Fritjof Capra (8 page)

Design, then and now, has always been an integral part of a larger process of giving form to objects.
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At its outset, the design process is purely conceptual, involving the visualization of images, the arrangement of elements into a pattern in response to specific needs, and the drawing of a series of sketches representing the designer’s ideas. All these are activities that fascinated Leonardo and in which he excelled.

As the design process matures and moves closer to the implementation phase, its dependence on other disciplines increases. Hence, we classify different types of design according to the domains in which they operate. Today’s design disciplines include those associated with civil, military, and mechanical engineering; architectural design; landscape and garden design; urban design; fashion and costume design; stage and theatrical design; and graphic design. Leonardo da Vinci was active in all these “design disciplines” throughout his life.

Good designers have the ability to think systemically and to synthesize. They excel at visualizing things, at organizing known elements into new configurations, at creating new relationships; and they are skillful in conveying these mental processes in the form of drawings almost as rapidly as they occur. Leonardo, of course, possessed all these abilities to a very high degree. In addition, he had an uncanny knack of perceiving and solving technical problems—another key characteristic of a good designer—so much so, in fact, that it was almost second nature to him.

Many of the machines and mechanical devices he drew were not original. But when he took them from sketches of earlier inventors, he would invariably modify and improve their design, often beyond recognition. When he worked on the large cartoon of
The Battle of Anghiari
, he constructed an ingenious scaffolding, according to Vasari, “which he could raise or lower by drawing it together or extending it.” While he spent long hours in the Sforza stables drawing thoroughbred horses from life, he also designed and sketched a model stable featuring automated supply lines of fodder and water as well as runoffs for liquid manure, which would provide the basis for the Medici stables twenty-five years later.
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Whatever he was engaged in, technical innovations were never far from Leonardo’s mind.

FROM ENGINEERING TO SCIENCE

It was during his employment as “painter and engineer” at the Sforza court that Leonardo’s technical inventiveness came into full bloom. The duties of an artist at a Renaissance court included, besides painting portraits and designing pageants and festivities, a variety of small engineering jobs that demanded unusual ingenuity and skills in the handling of materials.
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Leonardo’s many creative talents were perfectly suited for this. He invented a large number of astonishing devices during this time, which brought him considerable fame as an engineer-magician.

Many of these inventions were extraordinary for the period.
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Among them were doors that opened and closed automatically by means of counterweights; a table lamp with variable intensity; folding furniture; an octagonal mirror that generated an infinite number of multiple images; and an ingenious spit, in which “the roast will turn slow or fast, depending upon whether the fire is moderate or strong.”
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Other inventions of a more industrial nature included a press for making olive oil, and a variety of textile machines for spinning, weaving, twisting hemp, trimming felt, and making needles.
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Leonardo remained an avid inventor throughout his life. The total number of inventions attributed to him has been estimated at three hundred.
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But this combination of artist-engineer was not unusual in the Renaissance. Leonardo’s teacher Verrocchio, for example, was a renowned goldsmith, sculptor, and painter as well as a reputable engineer. The great Renaissance architect Brunelleschi was trained as a goldsmith and first gained notice in Florence as a sculptor. Later on, when he was famous as an architect, he was also acclaimed for his inventive genius as an engineer, both civil and military. Brunelleschi died six years before Leonardo was born. The young Leonardo admired him greatly and declared his indebtedness to the great architect by drawing several of Brunelleschi’s renowned lifting devices and architectural plans.
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What made Leonardo unique as a designer and engineer, however, was that many of the novel designs he presented in his Notebooks involved technological advances that would not be realized until several centuries later.
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And second, he was the only man among the famous Renaissance engineers who made the transition from engineering to science. Like painting, engineering became a “mental discourse” for him. To know
how
something worked was not enough for Leonardo; he also needed to know
why
. Thus an inevitable process was set in motion, which led him from technology and engineering to pure science. As art historian Kenneth Clark notes, we can see the process at work in Leonardo’s manuscripts:

First, there are questions about the construction of certain machines, then…questions about the first principles of dynamics; finally, questions which had never been asked before about winds, clouds, the age of the earth, generation, the human heart. Mere curiosity has become profound scientific research, independent of the technical interests which had preceded it.
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ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

