Nature can be an instructive guide for overcoming technological barriers. In 1969, the American engineer Otto Schmitt coined a term to describe the practice of science pulling from nature’s source code, biomimetics. The word might have been new with Schmitt creating an electrical circuit based on the neural systems of squids, but the inclination was centuries old. One early proponent was Leonardo da Vinci, whose own approach to biomimetics abound in the polymath’s notebooks.
Human flight was a particular fascination. From the 1480s to the 1490s, Leonardo turned to birds for inspiration, hoping to circumvent the limitations of human strength by understanding wings and their flaps. Alas, the weight of the mechanical devices Leonardo conjured up proved too cumbersome and so he turned from flapping to gliding wings. The flying devices were called ornithopters and are best illustrated in the through a group of red chalk and ink drawings that detail wing joints and the system of straps necessary to tie man and machine together.
Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus laid out his pursuit of human flight. Photo: courtesy Clos Lucé.
Ultimately, human flight took another shape with the advent of first propeller and later jet engines, but the team at Château du Clos Lucé in Amboise, central France, has brought Leonardo’s flying machine to life in a device made of wood, rope, and canvas. It hangs above visitors as the dramatic culmination of “Biomimicry: Taking Inspiration from Nature,” an exhibition that draws a line from Leonardo to contemporary engineers and shows the instructive genius of nature. The 500-year-old drawing itself sits in a low-lit niche beneath the ornithopter.
Amboise is where Leonardo spent the final three years of his life. Shortly after ascending to the throne in 1515, Francis I invited Leonardo to France to serve as the king’s leading painter, engineer, and architect. Enticed by a generous pension and the promise of creative freedom, Leonardo accepted and settled in the 15th-century château, which was a short walk from the king’s own Château d’Amboise. Ever since opening to the public in the 1950s, Clos Lucé has celebrated this connection and in recent years has held exhibitions on Leonardo’s relationship with perfumes, anatomy, architecture, and unfinished paintings.
Installation view of “Biomimicry”. Photo: courtesy Clos Lucé.
As the myth of Icarus shows, Leonardo did not invent biomimetic and in the centuries long gap before the practice was granted a name, nature proved recurrent a font for human creation. In the 16th century, German armor adopted metal plates taken from rhinoceros hides and British shipbuilders designed hulls that took on the shape of fish.
With the Industrial Revolution and the development of wrought-iron and steel, analyzing bone structures helped engineers optimize load-bearing. The cantilever bridge, for one, looked to the spine of a bison. Using photography to study the movements of birds frame-by-frame brought the likes of Otto Lilienthal and Clément Ader ever closer to cracking the secrets of flight.
The modern world teems with examples. Velcro drew from burdock seeds, Japan’s bullet trains looked to kingfishers, airplanes adopt the properties of shark skin, and robotics companies use animal anatomy as a starting point.
Engraving of a rhinoceros by Albrecht Dürer. Photo: courtesy Clos Lucé.
Armon was inspired by rhinoceros hide in the 16th century. Photo: courtesy Clos Lucé.
“This exhibition offers a timely opportunity to reflect on our relationship with the living world and our place within it,” Clos Lucé said in a statement. “The solutions provided by nature to a host of problems allows us to conceive of technology in a paradigm less focused on domination and more on collaboration and harmony.”
As “Biomimicry” shows, Leonardo did the same. To demonstrate a body’s mechanics, he created a suit of armor whose arms moved through a system of gears, pulley, and springs. He later repeated the trick with a lion, one Clos Lucé has recreated and placed alongside its contemporary counterparts including Solo 12, a quadruped, and Romeo, a humanoid robot, both designed by one of France’s national robotics centers.
Plants and insects were inspirations too. His vertical flying machine emerged from a close study of dragonflies, the ring of dandelion seeds provoked his idea for an aerial sphere, and the winged seeds of lime trees fed into his concept for an aerial screw (hence the name helicopter seeds). Today, researchers have followed Leonardo’s lead by developing micro-drones that mimic the body and wingspan of dragonflies, though as was the case in for his flying machines in the 15th century, weight remains a problem.
Installation view of “Biomimicry”. Photo: courtesy Clos Lucé.
Clos Lucé also dips into less direct translations. There’s the avant-garde bird-inspired dresses of Dutch designer Iris van Herpen, a research base designed to drift with ocean currents that mimics the skeleton of a seahorse, and the biomechanical sculptures of François Delarozière. They’re proof that art, as well as science, can find an eternal source in nature.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
