Organic architecture has never seemed so relevant

There was always another modernism. Not the white-walled, minimal, austere variety but an organic, warm, eccentric and often totally bizarre architecture, which presents as an outlier but has always been there as modernism’s mad but much more fun alter ego. 

The modernism we tend to know – the Bauhaus, brutalism, the international style – emerged around the end of the first world war. But so did organic architecture – this odd, parallel modernism, which grew from the expressionism of the era rather than the mechanistic obsessions of more conventional moderns. Its model was the tree and the landscape, the cave and the forest rather than the machine. Even today it appears futuristic and, despite being eclipsed by its more serious cousin, it has never gone away.

The expression “organic architecture” was coined by Frank Lloyd Wright and he, of course, being in possession of architecture’s most monstrous ego, laid claim to it. But it had been there all along – and in forms wilder than even Wright ever attempted. The now demolished Bavinger House, conceived by architect Bruce Goff, was a spiralling helter skelter of a building, its twisting roof held up by cables strung from a mast like a maypole, its chunky stone walls like something from The Flintstones. None of this prepared the visitor for the interior: a landscape of upside-down suspended mushrooms above a pool, and a floor that looks like the result of an earthquake. Its shocking demise in 2016 led to a reassessment of organic buildings, this outsider architecture that is both so magnetic – and so nuts.  

The movement’s major figures are a disparate bunch. There was Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian mystic, occultist, theosophist and founder of anthroposophic medicine. He is known for almost everything (mostly for the Steiner and Waldorf Schools he set in motion and even the cosmetic brand, Weleda) – except, that is, his architecture. Yet a visit to the Goetheanum, a brief tram ride from Basel, is a revelation. This vast, proto-brutalist concrete monster eloquently expresses the organicist’s aversion to right angles; a building that looks as if it was moulded from wet clay, every column capital writhing and metamorphosing into some weird plant. One of Steiner’s concerns was that organic architecture should look as if it had grown and unfolded like a plant from a seed. It doesn’t seem possible that this visionary structure was begun a century ago – its predecessor, a wooden dome, looked just as wonderful but burnt down in 1922. 

You can see links to the weird world of Gaudí, buildings like wet-sand-drip castles or fairytale fantasies. At the same time in Germany, though, Erich Mendelsohn was designing the Einstein Tower, a streamlined expressionist observatory, a stationary building somehow full of motion expressing the way in which the physicist’s ideas distorted our notions of space and time; and other architects including Bruno Taut, Hugo Häring and Hans Poelzig were building a riposte to the strictures of Bauhaus modernism with a fluid, strange freedom.  

Organic architecture seems to flourish at times of existential crisis; in the Weimar years and then again in the cold war (and arguably now once again in the age of climate crisis). The fear of nuclear annihilation seemed to spur a generation to look underground at houses evocative of bunkers, or protective, elemental caves. Mexican architect Juan O’Gorman went from conventional modernist to organic Womble with his Casa O’Gorman (1948-54) in a lava cave in Mexico City’s El Pedregal neighbourhood, another long-lost wonder. 

His countryman Javier Senosiain has built an enduring oeuvre of biomorphic homes in psychedelic colours, which veer between an acid trip and an extra-planetary 1960s sci-fi set with an unsettling echo of the Teletubbies. Incredible, trippy interiors wrap and warp around so that floors become walls, which morph into dining tables, ledges and shelves, obviating the need for any conventional furniture (which would never fit in a house without straight walls), and the houses nestle into rich gardens and alien landscapes. Senosiain’s Nautilus house, built in Naucalpan in 2007, is a glimpse into the everyday life of a hermit crab (with extra stained-glass psychedelia), its design earthquake-proof; while his earlier Casa Orgánica (1984) in Mexico City, an experiment in bio-architecture, is a bit like being stuck in a giant ear. Invigoratingly eccentric but otherworldly beautiful – and, bizarrely, nothing new.  

Hungarian architect Antti Lovag was sculpting similarly alien forms from the 1960s, the most famous of which is the house he designed for Pierre Bernard but which was later bought by Pierre Cardin. The Palais Bulles, a house of bubbles near Cannes, echoes the sci-fi desert primitivism of Star Wars and created a foamy Riviera dreamscape of bizarre forms fused into something that occasionally resembles sea creatures, UFOs or fantastical coral reefs along with, of course, a 500-seater auditorium like a Greek theatre with the Mediterranean as its background. 

Another Hungarian, Imre Makovecz, developed a branch of organic architecture that emerged from Steiner’s philosophies about nature and metamorphosis, adding in hints of Frank Lloyd Wright and a big dose of Hungarian vernacular carpentry. Makovecz developed his style working in the woods outside Budapest in the 1980s, where he’d been effectively exiled after becoming a little too outspoken. Instead of disappearing as he was expected to, he used the wood from the forests to sculpt a new language, working with elderly, marginalised craftsmen from Transylvania and using their skills to make something deliberately different from the Soviet-style panel houses that had become the default Eastern Bloc architecture.  

Beginning with campsite buildings and community centres, he worked up to extraordinary churches that exude numinous mystery, and a funeral chapel (at Farkasrét in Budapest, 1975) reminiscent of the inside of Jonah’s whale, the coffin placed where the heart would be – what a metaphor for resurrection. Of all these architects, Makovecz was the one I knew best (I wrote my first book on him), and he embodied the best of organic architecture as well as its potential pitfalls, from political drift to closeness to kitsch. He also inspired a whole school of architects in the country, a new generation of designers working with wood to craft powerfully expressionistic buildings; it created a powerful sense of place, purpose and identity for left-behind villages.  

Wright might not have been right that it was all about him, but it was through his adherents and acolytes that organic architecture reached its domestic apogee. Perhaps it is somehow in tune with an American desire for difference, an independent prairie spirit that acknowledges the landscape. As well as Bruce Goff there was Herb Greene, whose magical Prairie Chicken House in Norman, Oklahoma (1961), makes its wooden shingles look like the ruffled feathers of a monstrous bird about to take off, or a shaggy lone buffalo on the plains; or the Hobbit-like, undulating Creek House by Arthur Dyson. Then there’s the work of James Hubbell: the Sea Ranch Chapel in California, for instance, is an exuberant wave with foaming crest made in timber shingles, stones and patinated copper by an architect-artist who conceived his buildings as total works of art for all the senses.  

The Wright acolytes continued to experiment with the organic in design, branching off in all directions – like John Lautner, whose super-modern, organic-tinged midcentury modernism became a favourite for Hollywood production designers searching for villains’ lairs; and Ken Kellogg, whose Doolittle House on the edge of the Joshua Tree National Park in California remains one of the most remarkable houses you’ve probably never heard about. 

Shifting away from the warmth of timber, this is a harsher desert dwelling – a house that looks like some kind of armadillo squashed into the hillside. Inside, the walls swoop and curve, embrace and liberate; brutalism without the mass. More akin to something like Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House in its segmented deconstruction, it also allows the topography in, rocks and boulders poking through into the interiors to create elemental accents. Like so many of the best organic houses, it appears to be emerging from the landscape, not imposed upon it. And the movement continues: through the fantastical feats of parametric design by Zaha Hadid Architects and other contemporary innovators such as Mad Architects.

“Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spider’s spinning,” wrote Wright. “Buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to environment, married to the ground.”

Perhaps our age of impending climate catastrophe has encouraged us to look anew at buildings that bury themselves into the earth, that recreate forests and waves, that acknowledge rather than resist the fundamental forces of nature. Perhaps these remarkable, expressive, eccentric structures give us a little notion that we ought to be working with the earth, and not against it.