The Monumental Impulse

 The Monumental Impulse: Architecture's Biological Roots

by George Hersey

London: MIT Press, 1999

ISBN: 0-262-08274-8

(Amazon)

Read by the author in Oct. 2016

"Go to the ant, lazy one, consider her ways and be wise." (Proverbs 6:6)

לך אל נמלה עצל, ראה דרכיה וחכם.

A midrash ties this proverb not to ants but to the anthill, teaching a lesson about building houses to withstand the elements: "The Rabbis say, the ant has three houses. It doesn't enter the upper house, due to leaks, nor the lower house, due to mud, but rather the middle one." (Deuteronomy Rabbah 5:2)

In keeping with the dictate of Proverbs, art historian George Hersey (1927-2007) uses The Monumental Impulse to explore many amazing forms of architecture in the animal world. Hersey isn't interested in learning from these organic structures in order to improve our own architecture. Instead, he claims that early humans were influenced by animal architecture. (p. xiii). Architectural historians have long claimed that certain architectural designs are influenced by flora, so this is only an offshoot of that argument. Hersey feels that humans and animals share a genetic impulse to build monuments, dating from way back in the evolutionary process.

Hersey compares some existing buildings to shapes found in nature, including basic shapes likes cells and viruses. I.M. Pei's Bank of China (and perhaps by analogy, his First International Bank Tower in Tel Aviv) is shown next to crystals, and Vladimir Tatlin's Design for Monument to the Third International is compared to strands of DNA. (In Israel there is Zvi Mosessco's spiraling Culture Center in the Golan.) Hersey considers sea shells, ant and termite hills, and bee hives. I am reminded of an anecdote in Arieh Sharon's Kibbutz+Bauhaus: An Architect's Way in a New Land (Stuttgart: Kramer Verlag, 1976), in which the author describes the influenced of honeycomb cells on his design. Hersey's chapter on bowerbirds is perhaps the most lively, with analogies to grottos, obelisks, and piazzas (p.86). 

Termite Mound in Namibia (Wikimedia)

When it comes to primates, Hersey sees their structures as a way of marking territory, and feels that we humans have been known to act much in the same way. "Territories," he writes, "are singled out and remembered by landmarks." (p. 100). The biblical account of the Tower of Babel may say as much when mankind suggests "Let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach to heaven, and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." (Genesis 11:4). 

The book is most interesting when describing the complex dwellings in the animal kingdom. I found the first chapter on simple organisms and the later ones on phallic and yonic architecture less compelling. 

To learn more on the subject, consult ArchitecTorah p. 23 (The Imperative to Build) and p. 54 (Skyscrapers as Civic Icons)