20/09/2021 - THE WHOLE UNIVERSE IS MADE OF CURVES
THE STRAIGHT LINE IS A HUMAN MIND INVENTION
"It is not the right angle that attracts me, not the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. What attracts me is the free and sensual curve — the curve that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuous course of its rivers, in the body of the beloved woman”, wrote Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012), famous Brazilian architect who made dynamic shapes and curves his stylistic code, earning the nickname “sculptor of monuments”.
Whether one likes it or not, the geometric rigidity of the architecture creates a strong contrast with nature. In fact, the straight line is a human mind invention: there are no perfect circles, ellipses or lines in our universe. Nature is a huge perfectly organised chaos; everything is melted into a harmonious self-governing system.
Look at a tree: we can’t find a defect in it. Look at its trunk, with those irregular circles that mark the passing of time. Look at its bark, made of furrows, wrinkles and shades. Look at its roots, expanding themselves underground, like veins that pierce the asphalt.
We always need to put names on thing, to make order. We tend to sum up, contain, reduce everything to geometry, mathematics, symmetry. But imperfection and irregularity make our bodies uniques, from a dorsal hump to space between the teeth. Even the Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid (1950-2016) used to say that “Life is not a rectangle. Think about a natural landscape: there’s nothing regular or flat in it, but everybody find those places likeable and relaxing”. We know today that curves neurally trigger a sense of relief in the one who observes it, and that straight lines are perceived as alerting elements.
Culturally, we tend to consider a straight line from point A to point B the best way between them. But this is the shortest way and could be not the best way. The best way it may be the one with more curves, it offers to us more point of view, more to discover, more to see. The more inspiring the journey, the more desires we can imagine. That’s exactly what we would like to do with our works.
Nature-inspired design is made of curves and formal imperfections. The curved line has deep meanings, recalls natural shapes of the sun, the moon, the womb. It’s reassuring. Curves transform structural elements in dynamic ones, plastics, rhythmics and naturalistics. While architecture, for its part, is functional to stimulate some new forms of relationship between man and nature, provided that it respects the environment. Nature, with its shapes and colours, offers us extreme beauty, illuminates our houses with the sunlight. It offers us inspiration and decorations to make our environment relaxing and joyful. Cracks, marks and scratches make everything around alive: an aseptic environment is a dead one.
Not even Renoir ever draw a straight line, because “it doesn’t exist in nature”.