Thompson wrote On Growth and form in the maturity of a career that lay somewhat outside the mainstream of the biological sciences of his day. His writings were a large contribution for the study of morphology. On Growth and Form is essentially an attempt to establish a concept of organic form based upon the physical and mathematical laws governing the development and function of organisms. He demonstrates in this chapter that how organic forms once put in a Cartesian grid can change forms in the same species and how this method could be used to find missing parts in the series of relative species
During the debate in the class we found the book is more of a concept and basically starts with the theory of transformation and is solidly based upon the laws of Newtonian Physics. All the experiments D’Arcy conducted were in 2D and not in 3D and gives a mathematical approach to the biological forms. He tries to show how the relationship between similar species is still there but changing their coordinates and the position of the parts changes. It’s a form finding method found over 100 years ago and gives us an idea of multiplicity during that era. Topology has been explained as a concept here with no real results. It’s a relation of a part to a whole.
The Next part of the critical analysis was The Water Cube-Beijing National Aquatics Centre by ARUP. The structure is made up of the soap bubbles which symbolise the square in the Chinese culture. The beautiful geometry is based on Weaire Phalen foam structure with an array of soap bubbles where 75% of the cells have 14 faces and the other 12 faces. In spite of the complete regularity, the structure when viewed at different angle looks completely random and organic. The polyhedron structure works perfectly as an extremely energy efficient and possibly the most earthquake resistant building. The water cube is a steel space frame structure with 4000 ETFE bubbles, the material being 8 times thinner than even a penny, which are pumped in with a low pressure. The building captures 20% of the incident solar energy and requires 90% less potable water than an equivalent building and uses 55% less artificial lighting. The ETFE IS 1% of glass weight and acts as a thermal insulator. The whole structure weighs almost as much as the Eiffel tower.
Research line:
After reading On growth and form, I’m interested in studying and researching more about Topology in Architecture. Architectural topology is a mutation of form, structure, context and interwoven patterns and dynamic complexity in space. Topological space differs from Cartesian space within which it forms different forms. It’s a process of continuous deformation. There are differentiable dynamic systems in architecture like chaos theory and fractal geometry. Would like to research on the role of topology in architecture and which structure/buildings it can be applied to.
Image reference-http://futuresplus.net/tag/topology/