Article ID: CBB853863560

The Circulation of Morphological Knowledge: Understanding “Form” across Disciplines in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (2022)

unapi

This essay pushes the history of a scientific discipline, morphology, toward a broader philosophically informed and cross-disciplinarily engaged history of knowledge. It shows that by looking at how knowledge and practices circulated between scientific disciplines (such as biology) and technoscientific ones (like architecture and design) we can better understand how (morphological) knowledge was produced. By doing so, the analysis contributes to the study of the mechanisms of knowledge exchange between the organic and the technical worlds and, more broadly, to the study of the dynamics of knowledge circulation. First, the essay analyzes the engineering studies of organic form conducted by the Austro-Hungarian botanist Raoul Heinrich Francé (1874–1943) and the Scottish polymath D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860–1948). Subsequently, the essay moves to twenty-first-century morphogenesis. It examines the transfer of the notion of morphospace, a paleontological practice of data visualization, into biology-inspired architectural design. The conclusion deals with the broader features of knowledge transfer and circulation. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century morphologists successfully translate and transfer morphogenetic processes from nature into technical artifacts to achieve technical solutions to given problems. In the translation of organic morphogenesis into a technical process, evolution’s intrinsic historical contingency was deliberately left behind.

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB853863560/

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Authors & Contributors
Juler, Edward
Plutniak, Sébastien
Gramelsberger, Gabriele
Schinckus, Christophe
Simone Aurora
Fabio Grigenti
Concepts
Interdisciplinary approach to knowledge
Philosophy of science
Morphology
Knowledge circulation
Biology
Morphogenesis
Time Periods
20th century
21st century
20th century, early
20th century, late
19th century
Places
Great Britain
Spain
France
Soviet Union
Institutions
Santa Fe Institute
University of Edinburgh
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