Master Organic Architecture Starting From Zero Skills | All Organic Architecture Concepts Explained

It's obvious that you've got intertwining volumes and that makes for interesting buildings. There's floor plans, right, slabs. Hi there guys, this is Michael and let's go for organic architecture. We are going to look at a couple of sketches and we are going to talk about the theory behind drawing and designing buildings like these. So let's get to it. So what are we looking at right here? These are examples of buildings that fit the category of organic architecture. Yay, right, very good. And this is a bit more of the context behind organic architecture. You see there's like a difference there, like from a different world, right, in comparison to let's say modernism, bottom right hand corner. Okay, so why should you learn to draw and design organic architecture? Well, it's mostly interesting and kind of taboo because it breaks all the things that we, or the rules that we thought existed in architecture. It's something completely new. I know you want to learn this stuff, maybe your own reasons, you know, because some people just want to be like Zaha Hadid. They just want to be like that, original, creative. Nice one, but the best and most important why, I think, is that you need to apply the stuff here in your own sketchbook. Okay, you need to go and take action, right? What you see here, the theory, the concepts, the, you know, critiques, you need to know those ideas down and go apply them, right? So go and take massive action when you are watching this video and after, most importantly. Right, so what am I going to talk about? There's five essential categories of organic architecture. Okay, these are the kind of five I've sussed out. Okay, so there might be a bit more, but we are just going to be focusing on these main five. We are going to talk about the theory, about how to make these designs actually work. It's examples of me sketching a couple of quick designs. There's a short video clip where we are going to be looking at drawings your colleagues did, and we are going to focus on how not to make these buildings look weird, right? These organic designs. A mistake there in the presentation. Right, let's go, go, go, go, go. So where is it? Where is it? There it is. So I want you to understand a couple of things. We're sketching some, you know, organic architecture concepts. We'll be, you know, summing up, synthesizing a lot of information through sketching. Like, look at this brain. It's going to, you know, start to get activated. And in some cases, just one good idea that you follow through with all the way is enough, okay? You won't be able to understand the full depth of what an organic building is, we are just going to sketch and basically feel a couple of ideas and then, you know, express them all the way, okay? I think most students just get stuck. They have to tackle too much information and, you know, they can't push forward. They just get stuck in detailing, right, in imagining stuff. So what to expect results-wise? Well, stuff like this. This is the types of drawings. These are drawings done by my students. B2 paper, which is large paper. It's done in basically eight hours time, okay? It's quite interesting. One thing I want you to know is that you've got how your brain works, basically. You've got three brains, okay? So you are going to get inspiration from this. You're going to understand a couple of concepts, but I want you to go and take action, right? And also, I want you to take notes and start sketching small sketches as we look at this video presentation, okay? We've got the intellectual, emotional and physical brains, okay, that work together. So you need to be inspired emotionally. You need to understand the concepts and then you need to go and take massive action. So how do you get the most out of this training? Well, there's going to be a lot of info. Again, take notes. Get some A4 paper and 2B pencils and start sketching and it's time to go, go, go, go, go. Right, so this is in loving memory of two of my favourite architects, Jan Kaplicki and the author of Selfridges and obviously Zaha Hadid, the author of many, many beautiful buildings. So what are we going to study here today? Well, these are the five categories, regular organic buildings, right? So these are obviously, they have a visual language specific to this architecture style. And obviously you can experiment with different types of visual language like this. But at this stage, don't worry too much about being right or wrong. Get your ideas out there. There's also small scale pavilions, right? Like the ones on the right hand side. They need to be simpler. They are very small buildings at the end of the day. You can make them basically take shape from the structure itself that generates them. You can use the horizon line to obviously show the scale of their small pavilions, okay? And they're open. Let's have a look now at category number three, which would be large scale futuristic buildings. They are really, really weird, okay? They're huge and towers, floating cities, all sorts of weird office buildings. The form