In 1971, while Bruce Graham and Kazler Kahn were meeting for lunch to discuss the idea of designing the tallest tower in the world in Chicago, Graham took out his pack of cigarettes to take one, and while he was taking out the cigarette in his hand, the cigarettes were coming out in a gradual manner, supporting each other. This was the moment of inspiration for Graham and Khan to build the tallest tower in the world by separating the structural system into 9 sections that begin to vary after the fiftieth floor, like cigarettes coming out of a pack! This is the moment of the birth of the Circe Tower, or what is currently called the Willis Tower. It was the tallest tower in the world and held the title from 1974 until the appearance of the Petronas Tower in Kuala Lumpur in 1998.
Zaha Hadid was called the 89-degree architect by her teachers, as she did not recognize right angles, and relied on her constant inspiration from the theory of the explosion of the universe, from which everything began.
As for Norman Foster, his inspiration was based on the images of the ideal city that he sees through a bird's eye view while practicing his favorite hobby of flying high in his plane. Since he was small, the British Daily Mail building in London had a great influence on his architectural personality, which is obsessed with high-tech, energy-efficient buildings that are clearly visible in Masdar City.
Bjarke Engels' childhood dreams of becoming a comic book artist were inspired by his dreamy buildings like Lego cubes, where he spent two years at the College of Fine Arts to later discover that he could build larger comic books through architecture!
Behind every successful architectural project is a character who reveals his true inspiration to the world and tells a story about the personality of its designer Who is not afraid to show the truth of what she believes in and what inspires her, not what the majority supports!
The intermediate dictionary defines inspiration as the meanings and ideas that are thrown into the heart. We find the contemporary Arabic language dictionary defining it as an elevation of the mind and spirit that precedes creative composition, so that the recipient feels that he is receiving help from a higher source. Inspiration is like a dream, we do not know much about it, but it is divine help. Just as we cannot control inspiration, we cannot predict its timing. Perhaps the belief of the ancient Greeks and Greeks that inspiration is given to man and does not come from him, that is, that it comes from without and not from within, is one of the definitions closest to my heart.
You will find architectural opinions that go in every direction and contradictory ideas about the source of the idea and the architect's inspiration. It is not as Mies van der Rohe described less is more, nor as Robert Vinciuri opposed it when he described architecture that less is more hollow! It is unfortunate that architecture is still taught today in universities like a written constitution. Inspiration cannot be limited to its infinite sources, and the source of the architectural idea shares with art that it is not subject to the law of right or wrong, but rather is an expression embodied in an open or closed space. Inspiration is a solution to a need or activity that can be translated in many ways that cannot be limited to one solution.
It is unfair to judge a design as wrong, even if it departs from the rational framework, as long as it can be implemented with appropriate engineering solutions, and why not! Today, we do not need painters who copy styles in which there is no addition. Rather, today we need every architect who conveys his true inspiration and solid ideas. Inspiration is the main source of the development of science. Inspiration is the main engine of imagination, and science follows, transmits, and adapts to imagination. If it were not for our imagination that dreamed of a skyscraper, structural engineering was transferred to design a safe building structure with a height of 828 meters that resists the winds in Burj Khalifa. If an article had not been published in the New York Times in 1916 describing a dream of a bridge crossing the Golden Gate Strait from the city of San Francisco in the south to the city of Sollaceto in the north, the genius of Strautz, an engineer of German origin, would not have been unleashed to invent the complex geometry of the Golden Gate Bridge, the most unique bridge in 1933 that transferred science. Bridge engineering to a new era where science follows imagination.
Inspiration will remain a flame that illuminates minds and ignites incentives to create the most amazing innovations in human life!