The art director of this year’s London Design Biennale, Es Devlin, intends to challenge archaic design principles and highlight current climate concerns by planting 400 trees in the heart of the capital.
Somerset House was built in line with the principles of the Enlightenment, an intellectual and philosophical movement in 17th and 18th century Europe. At the centre of this was a synthesis of scientific discovery and reason, the power by which humans understand the universe and improve their own condition.
In architecture this was represented through neoclassicism – a style looking at the formal designs of the ancient Greeks and Romans while conforming to the rationality of science. In reaction to the floral excesses of the baroque and rococo, Enlightenment buildings were designed on the principles of simplicity, symmetry, mathematical precision and absolute functionality. In short, the defined, measurable restraint of science versus the indeterminate, unpredictability of nat