Harnessing wind energy harks back centuries to unknown Middle Eastern and Asian architects who developed windcatchers to create natural ventilation systems – but the architectural implications of harnessing wind go far beyond ancient windcatchers and today’s turbine-turning wind farms generating energy. Wind itself shapes environments with architectural force and focus, generating wave patterns refashioning shorelines, and through wind-borne deposition, shape dunes. These are natural and artistic, as well as environmental events. Perhaps that is why artists and architects, not wanting to be outdone by Nature, have throughout history been refining their own forms of windswept art.

 

Windswept landscapes and interiors dramatically animate the Renaissance religious paintings of Tintoretto. Bernini’s baroque sculptures – think of his Triton with streaming hair gracing Rome’s “Fountain of the Moor” – evoke divinely human figures so wind-whirled as to prefigure Dorothy and Toto’s tornado-transit to Oz. Referencing Asian art, windswept seas have long sensationally energized Chinese and Japanese landscape art, most famously in Hokusai’s cresting wave print. So, windswept design has a long history of sweeping away designers seeking a sense of dramatically kinetic dynamism. And recent books and instillation art inspire and deepen the inspirational value of windswept design for art’s sake as well as for sustainability’s sake.

 

Norbert Wolf’s Art Nouveau (Prestel, 2011) is a weighty and eccentrically organized coffee table book with extraordinary reproductions of Art Nouveau architecture, painting, decorative arts, fashion, advertising, and most surprisingly, dance. Wolf overreaches by trying to pack too many artistic expressions in a single volume, likely contributing to the book’s odd sequencing of topics, hop-scotching from key themes to cataloguing artists by nationality, to painting, and concluding with a visionary chapter about the impact of this late 19th-century style in our time. From an architectural perspective, you might read this starting with the chapter on “Synesthesia” featuring a section entitled “Built Symphonies,” then jump to chapters on Victor Horta, Gaudí, Louis Sullivan, and Adolph Loos. And if Wolf’s rather formal writing (translated from the German) is offputting, the book’s graphics alone captivate. Art Nouveau architecture stunningly showcased curvilinear and biomorphic decorative patterns, foreshadowing major trends in 21st-century century design. It embraced new materials and technologies in the service of spotlighting the artful in nature (twining plants, rippling streams, and massively, windswept flora and fauna). Art Nouveau’s obsession with the windswept image manifested itself architecturally in Victor Horta’s swirling staircases suggesting barely arrested eddies in a stream, or a freeze-frame of a wind funnel, an uncannily balanced marriage of natural form and geometric abstraction realized in lushly curvilinear lines.

 

This is why you can discover wicked assessments of Zaha Hadid’s designs on the Internet by searching “Hadid Art Nouveau Chic.” While clearly crediting the Russian Constructivists as muses in the evolution of her precise, mathematically-inspired, dynamically kinetic designs, her fluid forms evoking energetically pooling motion might just as well be updated translations of Art Nouveau. Try this experiment. Transition from gazing at the Art Nouveau art and architecture inspired by the dancer Loie Fuller (page 95 in Wolf’s book or here) to this 1896 film of Fuller dancing. Now look at the design of Hadid’s Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Center. Is it possible to not see the continuity and refinement of windswept biomorphic forms from Art Nouveau to Hadid? Fuller’s dance mimics a butterfly navigating wind currents, or leaves twisting in wind, but also verges on purely abstract geometric patterns evoking vigorously muscular gestures. In short: Hadid animated on the dance floor, truer to her aesthetic than her stage set design for that avant-Brit dance band, The Pet Shop Boys. Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion (Yale University Press, 2011) is a petite catalogue accompanying the recent show of Hadid’s furniture and objects at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Authored capably by curator Kathryn Bloom Hiesinger (and only mildly blemished by the Teutonically-tortured prose of key Hadid colleague, Patrik Schumacher), 42 color illustrations of sofas, tables, residential fixtures, jewelry, and footwear positively beguile. Common to the diverse lot: the windswept biomorphic look. How comfortable is Hadid’s furniture? Oh, probably as easy to sit upon as any asymmetric plastic kidney-shaped chairs by Mr. and Mrs. Eames, and better than dropping your ass into Rietvald’s Red/Blue chair of de Stijl-de Sade glory. But since Hadid designs interiors and exteriors predicated on our desire for adventurous turbulent atmospherics, creature comfort assumes second place to excitement. Who relaxes into a sofa in the midst of a tornado?