can literally look like anything, okay? But again, there's some motifs that come from basically nature, right? So you need to show that scale to justify that something like that could work, okay? It's kind of a subtle balance. We will be talking about how to not make them look too weird. So number four would be blob architecture. Blob architecture is different from organic architecture because it's really aggressive and it's basically contrasting normal architecture. So there's a huge contrast between the organic architecture of blob architecture and what happens around it, okay? You can make it look like it's a scoop or like gooey. It's melting. There's this contrast between it and what's happening around it again. And it's large scale. It's pushing the limits, definitely pushing the limits. And number five would be organic design. That would be interior design and product design. We are not really going to go through this too much. There's simple organic shapes with, you know, simple material, glossy material, something that looks futuristic. And again, they're all inspired by nature, right? Although they have this weirdness about them. Right, let's go for theory. So I want you to take inspiration from nature. This is a weird cauliflower thing, right? It's interesting as a spatial, it's a fractal, basically. So you get one of these weird shapes. So each one of the larger tips of this is made out of smaller fractals. And each smaller fractal is made out of smaller fractals and so on and so forth, right? It generates a spatial principle, which you can apply in your buildings. You can sketch these in four by four centimeters thumbnails. You know, you need to get a feel for them to feel what this is about. Okay, you can inspire yourself from like flowers or folds, right? Organic, right? The orchid on the left is just beautiful. It's just beautiful. And the folds can generate, again, a spatial layout or a spatial concept. You know, if you have absolutely no clue what you're doing, then just go and copy nature. Again, copy nature and start by sketching thumbnails of these specific elements. And slowly we'll discover a visual language which you can understand and apply, okay? So this takes me to the next stage, which is feeling and understanding scale. You need to basically feel and kind of understand the scale of these objects, okay? So look how large they are compared to normal people, right? Yeah, they could be actually smaller, larger. The pavilions are obviously smaller, but regardless, you just feel these objects. The amount of weirdness of detailing goes up and up as you make a larger building, basically. The smaller the building, the simpler it needs to be and easier it needs to read, okay? I just want you to go for the ideas. Just be an ideas person, okay? Just, you know, it's weird. Whatever it is, go for it. We will study this. I remember when teaching the, I think, these specific drawings, this is like a simple house. It's a three-story house. You know, it's just, it's good. It's a good stage in your development as a architect, you know? You want to test these ideas out on paper, you know? Why not, you know? It might never get built, so it's still valuable. It's still something that's going to grow you, okay? It's going to improve you. Right, so how to draw and design organic architecture. Let's get to it. Three principles, the same as all buildings, but in this context. So, number one, mark the entrance. Number two, keep, you know, in this case, this is an exception to one material and glass. You know, for regular buildings, you've got, I just made a lot of mistakes here. Damn. For regular buildings, in these slides, for regular buildings, you've got three materials. In this case, we will stick to two because of the specific visual language of organic architecture. Keep it sculptural, okay? Make it like a volumetric intersection, okay? Sculptural is very important in this case. So, let's mark the entrance. You see, there's something that just kind of draws you in, okay? The right-hand side building is obviously most, I think, most relevant because, you know, you've got like a fold that obviously attracts you. That's the entrance, okay? Use a canopy to mark the entrance and make it easy to read. Subtract the volume, right? Just make it go in. So, again, it's kind of like the canopy, right? It adds clarity to your idea. And obviously, exaggerate the effect. This is going to get you the clarity you need, right? Keeping to one material and glass, if you look at the left-hand side, we've got a really rough sketch. Obviously, you don't need to be an expert to create these things, right? You can, you know, just hustle and slowly get there. So, you've got one material and glass. Very nice. It would work for organic architecture. For normal sketches, look on the right-hand side. You've got two materials and glass because, you know, it's obviously the shape can be controlled easily, right? I think for organic architecture, the shape itself doesn't allow for you to use more than one material because it just won't work. It's too much. Look on the left-hand side. You've got a image and on the right-hand