Organic design

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

Organic design is a way of designing that takes nature as its model: not to copy its appearance, but to imitate its principles. In a living organism every part is connected to the others and form arises from function and material; in the same way an organic object is conceived as a unified whole, with soft lines that follow the human body. More than a style, it is a thread running through the whole twentieth century, from the architecture of the 1930s to postwar seating and today's digital design.

The roots: Frank Lloyd Wright

The term "organic architecture" was coined by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright took the motto of his master Louis Sullivan, "form follows function", and turned it into "form and function are one", pointing to nature as the clearest example of this unity. His masterpiece is Fallingwater, the house built over a waterfall in Pennsylvania for the Kaufmann family, where building and landscape merge. For Wright, furniture, lighting and textiles too had to form a single organism with the house.

Aalto and bent wood

In Europe, while Functionalism favoured tubular steel, the Finn Alvar Aalto chose a warm, natural material: bent laminated birch. His Paimio chair, designed for tuberculosis patients in a sanatorium, and his stool 60 showed that the modern could also be soft, welcoming and human. Aalto became one of the great references of organic design.

The 1940 MoMA competition

The moment organic design became a real programme was the "Organic Design in Home Furnishings" competition launched by New York's Museum of Modern Art and curated by Eliot Noyes, director of the industrial design department. In 1940 the first prizes went to two young men from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, for seats in plywood moulded in three dimensions: a single shell wrapping the body. The technology of the time did not yet allow mass production, but the idea shaped the future. In the following years Charles and Ray Eames perfected bent plywood, first with leg splints for wounded soldiers commissioned by the US Navy, then with the LCW and DCW chairs; Saarinen designed the Womb chair (1948) and the Tulip series (1956) for Knoll.

From Colani's forms to digital design

In the 1960s and 1970s plastics and fibreglass allowed even freer forms. The German Luigi Colani made rounded, organic forms, which he called "biodynamic", his banner: "the earth is round", he would say, rejecting right angles. Today, with computer modelling and 3D printing, designers such as Ross Lovegrove take up the idea of an object that grows like an organism. Organic design thus remains a warm alternative to geometric rigour, close to Biomorphism but more concerned with structure than with form alone.