Over 300 years ago, Antonio Stradivari was making beautiful violins, each weighing a few hundred grams, yet filling the largest concert hall with soul-lifting sound. Stradivari would never have said, “For safety, I’ll double the thickness of the wood.” If designed like most modern buildings, his violins would play like tree-trunks. Stradivari‘s structures are balanced natural systems: no imitations of birds’ nests or deliberate distortions of geometry in the name of “architecture” here. Today’s engineering is too full of “tree-trunk” […]

Categories: published work • Tags: design, mastery, nature, overdesign, performance