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Katarxis Nº 3
A Conversation with Three Scientists:
Physicist
Philip Ball, Biologist Brian Goodwin and
Mathematician Ian Stewart
Sections:
The Imitation of
Nature
Life
Order and Power
Quality and Wholeness
Contradictory Uses of the New Sciences
Subjectivity and
Objectivity
Wider Implications for Architecture and Urbanism
Notes
About the
Scientists
Philip Ball
was for a decade physical science editor of the
influential magazine Nature. Since then he has
been consultant editor to the magazine, author of many
well-received popular books
on science, and broadcaster. His abiding interest
in pattern, and in the relevance of scientific ideas to
social problems, is clear from books such as The
Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature,
1998; and Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to
Another, 2004. He recently presented a series of
programmes on nanotechnology – Small Worlds – on
BBC Radio 4.
Ian Stewart
FRS is Professor of Mathematics at the University of
Warwick, and Director of the Mathematics Awareness
Centre there. He has been the most active among UK
mathematicians in bringing new scientific concepts –
particularly to do with geometry, symmetry, order and
chaos – before a wider audience. His books include
Life’s Other Secret: The New Mathematics of the Living
World, 1998; and (with Jack Cohen) The Collapse
of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World,
2000.
Brian Goodwin
is Professor of Biology at Schumacher College in Devon.
He sees the “new biology” as sharing with physics an
interest in principles of order. He is implacably
opposed to reductionist science, and is a member of the
Board of Directors of the Santa Fe Institute, an
influential "think tank" devoted to the study of complexity in various fields.
His books include How the Leopard Changed Its Spots:
The Evolution of Complexity, 1994; and Form and
Transformation: Generative and Relational Principles in
Biology, 1996.
About the Interviewer
Dr. Brian
Hanson is Research Fellow, Centre for the Study of
Religion, Ideas and Society at London University.
He is author of a number of books including
Architects and the "Building World" from Chambers to
Ruskin: Constructing Authority (Cambridge University
Press, 2003).
The following exchange was edited to read as a single
Question & Answer session, with discussion not only
between the interviewer (Brian Hanson) and his subjects
(Messrs. Ball, Stewart and Goodwin), but also between
the interviewees themselves. To achieve this three
separate interviews were conducted by email, in
two stages each. At the second stage – of
“supplementary” questions – interviewees were able to
respond to points made earlier by their fellows.
The Imitation of Nature
Current developments in the natural sciences prompt us
to look again at an old question – or rather, two
questions. The first – “is nature an appropriate model
for architecture?”; the second – “if so, in what ways
should architecture imitate nature?”. These questions
have divided architects and theorists for centuries, and
continue to do so today[1]. I wondered how scientists
themselves viewed the subject.
Brian Hanson:
Philip Ball,
do you think that nature provides a good model for
architecture?
Philip Ball:
I see no reason automatically to conclude that
‘nature equals good’, or that nature always does things in a
way that will best suit our own objectives … I feel
quite strongly about it; there is often a far too
rose-tinted view taken of nature …
[Yet] one
might suggest that our aesthetic choices are likely to
be influenced by what we find in nature, and I think
there is likely to be some truth in that. I do think we
often find a certain level of complexity interesting and
pleasing (for example, complex but discernible structure
in music, rather than monotones or random noise[2]). But
it seems to me that we can also enjoy [more artificial
qualities such as] simplicity, spaces that are easy to
‘read’, certain types of proportion, and so on.
BH:
The way your work has proceeded from the physical
sciences, through the physical aspects of nature, and
finally to social issues, reminds me strongly of that
great Victorian, John Ruskin. Indeed, the art critic
Peter Fuller once said that “the aesthetic implications
of today’s ‘scientific attitude’ … are uncannily similar
to those of Ruskin”[3].
You are, it seems, well aware of the aesthetic
implications of your own work.
Ball:
Yes, very definitely! I have become very much aware of
the (obvious) fact that we can respond to beauty only
when we can see it. Until one becomes sensitized to the
patterns that exist in nature, for instance, one can
overlook them entirely, and miss out on the joy of
recognizing and admiring them. And an understanding of
how those patterns develop can enhance one’s
appreciation of them. In this sense, nature really is
creative – although what I mean by that is really tied
up with issues about why our cognitive system responds
so ‘positively’ to these patterns and structures.
