Abstract Summary
In 1971, biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin criticized the agenda that had “dominated evolutionary thought in England and the United States” according to which natural selection is seen as an “optimizing agent”. Conversely, they proposed a different standpoint on evolution, in which body plans are “constrained by phyletic heritage, pathways of development and general architecture”. As they admitted, while this different focus on evolutionary mechanisms was “long popular in continental Europe,” it was almost entirely absent in English-language biology. Given this background, how did this “European” perspective come to form the basis for a major theoretical challenge to Adaptationist thinking? What were the sources of this perspective? In my talk, I point out that this rethinking was possible through an exchange and transfer of practices, data, technologies, and knowledge between biologically oriented students of form and architects, and engineers. Specifically, I analyze how morphological knowledge traveled from evolutionary biology into architecture and back during the 1960s. As a case study, I focus on the Stuttgart Collaborative Research Center on wide span surface structures. In this research center, architect Frei Otto and biologist Gerhard Helmcke developed a structural analysis of morphogenesis. According to this analysis, an efficient form is obtained by using as little material as possible in line with the lightweight principle. Hence, by showing how morphological knowledge traveled during the 1960s, my presentation will provide preliminary insights into a different history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century science of form.
