--- title: "Painting the world" date: "2026-11-05T00:05:00+00:00" modified: "2026-10-22T16:06:48+01:00" url: "https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/painting-the-world/" post_id: 11082 --- # Painting the world ![](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/10/AC6485-2-cropped-1200x675.jpg)The skeleton of a Burmese python: zoomorphic architecture uses animal forms as inspiration for man-made structures. Credit: Ashok Captain / Alamy Stock PhotoFrom time to time, to redress some current lacuna, an era comes into focus as a place worth revisiting. Dissatisfied with many of the currents of our time – who isn’t? – I’ve come to see that the 1990s had powerfully inventive movements that ought now to be in full flower but, for various reasons, aren’t. What follows is an attempt to show how much more fruitful these avenues could have been than the roads actually taken and a proposal that they might once again become sources of energy and inspiration. My watchword back then – and it is even more so now – was a passage by Michelangelo: “I sometimes set myself thinking and imagining that I find amongst men but one single art or science, and that is drawing or painting, all others being members proceeding therefrom. For if you carefully consider all that is being done in this life you will find that each person is, without knowing it, painting this world, creating and producing new forms and figures here, in dress and the various garbs, in building and occupying spaces with painted buildings and houses, in cultivating the fields and ploughing the land into pictures and sketches, in navigating the seas with sails, in fighting and dividing the spoil…” This perspective inspiringly unites – across everything we do and make – the collective patterns we forge, both calculatedly and unwittingly. To import this ruling idea into the modern world, we can also include the written word and even the wit of advertising design, which in the Michelangelesque sense also “paint the world”. The essence of Michelangelo’s idea is the characteristic way in which the best designs make compelling patterns that endure: compositions in real life worthy of being painted by great masters like himself. Taking inspiration from nature ------------------------------ It isn’t surprising that I found Michelangelo’s concept resonant in the 1990s. It was the decade of biomorphism: an artistic and design approach that takes inspiration from natural life and organic shapes to create elegantly engineered objects and architecture. In the 1990s, the discipline of biomimetics or bioinspiration was born, now an influential programme for bioengineering. In the same mood but on a much larger scale, enough zoomorphic architecture – designed with biological analogues in mind – was created at this time to enable its celebration in 2003 in a V&A exhibition and accompanying book: *Zoomorphic: New Animal Architecture* by Hugh Aldersey-Williams. The prime practitioner, the architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava, wrote: “I take inspiration from things that are skeletal, but also unicellular organisms visible by microscope. My PhD thesis was called ‘The Natural is Mother and Teacher’.” Similar was the engineering architecture championed in Tony Robbin’s influential 1996 book, *Engineering a New Architecture*. This movement produced the fabric-clad structures of the Millennium Dome in London, the Haj terminal at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and the free-floating “tensegrity” domes made by the American firm Geiger Engineers from 1988, built in the US, South Korea and Japan. I was first made aware of the structural principle of tensegrity via the novel “dinosaur-bridge” designed by David Marks and Julia Barfield (later of London Eye fame). Held together by cables in tension that gripped “vertebrae” in compression – just as *Tyrannosaurus rex*’s spine enabled it to rear up on its hind legs – the bridge was allowed to be anchored to the ground with heavy foundations *at one end only*. I was fascinated, and began to research tensegrity for a book on bioinspiration, which became *The Gecko’s Foot* and led me to the work of the American sculptor Kenneth Snelson. Snelson discovered tensegrity at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, in 1948. Equally rooted in art, science and nature, tensegrities connect stiff rods by means of a tension wire network that maintains the shape of the assembly *without any of the rods touching*, breaking with the monumental tradition of building and sculpture alike. It’s a means of creating assemblies of striking grace and lightness. A dinosaur spine is one source of inspiration, but the human body also embodies some elements of tensegrity. It contains 206 bones – stiff rods in compression – held together by tendons and muscles, all in tension. Without the tensile elements, the bones could not preserve the shape of the body: they would just collapse in a heap on the floor. In fact, tensegrity provides a unified model for the mechanics of all living cells. The integrity of cells seems to be maintained by tensegrity structures within the cell: microfilaments play the tensile role and stiff microtubules are the rods, the self-repairing tips of the filaments and rods continually breaking down and growing again, adjusting to external conditions. The power of tensegrity ----------------------- Snelson was aware that the wider possibilities of tensegrity in biology and architecture were being explored, but