Leonardo was active in the field of architecture throughout his life, but his name is not associated with any church or other building, nor is he mentioned in any architectural contract. Yet he was praised as an “excellent architect” by his contemporaries, and art historians such as Ludwig Heydenreich and Carlo Pedretti feel that he deserved this reputation.
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In architecture, as in many other fields, Leonardo’s main interest was in design. His Notebooks are full of architectural drawings; he produced numerous designs for villas, palaces, and cathedrals, and he was often consulted as an expert on architectural problems.
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However, his drawings are not of the kind that a patron would expect from a professional architect. They are never precise proposals or detailed plans, and, as Daniel Arasse observes, they are remarkably free of “any studies of the details of architectural vocabulary (columns, capitals, frames, cornices, moldings, and so on). It is the syntax, the logical linking and the reciprocal organization of the parts of the building that interest Leonardo.”
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In other words, the problems Leonardo addresses are theoretical problems of architectural design. The questions he asks are the same questions he explores throughout his science of organic forms—questions about patterns, spatial organization, rhythm, and flow. The notes accompanying his drawings (written in his customary mirror writing, and hence intended for himself) can be seen as fragments of a treatise on architecture that Leonardo, according to Heydenreich, may have intended to compose.
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As a result of his unique systemic approach to architecture, Leonardo’s architectural design is characterized by a remarkable indifference to classical forms and a high degree of originality. “The solutions which he imagines,” writes Arasse, “are invariably (brilliantly) unconventional—that is to say, they are not ‘classical,’ being simultaneously Gothic in some respects and already Mannerist in others.”
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Leonardo’s originality revealed itself in his seemingly effortless integration of architecture and complex geometry. This is especially apparent in his many designs of centralized, radially symmetric churches and “temples” (see Fig. 2-5). Although churches with such central plans were a favorite design of Alberti, Brunelleschi, and other Renaissance architects, the playful clusters of geometric patterns—almost reminiscent of the fractals of today’s complexity theory—are unique to Leonardo. “The mathematical integration of the parts,” observes Martin Kemp, “somehow achieves a compelling sense of organic unity in the exterior perspective of the building in a way which is uniquely his own. Equally impressive and characteristic is the spatial vision which allows him to display his design as a fully three-dimensional concept, like a piece of sculpture, rather than as a compound of plan and flat elevations.”
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Figure 2-5: Design for Centralized “Temple,” c. 1488, Ms. Ashburnham I, folio 5v

In view of Leonardo’s central focus on understanding nature’s forms, both in the macro-and the microcosm, it is not surprising that he emphasized similarities between architectural structures and structures in nature, especially in human anatomy. In fact, this linking of architecture and anatomy goes back to antiquity and was common among Renaissance architects, who recognized the analogy between a good architect and a good doctor.
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As Leonardo explained,

Doctors, teachers, and those who nurse the sick should understand what man is, what is life, what is health, and in what manner a parity and concordance of the elements maintains it, while a discordance of these elements ruins and destroys it…. Thesame is also needed for the ailing cathedral, that is, a doctor-architect who understands well what a building is and from what rules the correct way of building derives.
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However, Leonardo went beyond the common analogies, for example, comparing the dome of a church to the human cranium, or the arches in its vaulting to the rib cage. Just as he was keenly interested in the body’s metabolic processes—the ebb and flow of respiration, and the transport of nutrients and waste products in the blood—he also paid special attention to the “metabolism” of a building, studying how stairs and doors facilitate movement through the building.
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A sheet from the Windsor Collection showing a diagram of human blood vessels next to a series of sketches of stairs makes it clear that Leonardo consciously applied the metaphor of metabolic processes in his architectural designs.
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Leonardo’s special attention to how movements would flow through his buildings was not restricted to the interiors, but included the surrounding grounds as well, by means of doorways, loggias, and balconies. In fact, in most of his designs of villas and palaces, he considered the garden to be an integral part of the house. These designs reflect his continual efforts to integrate architecture and nature. The emergence and evolution of the Renaissance garden, and Leonardo’s original contributions to landscape and garden design, are discussed in great detail by botanist William Emboden in his beautiful volume
Leonardo da Vinci on Plants and Gardens
.
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A further extension of Leonardo’s organic view of buildings and his special focus on their “metabolism” is apparent in his pioneering contributions to urban design. When he witnessed the plague in Milan shortly after his arrival in the city in 1482, he realized that its devastating effects were largely due to Milan’s appalling sanitary conditions. In typical fashion, he responded with a proposal for rebuilding the city in a way that would provide decent housing for people and shelters for animals, and would allow the streets to be cleaned regularly by flushing them with water. “One needs a fast flowing river to avoid the corrupt air produced by stagnation,” Leonardo reasoned, “and this will also be useful for regularly cleansing the city when opening the sluices.”
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Leonardo’s design of the ideal city was radical for the time. He suggested dividing the population into ten townships along the river, each with approximately thirty thousand inhabitants. In this way, he wrote, “you will disperse such great agglomeration of people, packed like a herd of goats, on each other’s backs, who fill every corner with their stench and sow the seeds of pestilence and death.”
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In each township there would be two levels—an upper level for pedestrians and a lower level for vehicles—with stairs connecting them. The upper level would have arcaded walkways and beautiful houses with terraced gardens. At the lower level would be shops and storage areas for goods, as well as roads and canals for delivering the goods with carts and boats. In addition, Leonardo’s design included underground canals to carry away sewage and “fetid substances.”
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It is clear from Leonardo’s notes that he saw the city as a kind of living organism in which people, material goods, food, water, and waste needed to move and flow with ease for the city to remain healthy. Ludovico, unfortunately, did not implement any of Leonardo’s novel ideas. Had he done so, the history of European cities might have been quite different. As physician Sherwin Nuland points out, “Leonardo had envisioned a city based on principles of sanitation and public health that would not be appreciated for centuries.”
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Two years before he died, Leonardo had another opportunity to reflect on urban design when he was asked by the king of France to draw up plans for a new capital and royal residence.
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Once more, Leonardo designed a city crisscrossed with canals, to be used not only for the water supply of splendid fountains but also for irrigation, transportation, and for cleaning the city and removing waste. Again, Leonardo insisted on the importance of water circulation for the health of the urban organism. This time, work on the huge project was actually begun, but it was abandoned a few years later when an epidemic decimated the workforce.