Zoomorphic Architecture

Zoomorphic architecture is the practice of using animal forms as the inspirational basis and blueprint for building design, drawing on biological processes and organic shapes rather than the more rigid geometry of Modernism, and it emerged partly as a reaction against the perceived separation of Modernism from the natural world. The style often draws on animals that carry particular cultural significance, notably within Native American architecture, and reflects a broader shift in contemporary design thinking in which the old opposition between culture and nature, and between the living organism and the machine, is treated as increasingly dissolved. The TWA Flight Center in New York City, designed by Eero Saarinen, and the Milwaukee Art Museum, designed by Santiago Calatrava, are two well known examples, both shaped to evoke the form of bird wings, and zoomorphic designs of this kind continue to appear in contemporary institutional and civic buildings.