side, we will kind of visually break it down and understand it. So, let's look at the yellow parts. Those are the windows, okay? And just literally like a shape with windows, okay? But with windows, it's very important to understand this glass you see on the inside of the building. Same goes for these buildings, okay? So, the glass just helps you understand what's happening on the inside transparency, right? I don't want to switch this around too much because, you know, when you interpret something in multiple ways, you kind of forget its essence. The essence is make it like made out of this weird material and mark stuff with glass. The entrance, important areas, corners, movements, shapes, okay? Let's get a couple of material study references, okay? Basically, as I said before, just one simple material and glass, okay? So, just have a look at this. What am I looking at over here? Okay, what is this? What am I looking at over here, okay? These are examples of buildings which their materials, they're so weird that they basically defy everything, okay? But the case could be made for materials ordering this organic architecture, okay? So, if you look at these two buildings, the materials kind of make this shape have a scale in a way and make it look more realistic, opposing to this and this where you don't understand anything, right? Which is very, very good. Different effects. And number three, principle number three, hopefully you've taken notes so far because these are very profound principles. You need to apply them in your work, okay? Apply them in your work. Don't just, you know, go by instinct. Direct that instinct by using principle, right? Your inspiration needs to kind of, you know, succumb to your intellect, okay? And, you know, after you've got the intellect down, you just take action and everything changes, right? So, number three, keep it sculptural. It needs to be a volumetric intersection, okay? Just like a, it's not just a regular shape, right? It's something that you feel it like in, you know, in your gut, you know? It's, look at the right hand side. It's, you've got obviously, although the intersection isn't marked by a change of materials, it's obvious that you've got intertwining volumes and that makes for interesting buildings. I know it's blob architecture, but you don't want to have just literally a blob. It needs to have that volumetric feel to it, okay? So, again, left hand side, sculptural, you know? A lot of cuts, a lot of folds, stuff that make it look like it's, you know, basically, you could use it as a, you know, sculpture on your desk or something, right? It has that thing to it. But on the right hand side, again, the same kind of sculptural feel, but because we are talking about the typical type of architecture, it's easier to read and understand. These are drawings done by my students, by the way, right? Left hand side, weird organic architecture. Right hand side, understanding how these sculptures work together, right? They, again, it's something that you feel. They're not just a blob. There's something that, you know, kind of folds or moves. Okay, let's look at the top architects in organic architecture. Well, there's many, but my personal favorites are Zaha Hadid, Ian Kaplicky, and Greg Lynn. So, a couple of building references for them. So, stuff which is done by Ian Kaplicky and Future Systems. I think this looks like a sea slug which is fighting for its territory, right? So, it's this weird type of alien or something that is just, yeah? You can obviously see that this is weird and we love it. We love it because of that. Zaha Hadid, many, many organic buildings. It could be waves or, you know, kind of the flow of a flower or something, right? It is what it is. You know, it's interesting. It's definitely interesting and you can see that it's more towards being delicate than being weird, okay? And I just found this on the internet. This is one of Greg Lynn's studies, apparently, but I know his trademark, you know, artistic vision. Just got one weird material and it just flows, right? It's a blob with rhythm, right? Rhythm and glass. So, let's have a look at a fast forward sketching where I just go and sketch a small organic architecture building, okay? Let's go, go, go, go, go. Okay, part two. Bonus number two of this presentation. Let's have a look at drawings that my students did and I'll basically go through this and, yeah, narrate the good parts and the things that could be improved in each of these sketches. Okay, let's look at some organic architecture ideas. You could call it even, like Greg Lynn says, blobitecture. Okay, so we got a couple of references here, a couple of sketches of the organic buildings. These look kind of like blobs. Okay, one, two, three and, yeah, a couple of designs here as well. They're trying to study this image in a frontal view and a side view. Frontal view here, side view there. The image itself looks very, like, the final image looks very like it's a blob, like it's, you know, irregular. But that in itself isn't, you know, enough. It needs to still have windows to still have a bit of a rhythm. You can see, like, these triangles