Perhaps this is an aspect of E. O. Wilson’s notion of
‘biophilia’[4]. Getting to the root of this might have
enormous implications for art and architecture …
BH:
Brian Goodwin,
you have spoken about a “confluence” taking place
between the arts and the sciences, which will enable
both to participate in “natural creativity” of the kind
Phil has touched on. What would you say to those who
respond that the arts – architecture in particular – are
artificial products, and don’t necessarily need to take
their cue from nature?
Brian Goodwin:
I believe that we do need to learn from natural process
about how to be appropriately creative ourselves,
meaning that our activities should be appropriate to
whatever is the context within which we are acting. This
of course applies to everything we do, not just to art
or architecture. The process of bringing something into
being is what we and the rest of nature are engaged in
all the time, but we have a tendency to assume that what
emerges from our looking or feeling or doing was there
to begin with and we just became aware of
it. However
just as quarks and mesons, organisms and galaxies are
dynamically generated continuously, from we know not
what, to become the natural kinds[5] that we call in the
generic language of dynamics, attractors[6], so we and
the world we inhabit are generated continuously. The
individual properties of these natural kinds reflect the
context in which they arise by their particularities. It
is this type of process that I believe we need to
understand by participating in it, not just by looking
at it, with the intention that our activities have the
quality of what is called in some traditions ‘right
action’.
BH:
Ian Stewart, Brian’s position (like that of Stephen
Wolfram[7])seems
to offer a way of reconciling two apparently opposing
views about what the architect should be looking for in
nature: its invisible essence or its visible
aspects (see note 1). The same could be said
about your suggestion that it is the fungibility of
patterns – their ability to change in step with the
circumstances they face – rather than the operation of
eternal, abstract truths, that has enabled the order we
see in the world to emerge out of the underlying
complexity. This also reminds me of the ideas
Christopher Alexander has put forward about pattern, and
about “Structure-Preserving Transformations”[8].
Stewart:
The process of biological development – growth, in
D’Arcy Thompson’s sense of Growth and Form[9] – might be
a source of such ideas. But we don’t really [yet]
understand the mathematics of growth. Another way to
characterise [a Structure- Preserving Transformation] is
‘variation on a theme, with a guarantee that if the
original worked, then so will the variation.’ Evolution
uses such tricks profitably; I’m sure architecture can
do the same. Already has, of course …
An effective mathematics of evolutionary systems is in
its infancy – a big problem being the ‘creativity’ of
biology, which repeatedly changes the ‘phase space’[10]
of possible behaviours. Flight, for instance – of
insects, initially – changed the evolutionary game
completely. I think that the idea of self-evolving
systems, be they organisms or buildings or societies, is
a very exciting area that will stimulate a lot of new
scientific thinking and a lot of new mathematics.
Life
In his new book, The Phenomenon of Life[11],
Christopher Alexander argues that “life” is a real
property of the organisation of matter, and as such
something of which we can come to an objective and
measurable knowledge, which can then be applied to –
amongst other things – the production of buildings.
Did scientists think it was any more than a
romantic notion to say that some environments have more
“life” than others?
Ball:
[P]eople worry rather too much about how to define
‘life’[12]. The fact is that it is a linguistically
useful word but not a scientific one. Scientists don’t …
themselves draw a sharp boundary between the
living and the non-living (how does one classify
viruses, for example?) … It was, in fact, one of the
central aims of The Self-Made Tapestry[13] to
show that structure, order and pattern can evolve in
non-biological systems that are every bit as complex as
some of those we see in living systems (and which
intuitively we therefore often associate with life). One
could argue that maybe this shows there is ‘life’
in inorganic systems after all, but it seems to me that
this is simply imposing an arbitrary definition of life
(= order/pattern) that does not seem to have much in
common with the one that is widely accepted at the
moment. I’m uncomfortable with redefinitions of such
emotive words.
