Nature, Artifice and the Mystery of Design (Notes on Le-Duc and Art Nouveau)

In his “Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle” (1868) great architect and insightful precursor of Art Nouveau style, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, pointed out that style, as a material condition that every human creation possesses, needed to follow the example of nature. He believed that within the universal order (of nature), the principles of human design exist and rather than created, are discovered. Accordingly: geometry, stability (against the force of gravity), and the harmony of proportion. It is from this “great order of nature” that human intelligence, through profound observation, must discover its own principles of creation.

“Architecture is a human creation, Such is our inferiority that, in order to achieve this type of creation, we are obliged to proceed as nature proceeds in the things she creates. We are obliged to employ the same elements and the same logical method as nature; we are obliged to observe the same submission to certain natural laws and to observe the same transitions.”

 There are three fundamental notions that constitute Le-Duc’s understanding of materiality: natural law, imagination, and reason, each of these abstract forces precede any attempt of human material creation. Primarily, reason must necessarily submit to the instruction of nature and to the incontrollable phenomena of imagination in order to proceed, but imagination without reason has no means. He points out, “we are not the masters of our imagination“, but only masters of our consciousness. If art first exists in an embryonic state in the imagination, it is only reason (the deliberated exercise of our consciousness) that will bring it into material reality.

“It is reason that will provide the embryonic work with the necessary organs to survive, with the proper relationships between its various parts (…) Style is the visible sign of the unity and harmony of all the parts that make up the whole work of art. Style originates, therefore, in an intervention of reason“

 Underlying his theory is the long-standing tension between the natural and the technical. The negative relation that defines Nature and artifice against one another has been a primordial conflict for the human, and thus a concern constantly re-emerging throughout the history of art since its very origin. Art Nouveau once recovered this tension and tried to solve it, in architecture, its style imitated the shape and dynamics of nature, for which it considered fundamentally beautiful and functional. Yet, this, rather than suggesting a rejection of technology proposed that the artificial unification of humans’ most advanced techniques and materials with nature’s principles is not only desirable, but indivisible for the task of creating beauty and truth. 

Concerned mostly with architecture, le-Duc affirmed that while it needed to follow nature’s logic model, it must be achieved by making use of modern technologies and materials. Thus emphasizing that nature serves best artificiality and the other way around.

Later in time Art Nouveau (and subsequently, Art Deco) unfolded into multiple disciplines of design, its fascination for nature’s shapes and dynamics resulted to twist (quite literally) the materials and technics of industrial design into a whole new world. Containing the mystery of nature along with the mystery–and thus, the promise–of a future, unleashed a stream of fantasy that better captured, for an instant, the visions, dreams, and impulses of a people of its time; a period of time in which the totalizing forces of industrial capital had shattered and obscured in many ways the capacities of human imagination. Yet, it was this exaggeration of industrial majesty that stapled some of the principles of a design-to-come and the promise of a future that has since been lost.

Throughout the century, other styles–mostly those concerned with the design of the imaginary–emerged and followed to exceed these principles in contrasting ways. It is noticeable that many of the stylistic developments within science fiction streams continue to rely on Nouveau and Deco for the creation of worlds that are either dystopic or hedonistically utopic. In any way, its design achieves to exalt the primitive and mystic conditions of humanity constrained by technology, order, and control. Once again, raising the strain that Nature is negated by artificiality and that the artificial, rather than learning from Nature, can only exploit it for its own sustain. For instance, Sci-fi’s fascination with Art Nouveau style is an aesthetic paradigm that better plasm both, the negation and desire for lost futures, corresponding to the symptoms of a post-industrial society, terrified by, yet eager to explore the limits of technology, imagination and Nature itself.

MIRUEL (Artist’s Blur) 

Miró Ingmar Tiebe (MIRUEL) is a graphic and illustration artist based in Hamburg-Altona and a current graduate student for a Master of Arts in Illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW).

The artist points out to be inspired by Art Nouveau and Art Deco–from which he has learned not only the majesty of shape but also the mysteries it can contain–yet, he emphasizes Nature itself to be his biggest stream of inspiration. 

Taking inspiration from the shapes and dynamics of nature, he weaves a visual language of his own, which I can only describe as one of transformation: imagery composed of alien forms merging in chaos and order; sometimes in an attempt to bring the viewer close to the unknown, into the realm of mystery, other times simply presenting the shape in its original state. Rich and contrasting colours define the limits of each shape and carry the sight of the viewer across the image with no fixed direction. If it’s an unidentifiable machine, a gross organism, an evil stare, an inviting corridor, or a remote scenario, elements that show his devotion to design and Nature are constantly present in his illustration: architecture, engineering, and the dominance with which typography acts to hold them all together. 

In fact, this persistent care for typography that accompanies his work reminds me of an original quality that Art Nouveau found in its lettering, a powerful design with which words alone can contain a whole new world of fantasy.