 

Bay Area instillation artist Charles Sowers has carried the aesthetic of windswept design into another remarkable branching. Watch his “Windswept” installation here. Sowers has refashioned the façade of San Francisco’s Randall Museum into a windswept display of 612 directional arrows rotating to graphically indicate the relationship between wind and building. On one level, he has transformed the museum’s façade to a lighthearted riot of miniature weather-vanes to perhaps lift the veil of exterior seriousness emanating from much museum architecture. On yet another level, he has brilliantly transformed a building façade into a nature observatory, as sensitive an indicator of wind patterns as desert dunes or shorelines. At a time when building façades assume the identity of energy-draining, larger-than-life video monitors studded with billboard vulgarity, there’s something aesthetically and sustainably uplifting in Sowers’s windswept, low-tech, permanent instillation. This may not have been what Bob Dylan had in mind when he sang “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” but it seems to mesh with poet Ezra Pound’s poetic claim, “The wind is part of the process.”

 

 

Norman Weinstein writes about architecture and design for Architectural Record, and is the author of “Words That Build” – an exclusive 21-part series published by ArchNewsNow.com – that focuses on the overlooked foundations of architecture: oral and written communication. He consults with architects and engineers interested in communicating more profitably; his webinars are available from ExecSense. He can be reached at nweinstein@q.com.

 

More by Weinstein:

 

A Meditation on the Beauty of Zaha Hadid's Door Handle

Hadid's design issues a challenge: define beauty by lyrically playing with illusion.

 

Why "Greatest Hits" Lists by Architecture's Stars Should Be Mocked 
Transferring the musical or cinematic "greatest hits" list mind-set to architecture is deleterious, and here's why.

 

Celebratory Meditations on SANAA Winning the Pritzker Prize

 

Op-Ed: Life After Ada: Reassessing the Utility of Architectural Criticism 
Ada Louise Huxtable deserves mucho thanks and praise - but other questions moving us to a new flavor of criticism have to be asked.

 

Book Review: Laboratory Architecture for Observing Nature at Play
Books on Luis Barragan's house and BNIM's Omega Center for Sustainable Living reveal how transparently daring designs teach Nature's processes.

 

Book Review: Tracing a Hidden Track from Adolf Loos as Modernist Architect to Jennifer Post as Modernist Interior Designer
By considering this unlikely couple, we can air out that beleaguered term "architectural minimalism" and trace a trajectory of what might be better identified as "essentialist architecture."

 

Two Books to Accelerate the Translation of Ideas into Practical Forms
New books on design research and transformational ideas through architectural history have potent practical uses: "The Designer's Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design" Sally Augustin and Cindy Coleman; and "100 Ideas That Changed Architecture" by Richard Weston

 

Book Review: How to be a Useful Architectural Critic: Alexandra Lange's Perspicacious Primer Points the Way
"Writing about Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities" - use it often and you'll never think of the word "critic" pejoratively again.

 

Michael Sorkin: Architectural Critic as Scam Scanner and Urban(e) Design Sage
Sorkin's "All Over the Map," a sprawling miscellany of recent essays on buildings and cities, a triumph of enlightened nay-saying and affirmation.

 

Best Architecture Books of 2011
10 Books Sparking Creative Inspiration Plus Escapist Fare for Financially Fickle Times

 

Book Review: Pencils that Refuse to Die: Meditations about New Books on Architectural Drawing 
Three recent books dealing with architectural drawing by pencil you need to read: "Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow Food for the Architect's Imagination" by Marco Frascari; "The Architect's Sketchbook" by Will Jones; and "Robbie Cornelissen: The Capacious Memory" by Lex ter Braak and Edwin Jacobs

 

Book Review: "One Million Acres & No Zoning": Lars Lerup's Outrageous Encomium to Houston Instructs and Infuriates 
This isn't some dryly academic reconfiguration of trendy urban planning theory. I recommend it for the intrepid.

 

Book Review: Talkin' 'Bout (Not) My Generation: Uplifting Gen X Architects Showcase Pragmatic Optimism 
In "New York Dozen: Gen X Architects" by architect Michael J. Crosbie, the framing of each architectural firm is extraordinary.

 

"Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum": Bravura Example of an Architectural Documentary - Wright's Guggenheim Done Right 
A look at great architecture as the product of the dance of the designer's intellect in an architectural film that doesn't miss a beat.