he cleaved to a path of pure art. Utility was not his aim, seeking instead to reveal “in whatever ways I can, the wondrous essence of elementary structure”. He used the tensegrity principle to create many different overall forms: “Needle Tower I”, 1968, in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, tapers to a point 20m high, aiming at infinity, while “V-X”, 1968, at the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, resembles a power station cooling tower but is far more elegant. Despite Snelson’s disavowal of wider uses, in the 1980s tensegrity architecture began to appear. The key protagonist was the engineer David Geiger, who built two domes in Seoul for the Korean Olympics in 1988. A year later, he built two more cable domes in America: the CEFCU Arena in Illinois, and the Tropicana Field in Florida, as they are now known. He died that same year. In 1997 a solid-clad tensegrity dome was constructed by Geiger Engineers in North Carolina, as the Crown Coliseum athletics venue. But this, sadly, was the last tensegrity cable dome ever to be built. Not for the last time, shifting demand – in this case fuelled in part by a preference for retractable stadium roofs – has brought an end to this particular adventure in ingenious and inspiring technology. We can paint the world in an elegant and witty way through what we do and make, but a large part of our creative world is embodied in the images and words that mediate between us and that world of objects. In 1996, a lavishly illustrated book appeared celebrating lightness and wit in graphic design and advertising art: *A Smile in the Mind* by Beryl McAlhone and David Stuart, principals at the design house The Partners. Crucial to this work is verbal/visual fusion. ![](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/10/C1P3DB-1200x800.jpg)The Príncipe Felipe Science Museum in Valencia, Spain, designed by architect Santiago Calatrava, who takes inspiration from “things that are skeletal”. Credit: HUGHES Hervé / hemis.fr / Alamy Stock PhotoThe master of this blending of word and art – and the presiding spirit of *A Smile in the Mind* – is the British graphic designer Abram Games, who was most active during the 1940s and 50s. Games understood that an advertising poster was more than a picture plus words. Take the Second World War poster “Grow Your Own Food”. He discovered that the image of a spade could also serve as a ship’s hull face. So the picture divides down the middle, with a ploughed field and spade to the left, and the sea and a ship to the right – the message being that growing your own food was better than relying on convoys from the US, with their huge loss of life and cargo. In this Gamesian spirit, computer graphics might have transformed TV advertising. But of course the internet changed everything, and then social media changed it some more. In an obituary for the noted designer David Abbott in 2014, the design critic Stephen Bayley wrote that “beautifully artificed commercials” were “as quaint and redundant as consular diptychs or triumphal arches”. Ten years later, an article in the marketing magazine *The Drum* tried to talk up a resurgence in humour in advertising but admitted that the 21st century so far was challenging in this respect. Meanwhile Andrew Robertson, head of the major advertising agency BBDO, identified a “hesitance to rely on comedy for fear of being perceived as tone-deaf during moments of economic, political, or social tension”. The result is dull and timid advertising. 90s optimism and The Knowledge Quarter -------------------------------------- It’s easy to forget that early promise and explosion of creativity in the 1990s, before social media came to dominate the online world. But I remember it well. I was not an early adopter of IT – my first computer was a green-screen-and-floppy-disc Amstrad in 1988. But it all kicked off in 1992 when I acquired my first Windows computer, instantly learning Quark Express to produce *Poetry Review*, the magazine I edited. While leading to other kinds of novelty, I believe that the rise of social media has since stalled the take-up of truly inventive and elegant ways to paint the world. The 1990s was also a great time for science. Seeming to hold a key to the whole of medicine, the Human Genome Project was underway. Popular science books did well, with authors like Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Oliver Sacks, Steve Jones, Dava Sobel, Simon Winchester, James Gleick and others creating the need for new science racks in the bookshops. For me, there was a place where all the strands of 90s optimism came together: the projected King’s Cross Knowledge Quarter. Crucial to this was the arrival of the new British Library at St Pancras in 1998. At the time, I was researching bioinspiration. I found the new library to be a great joy. St Pancras combined the Science Reference Library from Chancery Lane and the hallowed British Library Reading Room collection from Holborn and added the global archive of the internet: a researcher’s dream. At lunch times, I’d wander the huge building site, on what had been 67 acres of derelict cottages, gas holders, a disused tube station and other defunct railway buildings. Bound to the north by the railway lines coming out of St Pancras and King’s Cross, the area was the focus of an ambitious plan to develop a cultural hub known as the Knowledge Quarter, with colleges, high spec shops, restaurants and housing. The world of knowledge I was imbibing at the