Inspiration — a sense of idea, feeling, or energy that compels you to do something creative — comes from many directions in architecture. Architects are often inspired by ideas outside of the profession and by knowledge from other fields that study science, art, philosophy, or nature. For instance, architectural ideas may come from:
• scientific principles, like what does water do when it moves?
• material qualities, like how do layers of rock form?
• human behavior patterns, like how do people act in a large open space?
• manufacturing or production techniques, like how is fabric, furniture, or even food made?
Inspiration can also simply be a spirit of creativity that is loose, peculiar, or intuitive, arising from traveling someplace unfamiliar, participating in a new activity, or experiencing other art forms, like watching a film, listening to music, or going to a museum. But it is only a start, work must follow to investigate what it means as a design principle.
Architecture students and faculty often encounter an object or quality they find intriguing and discover more detailed information that leads to unexpected logics for making something new. Check out these projects and their inspirational starts. Lace as a facade? Bubbles as structure? What will we think of next...!
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Image 1 & 2 > An entry to the ACSA/AISC Steel Design Competition, implementing a lace-like mesh structure.
Image 3 & 4 > The hybridization and cross-fertilization of two primary physical modelling types implemented by Frei Otto - soap film lamellae and catenary - result in a new lineage of geometric differentiation.
Image 5 - 8 > Students working in multi-disciplinary teams (made-up of two architecture and two landscape architecture students) completed a case-study project, an urban research project focused on one land use type, and a comprehensive mixed-use urban design project.