BH:
My
co-editor, Nikos Salingaros, made the following
observation:
[Alexander] talks about life, but at the
same time, everything he says can be understood as the
distinction between evolved structure and non-evolved,
or imposed, structure ...Whether a form is a product of
a certain process has nothing to do with psychology.
That it leads to our connecting better in a
psychological sense says something deep about how our
cognitive system is tuned (evolved) to recognize and
interpret such structures.
Ball:
I agree entirely with the last sentence. And I think
that the distinction between evolved and imposed
structure is indeed a crucial one. But I don’t see that
this need be connected to any notions of ‘life’ …
Frankly, I don’t think Alexander’s book will get a lot
of attention in the scientific community, because there
doesn’t seem to be any real science in it. His attempts
to broaden the definition of life seem just tautologous:
this is what life is because this is how I choose to
define what life is.
BH:
Brian and Ian – you both think that it
is helpful to talk about life as an actual property
of matter, and not just something we read into matter –
a “Pathetic Fallacy” in other words.
Goodwin:
The latest problem to appear clearly on the scientific
agenda is how consciousness (and feeling) could
emerge[14] in a cosmos that is made up of totally inert,
insentient components. Complexity theory always requires
that there be some precursor of whatever property is
observed to emerge in a system, such as superconductivity
or the properties of water or the cooperative behaviour
of bees in a hive. The dilemma now is to account for the
evolutionary emergence of feeling from a system that has
no qualitative precursor of such a property. This would
be a scientific miracle, and scientists don’t like
miracles. So some other solution needs to be found. My
own preference, to save the unity of scientific
understanding, is to adopt some position like that of
Whitehead or Bergson[15], so that consciousness and
feelings are grounded in reality and not some ghostly
epiphenomena that are not quite real. However, this will
be very firmly resisted by the majority of scientists,
and for perfectly good reasons. You do not lightly
abandon a position that has been so phenomenally
successful at explaining so much of nature. I don’t
intend to abandon it either, but I believe that science
has to be extended in some way to accommodate the
reality of qualities.
Stewart:
Life is a process … It’s a collective, emergent property
of the bits. In the 60s and 70s biologists thought that
life = DNA, but now they’ve realized it’s not that
simple. Stu Kauffman[16] has effectively defined life as
any “autonomous agent” that can reproduce and carry out
at least one thermodynamic work cycle. I’m not sure
that’s quite the answer (I want something more abstract)
but it’s in the direction that appeals to me.
What we need, and what Kauffman hopes to provoke, is an
effective theory of organization. Life, evolution… but
also organizations, and how to make them work.
Mathematical politics, even. I don’t think we’re close
yet, I don’t think many people understand the issues
involved in getting close (maybe only Kauffman
and a few others, not me!), but that’s the way the
activity is pointing. [Though] it’s worth bearing in
mind that on a metaphorical level a lot
of these ideas
are not news to thoughtful managers …
Autocatalytic networks[17] are a nice formalization of
self-generating order. That’s a step in the right
direction.
BH:
Do you find acceptable or useful the degree of
recursiveness in Alexander’s views on how life as a
structure is created?
Stewart:
Recursiveness is one of the great secrets.
Chicken…egg…chicken…egg… I don’t think we fully
understand it (as Wolfram says), but I think Alexander
is absolutely right to state its fundamental importance.
It is a profound source of creativity. So: yes, it’s
very useful indeed.
BH:
Ian, can
you tell us how the concept of symmetry-breaking
explains how pattern and order arise in the world from
what, at the level of individual components (molecules,
people even), seems undifferentiated or chaotic?
Stewart:
If you take some pattern-forming system, and drive it
through a series of symmetry-breaking changes, it often
goes chaotic. The classic here is Taylor-Couette flow:
fluid between concentric rotating cylinders. Fix the
inner one, rotate the outer. Bland Couette flow, with
full symmetry of a cylinder, gives way to Taylor
vortices, stacked on top of each other like a tube of
polo mints. Then the vortex boundaries become wavy; then
they start to modulate over time. Then the flow goes
turbulent – chaotic – and most people thought nothing
much changed after that.