library started to take physical root in the streets around. Right opposite the exit from St Pancras, a new medical research facility was being planned: the Francis Crick Institute, designed to accelerate the march of genomic knowledge. A glimpse into the nanoworld ---------------------------- The 90s saw the beginning of a new way of looking at life: through the nanoworld, the microscopic realm of the extremely small. We discovered the beauty of this world, far below the scope of human vision, and “nanotechnology” became a buzzword. In 1994 the first high-resolution structure of ATP synthase – the sole source that powers life in every cell of every organism – was confirmed in its atomic mode of action. At the very end of the decade, we obtained the first detailed picture of the ribosome – the molecule that manufactures every protein in every living thing. Now, work on these fundamental biological giant molecules is at the heart of our understanding of climate change. Life’s processes essentially involve the exchange of small gas molecules – most importantly oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide – across the realms of the air, the waters, the soil, rocks and living things, processed through nature’s nanomachines. Our developing knowledge of bacteria may offer the key to ending our reliance on fossil fuels. For example, in 1994, we discovered a bacterium that can produce ethanol – a key feedstock for fuels, chemicals and materials usually made from fossil sources. But the prospects of these developments have been hindered by regulatory inertia and the current mania to “drill, baby, drill”. Meanwhile, the emphasis on packing ever more transistors onto a computer chip has obscured the work of deciphering the nanostructures of nature, much more intricate and powerful than any chip could hope to be. The aspirations for bioinspired technologies have also not been realised on the scale envisaged in the 90s. Applications of spider silk, for example, have shifted from grandiose projections – aircraft carrier arrestor wires, better-than-Kevlar body armour – to very niche products in fashion, cosmetics and some specialised medical uses. Missed opportunity ------------------ Thirty years on is a decent enough interval over which to assess the progress of the movements of the 90s. The King’s Cross redevelopment, including Granary Square and Coal Drops Yard, is the most successful regeneration project in Britain. Its unique advantages – the constellation of powerful existing and new institutions, the brilliant transport hub, the careful attention to landscaping, the restaurants and cafés – make it a popular place. On summer days, by the canal, it is a delight. But as a “Knowledge Quarter”, some of the bigger ambitions have fallen short. The most dramatic fall is the result of a cyber attack on the British Library in October 2023 which destroyed the catalogue structure so badly that every computer had to be removed from the building. Twenty-five years after digital replaced record cards, the library suffered the consequences of the vulnerability of digital data. Many systems still remain unavailable, while a more general institutional crisis has led to industrial action by staff and senior management resignations. Another less than happy development relates to the Alan Turing Institute, which is housed at the British Library. Founded in 2015, it was upgraded in 2017 to become the National Institute for Data Science, including artificial intelligence. Under its government-directed Turing 2.0 strategy, it is tasked with applying AI to address societal “Grand Challenges” in health, the environment, sustainability, and defence and national security. But this approach has clashed with the original aim of being a basic research organisation, like any university science faculty, and there is staff disquiet. The latest and largest addition to the King’s Cross campus is the new Google HQ. Despite talk of the UK being or becoming a superpower in biomedicine and AI, in truth we are mostly subservient to the US in these areas. The Knowledge Quarter is full of the British headquarters of American companies – including Google DeepMind, Meta and Open AI, with Anthropic proposing to join them. “Artificial intelligence” is not synonymous with knowledge, but The Knowledge Quarter seems *de facto* to have bought into this notion. Of course, there are many factors that led to the world of 2026 being very different to the optimistic scenarios of the 1990s. I believe that taste has coarsened generally. The dominance of IT across many aspects of our life militates against making our necessary transactions with the material world rewarding, elegant and graceful. In 1999, I reviewed John Naughton’s very fine book *A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet*, and commented: “The Net is in fact a gigantic folk art tapestry and represents the biggest flowering of collective creativity in the West since the cathedrals were built.” I’m not embarrassed to have said this, because it could have happened. We need to ask ourselves why we have something very different instead. And we shouldn’t let an obsession with AI – a tool that sidelines human invention and problem solving – stop us from exercising the kind of creativity exemplified by Michelangelo, Santiago Calatrava, Abram Games, Kenneth Snelson and the many others who have found in nature’s inherent creativity ways to enhance, not degrade, the world we are painting, moment by moment, in everything we do.