 

Book Review: A Shout Out for Leers Weinzapfel Associates: "Made to Measure" - Some Meditations on Rejuvenating Campus Architecture

 

Book Review: Diving into Architecture from Every New Angle: Reading Guillevic's "Geometries" 
Why an obscure book of French poetry in a flashy translation goes to the heart of every architectural practice.

 

Book Review: "Immaterial World: Transparency in Architecture": Marc Kristal crystallizes increasingly complex notions of transparency with a light touch. 
Although most of the 25 projects discussed are well-known, they take on additional meaning in this sensitively curated selection. 

 

Book Review: "Visual Planning and the Picuresque" by Nikolaus Pevsner. Edited by Mathew Aitchison 
A rediscovered manuscript unveils a portrait of the famed architectural historian as neglected urban designer. His commitment to the picturesque aesthetic for buildings and towns is as urgently needed as ever.

 

Book Review: How New Urbanism's Case Triumphs Best Through "The Language of Towns & Cities: A Visual Dictionary" by Dhiru A. Thadani 
Thadani's oversized reference charms, infuriates, and enlightens.

 

Best Architecture Books of 2010 
Ten books pointing the way to larger professional horizons

 

Book Review: "Architecture and Beauty: Conversations with Architects about a Troubled Relationship": Yael Reisner exuberantly interviews architects about beauty 
Any of you architects seen Mr. Keats Lately?

 

Book Review: Shedding Light on Concrete: Tadao Ando: Complete Works 1975-2010 by Philip Jodidio 
Photographic presentation of a poet of light and concrete triumphs over lackluster commentary.

 

Book Review: Sage Architectural Reflections from Architecture's "Athena": Denise Scott Brown's "Having Words" distills a lifetime of theorizing and practice into practical and succinct guidance for thriving through difficult times 
Brown's occasional papers trace a trenchant trajectory of learning from Las Vegas to learning from everything.

 

Book Review: Keeping the Architectural Profession Professional: "Architecture from the Outside In: Selected Essays by Robert Gutman" celebrates Gutman's legacy as invaluable outsider
Selected essays by a penetrating sociologist of architecture pose the kinds of tough-minded questions needed now to keep architectural professional on-track.

 

Book Review: "Design through Dialogue: A Guide for Clients and Architects," by Karen A. Franck and Teresa von Sommaruga Howard 
A helpful communications primer offers case studies of winning collaborations between clients and architects, but as useful as this book proves, it leaves some uncomfortable questions about communication unaddressed.

 

Twilight Visions: Vintage Surrealist Photography Sheds New Light on Architecture 
An exhibition and book of photographs of Paris between the wars might just be the necessary correctives to the virtual sterility of digital imagery

 

Best Architecture Books of 2009 
10 crucial volumes from the classic to the iconoclastic

 

Book Review: "Gunnar Birkerts: Metaphoric Modernist" by Sven Birkerts and Martin Schwartz

A major architect in the history of Modernism finally receives recognition – and sundry asides about why Modernism never exited.

 

Book Review: "Urban Design for an Urban Century: Placemaking for People," by Lance Jay Brown, David Dixon, and Oliver Gillham 
To the credit of the erudite authors, their sketch of urban design brings levels of political, sociological, and architectural analysis together in a readable synthesis.

 

Book Review: "Everything Must Move: 15 Years at Rice School of Architecture 1994-2009" 
There’s a Texas flood of architectural ideas that gives ample evidence of an architecture school that unsettles pat assumptions. Who could ask for anything more?

 

Book Review: A Subversive Book Every Architect Needs: "Architect's Essentials of Negotiation" by Ava J. Abramowitz 
Supposedly architects don't need negotiating skills along with other communication skills because great design "sells itself." How lovely that an AIA legal counsel created this definitive book to shatter that thin myth.

 

Book Review: A Perspective from One Elevation: "Conversations With Frank Gehry" by Barbara Isenberg

Gehry's conversations offer portraits of an astute listener as well as talker, an architect as aware of his flaws and limitations as of his virtues.

 

Best Architecture Books of 2008 
10 tomes from the superior to the indispensable

 

Book Review: You've Got to Draw the Line Somewhere

A review of Drafting Culture: a Social History of Architectural Graphic Standards by George Barnett Johnston

 

Book Review: "NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith," edited by Franklin Sirmans

Sharpen your pencils - and get ready to do a NeoHooDoo shimmy.