Abundance

Feverish accumulation of strange and wonderful things began with the Renaissance exploration of the world in the fifteenth century, and exploded in contests between philosophers, popes, and emperors to field collections of botany, geology, alchemy, medicine, and archaeology.  The catalogue of Collection of Rarities assembled by John Tradescant in the 1630’s documents curiosities such as: “Nunnes penitential Girdles of Haire, A Bracelet made of the thighes of Indian flyes, Edward the Confessors knit gloves, Divers night-caps made of grasse, A little Box with the 12 Apostles in it, Variety of Chains, made of the teeth of Serpents, A book of all the Stories in the glasse-windowes of Sancta Sophia lim'd in vellum by a Jew, Flea chains of silver and gold with 300 links a piece and yet but an inch long, A piece of the Stone of Sarrigo-Castle where Helen of Greece was born….”

Cabinets of Curiosities were assembled as symbolic demonstrations of power and influence.  The urge toward accumulation, and the juxtapositions that resulted from the excess, fueled collectors’ passion.  Inspiration found in the random placement of serpent’s teeth and nuns’ girdles led to more careful cataloguing of the provenance and history of the objects, with annotations of botanical, medical, and skeletal remains. Haphazardness made possible only by the sheer volume of objects gave way to scientific classification.  Matching like with like may have started as a parlor game, but the groupings that organize artifacts through taxonomies of time, place, antecedents, or other natural relationships were later encoded in the nomenclature of science.

As collections grew, in place of a cabinet, architecture became the spatial organizer and the generator for contemplation about relationships between objects and systems.  

The Gesta Grayorum (1594), a court revel performed before Queen Elizabeth I and attributed to Francis Bacon, described an imaginary research facility containing “a most perfect and general library” and “a spacious, wonderful garden” filled with wild and cultivated plants and surrounded by a menagerie, aviary, freshwater lake, and saltwater lake. Spaces for living nature were complemented by a museum of science, art, and technology – “a goodly huge cabinet” housing artifacts (“whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff”), natural oddities (“whatsoever singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced”), and gems, minerals, and fossils (“whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept”). The fourth and final component was a space in which to test nature, “a still-house, so furnished with mills, instruments, furnaces, and vessels as may be a palace fit for a philosopher's stone.’ [i]

Bacon’s imaginary place brings together natural history and science, medicine and engineering within one edifice, a trove of all of the abundance of the world through all times in history.  We  can accomplish this today with a computer and a connection, and yet we demand so much more.  Many of the botanic and animal specimens of the 1600’s are endangered today because of our overuse of the world’s abundance.  Instead of preserving habitats and cultures in place to continue production of the unique and exotic, we collect and number the dwindling species, study and classify their remains, and archive them in cabinets with humidity and temperature control.  By making these fragments ours we ensure their rarity, and perhaps extinction; after all, the archetypal dodo was one of the star attractions of the Ashmolean Museum, the successor to John Tradescant’s collection. 

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[i] Paula Findlen, Early Modern Science.  The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 3, 2006.

Longevity

The seeds of Welwitschia mirabilis may drop unnoticed into hollow pockets, to be covered with sand and left to slumber unnoticed for many years or even decades, until unusual rains cover the Namibian desert – storms of five days or more that wash the seeds from their gullies and into sunlight, leaching away the protective coatings and allowing the plant to begin its 1000-year cycle toward death.  For this strange plant, nearly alone in its taxonomy and a living fossil, embodies as many unknowns as if it were not just a primitive plant, but an altogether alien one.  Two permanent leaves, over time, are shredded into limp streamers – the only two leaves the plant shall ever bear, and the only source for harvesting water from the arid desert's fog.  A desert plant, and yet not a succulent in the way that we know members of the cacti family, with no deep roots, no water bladders for storage; none of the standard features.  Everything about it seems accidental – the anonymous pollinators who fertilize one plant from another, the unlikely events that lead to seed germination, the swollen pink cones bursting with seeds splitting from the two, vulva-like lips of the female plant, and the outlandish idea that a plant might have just two leaves – the same two leaves – for the whole of its 2,000 years.

Survival relies on just such implausible truths.  Plinths of stone may stand as long as this plant survives.  Pyramids may falter and crumble in neighboring deserts.  The lives of the few intrepid passersby in this parched place are as nothing to Welwitschia, whether human, or oryx, or Namib beetle.  Continuance is everything.

The plant offers no defense other than life.  It carries no spines and produces no foul poison.  It cannot close its leaves to protect the fleshy body, which is said to taste like onion when cooked in hot ashes. It has no armor to repel predators, and protects no symbiotic allies within its sparse foliage.  It simply exists… and endures.

Structures may learn many lessons from Welwitschia, beginning with the site.  In a hostile climate adjacent to nowhere, few threats come from mobile bands of marauders.  In the mirabilis life cycle, the plant thrives where not much else can survive, so threats are fewer and there is less chance of it NOT surviving. 

There is something poetic about creating only two leaves – two spreading wings that continue to grow and thicken and separate throughout their life.  Even as time passes and they are teased into filaments by wind and adventitious injury, they reach like tendrils into the morning to strip moisture from the wind and air.  Sunshine is never in short supply when thousands of days pass between rainfalls.  If architects could create wing structures of great flexibility without loss of function; mechanically perfect gleaners of the resources they need solely from sunlight and air; and celebrate the complete denial of aesthetics whether in its age or infancy, then there would stand the structural embodiment of Welwitschia.  It would likely fail to outlive its model.