here of glass. It's very important, a bit of a human scale and so on. And this would be an interior perspective, I guess. Right, but let's not point, just point out the obvious. So the technique is very good. The software knows how to really sketch and get these nice gradients. Pros, the idea looks original, especially in a triple projector. No, not in that cinematic. The volume itself is there, you know, it's bulky. It's, I mean, it's realistic for a building. It's not too thin or whatever. The graphics are really good. Good line drawing. It's a good interior image. It's an atrium type of thing where you've got a lot of space for, like, two levels and so on. The cons would be, it's really hard to understand this building now, the stuff in here. You'd still need an exterior perspective, okay? Again, it's really hard to create things that look good and are so different. Again, imagine something like this, just, you know, like, flips everything in your brain, okay? Next up, we've got this weird sponge kind of building. Okay, not that bad. Obviously, for a volume that's this large, as in not very large, you can't really create buildings that look as if they had a lot of space. Because it's just a pre-local building, the detailing needs to be just enough so it looks good. Not too much, or it would kind of break up the scale a bit, okay? The floor plan's good. The pros, the concept is good. It's like lobby, whatever. The floor plan as well, and the volume as well, the stairs and so on. Kind of a contrast between the stairs and this volume, but again, it could look interesting. And, yeah, another pro, a good boundary, you could say, here, you can see around your building. The cons would be the graphic style. It's very messy, very disciplined, not, you know, not anything that would have any positive thing to it. Okay, you kind of need to take care when you are drawing a building like this, and the building is weird, and your graphic style needs to be a bit calmer, very clean, precise. Okay, next up, again, weird building. I don't mind the things going in like this. The problem is with here. You have like a cleaner cut, you can't have curvature on both edges, as well as here. The cut here needs to be straight. You have to cut like this, just to make things a bit simpler, okay? Yeah, again, the same, same problem. Perspectives aren't what they should be, right? A building should be like this, and that's fine. It's the lowest level it can go, and then it goes all the way up. At least it makes sense, you've got three levels. The way, you know, the author drew it, it's like people are too large. All things aside, this checkerboard tiling isn't very good in perspective, and it also needs rectangles to actually look like rectangles. This isn't a square in perspective. This is kind of a square in perspective, okay? The concept is kind of interesting. I could show a bit more of what's going on on the inside here, some volumes or something. Prose concept, not bad, you know. With a bit of correcting, this could be a really good drawing. Cons, the drawing looks too, obviously, perspective is wrong, and it's not detailed enough to have a better graphic style, okay? Next up, we've got this wavy building, which isn't that bad. We've got a plane intersection, a point of view. This is an interesting image. Don't forget to always add cast shadows for these elements. Okay, something like that. This is an interesting image here. The thing is, there's another mistake in perspective. It needs to be a bit taller. You know, when you're drawing blobs and stuff, it's really easy to mess something up, and you see this curvature there. I could bet that it's too much. It's going out too much compared to what you have here. You know, the levels aren't perfect. It's not one meter here, three meters, three meters, right? It's taller. It needs to be taller and more robust, okay? But the context here is not bad. You know, this building isn't set anywhere. It's in a city. So again, technique-wise, not bad. Very clear graphic style. Prose, yeah, it's kind of sensitive. It looks kind of good. Cons, it could use a bit more of a direction perspective, perspective for the entourage. Again, the perspective point for this is too far away. And we've got two stairs. Yeah, it could be interesting. Okay, another weird blob-shaped building. So this looks like a thing with something around it. Not bad. Interesting. Yeah, you need to see more of the entrance if you can. The axiometric looks actually better than the perspective. Yeah, it's not bad. It's actually good. Okay, from the perspective, I recommend you, again, you add something in the branch, in the foreground, something to create more depth. In this type of, you see, like, you can't really have a shape that just goes, like, round. I recommend every time you do that, also add these, like, it's made out of pieces, right? Very delicate, right? So don't look too strong. That wouldn't work. So it looks like a smiley face. So prose, it's a cool idea. It's weird. The graphic style, the graphic style isn't too bad. Yeah, it's good. We also got kind of a good layout. So the most important part of this