On the Modern Mimesis of Nature. Networks, Tools, and Ecological Thought

Abstract

The rich relationship of architecture to nature has been gradually impoverished and narrowed down to a single mode of operation according to which the former imitates the forms of the latter. This use of nature as a repository of forms to be appropriated corresponds, one to one, with the logic of resource extraction that lies at the root of the current ecological crisis. In this essay, Pope tracks several architectural and urban responses such crisis, proposing a specific definition of the idea of organicism as a model of intervention in the natural world based on processes of functional integration.