Genesis of form.

VISIONS OF NATURE--THE ART AND SCIENCE OF ERNST HAECKEL 

By Olaf Breidbach. Munich: Prestel. 2006. [pounds sterling]55

Ernst Haeckel is a natural historian caught between the world of art and design on the one hand and biology on the other. A straight line runs from Goethe's aesthetic morphologies to Ernst Haeckel's plates, to D'Arcy Thompson's amazing On Growth and Form, to Gyorgy Kepes' exhibitions at MIT in the '50s, to Frei Otto and modern day evo-devo. A line that constantly intertwines design and genesis, order and contingency, necessity and chance. As an adamant supporter of Darwinism on the European continent Haeckel popularised many of Darwin's ideas through an incredible talent for drawing and observation. Since the 1860s, his plates and tableaux have been reprinted over and over again, mainly because of his special way of combining schematic thought and realist depiction. His drawing technique seems to us evidently architectural, sometimes as literal as when drawing up sections and elevations of deep-sea jellyfish.

Generally Haeckel is described as a precursor of especially Art-Nouveau ornament and this book is no exception. Olaf Breidbach, the successor of Haeckel at the Institute in Jena, has already introduced two books of Haeckel with Prestel Verlag--Art Forms in Nature and Art Forms from the Ocean (AR July 2005)--where he puts forward the same argument. And though probably true, it is not that important. On the whole, Art Nouveau's language of ornamentation lies in the vegetal realm, in the dreamy waterplant and whiplash curves, and though Haeckel shows a lot of interest in wavy tendrils and tentacles it is foremost his studies on Radiolaria--tiny oceanic protozoa--that have been so influential in architecture. The plates of 1862 are just stunningly beautiful. And on them we don't see any ornament, we see structure. No plants but bones. It is simply impossible to imagine the work of Frei Otto or Buckminster Fuller on gridshells without Ernst Haeckel's studies of Radiolaria. And what makes the plates actually more powerful than the more mathematical--and more correct--work of D'Arcy Thompson is Haeckel's acute sense of variation and irregularity. He never tries to reduce his subjects to idealised geometrical principles without losing an eye for the 'endless forms most beautiful' as Darwin would say. D'Arcy Thompson was always somewhat troubled by Haeckel's taste for the actual, living individual. But that, we now know, was Thompson's mistake, because only variation is real, order can only be virtual.

Though some of the drawings of Haeckel are incorrect--sometimes trying to tessellate a sphere solely into hexagons, which is a mathematical impossibility--most of his drawings are more correct than any photo could ever be. In a photo we wouldn't recognise the irregular shapes of the polygons, nor the variable sizes of the tiles or the cracks, but in a drawing we always do since all lines are drawn consciously. And then made felt by aesthetics. Behind all the morphological arguments of Haeckel this one is by far the strongest: the world has to be and can only be sensed in its minutest detail; and this is a purely aesthetic sensibility. We should see art in nature, not the other way around. Or, for us, we should see architecture in nature (not the other way around)--somewhere between the organic and inorganic, Haeckel understood, order and contingency merge.

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