NATURE AS A MODEL
The voice of the singer travels forward more abundantly than backward, because he uses the roof, and, to some extent, the walls and floor of his mouth, as a sound reflector. The roof of his mouth being made of concave plates of bone with a thin velarium of integument stretched tightly over them, supplies a model sound-reflector. Every architect who has to build a concert- or lecture-room, or theater, should study the roof of his own mouth, and imitate it as nearly as he can in the roof of his building.
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The analogies which furnish means of expression to the art of building find their models in nature. That which we feel at the sight of an edifice, the artist has felt a hundred times in contemplating the shifting curves of a hill, the bold edge of a haughty peak, the immensity of an even plain, a ground hollow, or gently undulating sheet of water which loses itself in the mists of the horizon. All the effects produced by architecture are only an interpretation of natural ones. What is a pyramid? A hollow cavern in a mountain. What is a Greek temple with its porticoes and columns? A memory of the sacred woods where were drest the first altars. What do we feel in entering a Gothic cathedral? The shudder felt at the divine awfulness of the forests. And it is also from the natural world that architecture has taken its decorations. Columns and capitals, rosettes, flowers intertwinings, ovals, foliage medallions, all remind us of something seen in the fields and in the woods, in plants and animals.—Victor Cherbuliez, Revue des deux Mondes.
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See [Insect a Model].
NATURE DUAL IN MAN
Plato, in his “Phædrus,” pictures the two natures in man under the analogy of two horses, one black and raging, pulling him down; the other white and noble, with an upward look, and drawing him to pure and self-denying actions; both steeds harnessed to the same chariot while the man sits in the chariot driving. (Text.)
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