Findings

Zoomorphic

Zoomorphic
This innovative and surprising exhibition places architectural models alongside stuffed animal specimens (borrowed from the Natural History Museum across the road), dramatically illustrating the contemporary revolution in architectural form. Thanks to CAD, new materials and brilliant structural engineers, buildings no longer need to look like boxes, and nature becomes the inspiration. read more

The Most Beautiful Molecule

The art of chemistry
Imagine a whiff of Chanel No. 4. Nobody knows now what it was like. But a few things seem certain. Like its more famous successor, it would have contained substances evoking flowers and fruit, yet it was synthesised in a laboratory, not extracted directly from nature. For chemistry, people are slowly realising, has its aesthetic side. Creative personalities from artists to chefs are using chemistry to raise their work to new heights. read more

Psychologists and geneticists disagree on the origins of musical talent
There were some 60 members of the Bach family over seven generations in the 17th and 18th centuries. More than 50 of them were professional musicians of one kind or another. Does this suggest that musical talent is in the genes? Or did it simply become the habit in these households echoing with harpsichords that each young Bach would acquire the skill? read more

Touch Me
Using contemporary designs that engage in novel ways with touch, this exhibition explores the role of this neglected sense in our interaction both with objects and with one another. The many imaginative hands-on exhibits provide sensations of delight and pain, arousal and revulsion, and above all reawaken our curiosity about what touch can tell us. read more

Sleeping and Dreaming
Science has frankly struggled to understand sleep. It often seems that great writers have been more perceptive and precise in their description of the states of sleeping and dreaming. My contribution to this exhibition catalogue was to unearth an illustrative series of literary excerpts from Dostoevsky to Christina Rossetti and W.S. Gilbert to Nicholson Baker. But for sheer surrealism, Freud’s index of dreams takes some beating. This is a tiny snippet from the Ds:
• dead bodies being burnt
• dinner party, unable to give
• dissection with own torso
• district council, communication from
There’s more about the exhibition here.

Design and the Elastic Mind
Once, science and design were the same thing. Think of Leonardo da Vinci; think of Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke, founders of the Royal Society. But they drifted apart, as I explain in my catalogue essay for this exhibition. Despite much in common, Charles Eames and Richard Feynman never met, for example. That’s too bad. But today, designers and scientists are collaborating once more, producing new ways to visualize our complex world. There’s more about the exhibition here on the MOMA website.

The trouble with technology
I smashed my telephone last week. I used the handset as a hammer and beat it into pieces. A luddite fit, a blow for freedom, incipient madness? I don’t know. The telephone was just the whipping boy. It was the computer that had annoyed me, but I dared not attack that. I am hardly a worst-case customer for technological equipment. I’m numerate, degreed in science subjects, design-aware, calm and rational, as you can tell. I should be their friend. I’m not. read more