Design in Nature: Learning from Trees

  • Claus Mattheck
Springer: 1998. Pp.276 $44.95, £30, (pbk)

Claus Mattheck grew up in East Germany, where the regime stole his history and his trust. He was a political prisoner for several years after trying to escape (all his East German equipment broke down and failed him; only a West German watch was reliable). Truth and trust are very important to him, and he seeks them in his teachers and friends, the trees.

I spent a happy day with him wandering around the Black Forest near Karlsruhe, hitting trees with a plastic hammer and diagnosing their structural design. I learned to see the lines of force stretching upwards from the roots and to detect the presence of a dead branch by listening to the echo in the trunk.

Later, in his laboratory in Karlsruhe, I saw how he applied his training as a physicist to produce a simple and compelling view of natural structures. By adapting techniques of finite element analysis, a standard tool used by structural engineers to analyse the balance of forces in complex shapes, Mattheck ‘grows’ shapes in the computer, making them spread the loads as evenly as possible. From simple beams and struts he derives the shapes of nature by erosion and accretion. This would be a pleasant enough pastime, but the method has great utility.

His habilitation was in fracture mechanics, so he was well placed to see that the shapes of nature, by eliminating self weight and stress concentrations, represent optimized solutions for engineering design. Throw away the design rulebook. Adopting the rules of nature using the ‘soft kill option’ (another of Mattheck's little jokes; he is a keen bear hunter, and follows them all day on foot with dogs) makes possible the design of screw threads, shells, levers and shafts that can support greater loads and are less prone to fatigue.

Mattheck has been developing these ideas over the past ten years in a number of publications alongside idiosyncratic illustrations, which his wife taught him to draw, and a multiplicity of photographs and computer models. Much of this is in this book.

He summarizes the computer models he uses, and the reasons for using them, and applies them to growing, damaged and diseased trees, then to bone, claws, thorns, shell structures and bracing. Finally, he applies his methods to the design of a variety of engineering structures. I recommend this book to biologists and engineers alike.