works shown here--from the way they insinuate themselves into their natural terrain to the ingenious ways they use regional materials to how they turn the whole notion of interior design on its head--is an embarrassment of eco-sensitive riches; unlike most other design anthologies, there's not a clunker in the bunch here. Fabrizio Carola's Kaedi hospital in Mauritania is a warmly glowing interconnected complex of fired-brick pods and passageway. Balkrishna Doshi's Hussain-Doshi Gufa in Ahmedabad, an undulating sequence of caves, makes the cyber-desert structures of the last Star Wars movie look banal. Renzo Piano's impossible-to-describe cultural center for the Kanak civilization in New Caledonia reinterprets the very nature and purpose of such a site in a jaw-droppingly original idiom. And if you don't long to live for at least a night in one of the upside-down, inside-out, backside-front homes designed by Bart Prince, Eugene Tsui, Javier Senosiain, or Eisaku Ushido and Kathryn Findlay, your senses truly must be made of something not found in nature. --Timothy Murphy