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Brief Introduction


Perhaps the most superlative modern-era exponent of inclusional flow-form in his architectural designs of responsively lined (relationally informed) living space is Antoni Gaudi of Barcelona. Drawing his inspiration, quite literally, from the diversity of organic life forms, Gaudi used gravitational influence to assist the shaping of his constructions without recourse to conventional exact numerical calculation aimed at forcefully opposing their potential downfall. He did this ingeniously by making ‘cat’s cradles’ of weights hanging from and interconnected by strings and inverting these into their ‘mirror image’ to form his designs. In effect, he worked from ‘inside-out’, with the grain of natural influence, not from ‘outside-in’, against the grain. His buildings flow and dance with rather than confine life within rectangular cell blocks full of dead spaces that are convenient to build and reproduce modularly but costly and dispiriting actually to inhabit. They represent an extraordinary elaboration of the cave dwellings, tepees, mud-mouldings and round houses of human cultures uninfluenced by the strictures of Greco-Roman orthodoxy.


Meanwhile, the vast majority of engineers and architects continue to work in accordance with rationalistic principles that work within fully defined (i.e. fixed) parameters imposed from outside inwards against natural influence. These principles give short-term convenience and abstract financial economy precedence over what is beneficial and sustainable for life in the long run. Inclusional design principles offer prospects of an enhanced quality if not numerical quantity of life, lived in dynamical attunement, not amplifying friction, with natural process.



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