Not so. Recently, my colleague Marty
Golubitsky discovered that there’s more going on than
that. Chaos has its own patterns, but these are visible
only on the statistical level. (An example is spiral
chaos, where patches of turbulent fluid move along
spiral paths.) The underlying ‘attractor’ can have
symmetry. In the Taylor-Couette system, if you continue
to speed up the cylinder, the chaotic attractor gains
more and more symmetry, until it becomes fully symmetric
(and you get fully developed, homogeneous turbulence).
So, roughly, chaotic systems follow the
reverse sequence of symmetries that you see for regular
ones. I’m not sure what that means for architecture…
well, maybe I do. If you mix everything up too
much (as happened in Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium) you
get a town in which every part looks just like every
other part. It’s confusing, bland, and doesn’t really
work. So in the chaotic regime, you need enough chaos,
but not too much …
Our perceptions like to see symmetry broken in various
ways.
Now: in mathematics there are two kinds of
symmetry breaking: spontaneous and forced. In the first,
the system itself breaks the symmetry. In
the second,
the breakage is imposed from outside. I’m mostly
interested in spontaneous symmetry-breaking, in my
research; Charles [Jencks][18] is mainly talking about
forced symmetry-breaking. In that context, his metaphor
works better! And it turns out that the two versions are
intimately related, so if you work on one, you’d better
take account of the other. It’s a question of context,
in the end.
Order and Power
Marxist criticism, and Foucault’s philosophy, have
prompted us to see order as inevitably an expression of
power. The implication is that order cannot exist
without strong exercise of top-down power, even if that
power is to some extent concealed. This has had serious
negative implications for the modern view of classical
architecture. Foucault’s acolyte Richard Sennett, for
example, blithely and typically remarks of the Pantheon:
“The Roman Empire had made visual order and imperial
power inseparable: the emperor depended upon making his
power seen in monuments and public works.”[19]
BH:
Phil, it’s been particularly difficult to discuss the
concept of
order in architectural circles since the Second World
War: if it doesn’t suggest unpleasant political
connotations, it seems to bear unwelcome moral ones.
However, what seems to be emerging from much of the new
sciences of complexity, is a way of discussing order
which is free of this baggage.
Ball:
I’m wary of portraying ‘complexity’ as too much of a
‘new science’. Many of the tools it uses have been
around for decades, even for a century or so. That said,
I think you are right: we are now quite happy
scientifically with the idea that ‘order’ can emerge
spontaneously rather than being imposed – and also that
there are types of ‘order’ and ‘structure’ that do not
necessarily imply geometrical rigidity. But I suspect
that when political and moral philosophers speak of
order, they are not at all talking about the same thing
as scientists.
BH:
Ian,
in his interview here, Christopher Alexander defends his
approach at length against the common accusation that it
is deterministic. Some architects have felt constricted
by his catalogue of patterns[20],
claiming it inhibits their individuality as artists.
Alexander’s defence of patterns – which is that they
allow countless possibilities for the creation of order
– reminds me a good deal of your own discussion of how,
in symmetrical systems, many possible effects can arise
from a single cause; many symmetries can follow.
Stewart:
Alexander is dead right that pattern and determinism are
not the same things. This is the big message from chaos
and complexity. Deterministic systems may or may not
generate patterns (at least, ones we can recognise
as patterns). And many patterns can arise in
probabilistic systems (that’s why statistics got going
as a worthwhile science).
What I mean by ‘pattern’ is really some
repeatable element of structure. It has to be genuinely
significant (I’m sceptical about, say, Elliot waves in
economics[21], I think they’re mostly wisdom after the
event). Determinism means repeatable rules, and
that’s on another level altogether. Patterns can emerge
from stochastic or effectively uncomputable systems.
BH:
I can see that all this may only become meaningful for
architecture if a more vital
Building Culture can be encouraged. Traditional
building culture seems to have affinities with such
things as Stewart Kaufmann’s “autocatalytic networks”,
or the “extelligence” of which you have written[22].
Only this would enable the act of building truly to
become an exercise in “spontaneous” rather than “forced”
symmetry-breaking. Surely it is only in a situation
where the whole culture is playing a full part that we
can expect greater complexity to coexist with increasing
order, so that “antichaos” or “decoherence”, of the kind
you and others have described, can come about.