video, of this training, is how not to make these buildings look weird. They're different, but they're not weird, okay? Weird is bad for architecture, this type of weird. Original is the good type of weird. Okay, let's go. Sketching is very important, okay? I want you to understand this. You will sketch these ideas several times, right, until you build them up. So you see these weird buildings, they're probably not the final draft. You can't take this and make a literal floor plan from it. But again, they are very, very clear. It's very clear that they started off with sketching. The other thing, the most important thing to not make these buildings look weird, is the classical firmitas, utilitas, and venustas, okay? So these are Vitruvius's principles, but they apply to buildings, and they double apply to organic architecture. You'll see why in this very moment. Right, so firmitas, this is the structure. Utilitas is the utility. Venustas, the final image looking good. So let's have a look. Left-hand side, we've got weird organic architecture. Right-hand side, we've got, ignore that this looks kind of like, you know, a prison with bars. What I meant to show in this sketch is that there's floor plans, right, slabs, sorry, slabs, floors, and columns, and they both work together, right, and generate this shape. You kind of need to feel this and maybe show this through your, I don't know, transparency. You probably can see the structure, you know, through the, you know, an area where you've got extra glazing and so on and so forth. Utilitas, right, so remember all these buildings, they, deep inside of them, they have something like this. So, you know, standard functions such as a bathroom, maybe, right. You kind of need to think of this in the back of your mind, okay, this type of utility. So, obviously, utilitas is function. Well, just let's have a look. Maybe, you know, there's different types of utilities, you know, maybe the green part is going to be an exhibition area, right, the red part's going to be a foyer, right, so an area where people meet up when they get into your building, and the, I don't know, blue part is going to be a, maybe an administrative space or, you know, like an office space or, again, an office space, maybe a cafe, right. All of these things, they happen on the inside of your building, okay. You need to, again, think about this as well as you can at this stage, okay. Maybe circulation, how people, you know, can flow around your building, maybe that's important as well on the inside of your building. And venustas, the last stage, basically the image looking good. So, this, basically, this concept of a building being expressive, looking the part, doubling down on the organic architecture, right. So, let's take, again, inspiration from nature for the venustas. You can go for the organic shapes such as the orchid on the left, the folds. Folds are very nice, okay, for organic architecture. You can see them on the left-hand side. And a flower there, some folds there, etc. You can take inspiration from famous architects, okay. And, yeah, you can copy their work, it's fine. And you can take inspiration from my work, from my students' work, right. These are organic shapes generated just by sketching them, which is all good. So, a short recap, the types of organic architecture, regular organic buildings, right, the large ones, small-scale pavilions, the smaller ones, really large-scale futuristic buildings, the weird ones, blob architecture, the really weird ones which contrast, right, the cityscape, an organic design, which we haven't really delved into, but again, an organic interpretation of common day-to-day objects. The theory, again, mark the entrance, so we've got clarity for our buildings. Keep to one material in glass. You know, again, if regular buildings, you should have, obviously, you should have had two materials in glass. Here, the weird visual language of the organic architecture, right, makes it enough for you to just have one material. And again, keep it sculptural, make it a volumetric intersection. How not to make the buildings look weird, recap, film it as structure, show structure, utility as utility, think of utility while you're sketching it, so it's not sketching the building, so it's not like a amorphous blob, right, it needs to have something special to it, right, a bit of, you know, common sense, and the new stress, the building, the image looking good. And of course, how to use what you've learned. Well, hopefully, you've taken notes. I want you to apply everything on the drawing board, okay, go for sketches, thumbnail sketches, you know, maybe get yourself a journal and sketch, right, but I recommend you watch the video at least three times. This is going to get you the core level understanding of everything here. Right, if you like this video, don't forget to comment, rate and subscribe, and you can actually opt in and, you know, pop in your name and email, and I'll send you these slides if you want to study them on your own terms. And yeah, talk to you soon. If you've got any questions, just leave them in the comment section below. Take care, draw nicely.