Stewart:
I think you’ve put it very well. It’s my earlier
‘context’ point. Specialists are very competent in their
own fields, but don’t pay attention to anything outside.
This is what went wrong with Biosphere 2: the architects
knew that concrete affects the carbon dioxide balance
when it cures, but didn’t know this would be a problem.
The ecologists knew it would be a problem, but didn’t
know that it would happen.
In the 1980s I wrote a series of science fiction stories
about ‘Billy the Joat’. JOAT: Jack Of All Trades. He was
an expert generalist. We need some of those. (Not too
many: see the stories!)
BH:
Brian, you have said that “you shouldn’t have too much
order. You shouldn’t have too much chaos. Perhaps you
should be at the point where you can move backwards and
forwards between the two …”. Do you think that a whole
culture can exist and flourish on that thin line between
order and chaos?
Goodwin:
The notion of ‘living on the edge of chaos’ that has
arisen in the study of complex systems emphasises the
potential of dynamic processes that include
deterministic chaos to generate order through
symmetry-breaking processes and phase transitions[23].
The emergent order is immanent in the system as a whole
and it manifests when particular conditions are present.
BH:
Brian, some of your colleagues at the SFI would decry
any attempt to “vindicate Bergson”. Yet, like
Alexander’s, your debt to Bergson and Whitehead – and
hence some form of animism or vitalism – is undisguised.
Goodwin:
Animism is the great taboo of scientific culture,
because Western science is founded on its denial.
However, nature always has surprises up her sleeve,
which is what actually keeps science alive and
scientists on their toes …
[A] science of qualities … proposes an extension of
ontology and scientific methodology in ways that do not
undermine what we have learned, but expands its scope.
BH:
You have said that – in, for example, their ability to
recognise plants – traditional cultures seemed to
understand this science of qualities more readily than
we do now. However, those of us who have said similar
things in connection with architecture have often been
accused of romanticising tradition; of wanting to go
“Back to the Future”.
Goodwin:
There is a sense in which we are now going back
historically and picking up aspects of knowing that were
put aside by Western science so that they can be
integrated into a more comprehensive, and more
sustainable, manner of living on the planet. The
Renaissance recognised qualities and values, and it was
love that made the world go round, as we learn from
Shakespeare and the Renaissance magi. Then love turned
into gravity, an impersonal force that became the
expression of a mechanical, clockwork universe. This has
now led to contradictions in science (e.g., holistic
properties revealed by non-local connectedness in quantum
mechanics), the rape of nature and the loss of meaning
in human life. We need urgently to heal ourselves and
our relationship to reality. There is nothing romantic
or utopian about the awakening that is moving us toward
a new way of relating to and knowing our world. It is
grounded in evidence and the real situation in which we
find ourselves. We either move on or perish. It’s a
simple as that.
BH:
I see a number of parallels between your emphasis on
whole organisms – which you sometimes refer to as
“generic forms” or “kinds” – and the interest shown in
typology by tradition-orientated architects,
including Christopher Alexander with his “Pattern
Language”. In all cases, the argument seems to be that
there is not an infinite number of legitimate answers to
a problem, and that the existence of particular,
highly-developed entities (species, building types, a
classical canon) tells us something significant about
natural creativity: eg. that there are natural limits to
it.
Goodwin:
I used the dynamic term ‘attractor’, above, to
characterise natural kinds which I take to include the
elements, biological species, and the myriad forms that
we observe in nature, animate and inanimate, including
snow-flakes and typhoons and galaxies. Since the world
of process is nonlinear, the dynamic entities that
emerge tend to be discontinuous and discrete, though we
cannot put any bound on their number. Nevertheless,
these natural kinds tend to cluster in what I have
called ‘generic forms’ that are characterised by the
dynamic process that generates them, or the organising
principles that underlie their emergence. Typology is
then connected with intrinsic dynamic necessity more
than historical contingency, which has become the
Darwinian reading of species as accidental functional
entities with survival properties. [To think of] species
as generic forms emphasises their natures and intrinsic
values, as well as their dynamic stability in context,
and this suggests natural limits to their boundaries
which can be related to notions of wholeness such as
health, vitality, well-being and beauty …
Quality and Wholeness
Goodwin and Stewart concurred on the need for science to
take quality seriously.
BH:
Brian and Ian, you have both argued in different
ways for the need to take quality seriously, as well as
the more holistic view of the world that would follow
from this. Could you say a little more about the
advantages you see accruing from this?
Goodwin:
Since the separation of the arts and the sciences in the
Renaissance, we have been systematically separating
qualities from quantities, the latter occupying a
position of individual peculiarity that has tended to
produce highly idiosyncratic art forms that emphasise
the individual rather than a collective awareness of
relevant creativity. I think that the way out of our
Cartesian prison is through a recognition of the primacy
of relationships in all process and the
secondary
position of the individual entity: ‘You exist, therefore
I am’, as Satish Kumar puts it in his new book[24].
I take [the
science of qualities] to be a major challenge now for
addressing many of the pressing issues with which we are
faced. This includes the design of buildings and
housing, and the way in which we use our land and
resources in sustainable ways.
Stewart:
Historically, mathematics has mostly been about
quantity, and most people still view it that way. I
think it was Rutherford who said ‘qualitative is just
poor quantitative”. This was fair enough in the sense he
intended, but it makes very little sense nowadays.
Quantities (numbers) are just one type of ‘quality’. The
interesting qualities are non-numeric, but entirely
rigorous and suitable for mathematical analysis. Most
modern maths is like that, in fact. So, for example,
topologists explore the quality ‘knotted’ and end up
with ideas that help with the study of DNA molecules and
superstrings.
Symmetry is a quality. There is no question that in the
physical sciences it is a fundamental concept.
Superstrings again, for example, are all about alleged
hidden symmetries of space and time and new dimensions
thereof. I think that subtle variations of symmetry are
important in biology – for instance, speciation is a
kind of symmetry-breaking: identical organisms cease to
be identical. A lot of important questions are best
understood by qualitative reasoning.
BH:
What do you make of Christopher Alexander’s radical
argument, that if we properly address the
quality of “wholeness” in a particular situation we
also naturally address the more quantitative,
functional, issues?
Stewart:
I think he has a very good point. A key theme in
mathematics, if you look at the history and the
interplay of ideas, is that an effective solution to a
problem is often also an elegant solution. The thing
seems to work on two different levels. So a holistic
approach to the large-scale structure may ‘resonate’
with its effectiveness on the human scale, yes.
Having said that: it doesn’t have to. There may
be contradictions between the large scale and the small.
I suspect that happens when we forget to embed the role
of people in the structural principles …
The paradox of architecture is that a
building ought to look good from the outside, but be
usable from the inside. Some architectural fashions do
well on the first but fall flat on the second. On the
other hand, I don’t think that the proliferation of
supermarkets with crenellations and little towers,
prompted by remarks made by Prince Charles, has actually
added much to human existence.
Contradictory uses of the New Sciences
Complexity science is fashionable, so all kinds of
claims are currently being made for its relevance to the
arts, though not all of them stand up scientifically.
Charles Jencks’s New Paradigm in Architecture[25]
– a new name for deconstructivism – claims support from
the new sciences, as do the arguments in Christopher
Alexander’s The Nature of Order[26]. Both
authors, for example, cite the work of Ian Stewart and
Brian Goodwin in their defence. However, Jencks –
Post-Modern to the core – sees science as little more
than a “pretext” for making architecture, whereas
Alexander – more of a modernist in this – sees it as
offering crucial proof of how the world is made, and
therefore how we can best intervene in that world. How
do we disentangle legitimate from illegitimate
applications of these new concepts – or does it matter?
BH:
Ian, I thought you sounded very Post-Modern yourself
when I read your description of mathematics as a “social
construct”. Can you explain what you meant by that?
Stewart:
It’s a social construct by a society (of mathematicians)
who are very well trained indeed at spotting logical
errors. In the end, whether or not a complicated proof
is accepted as valid boils down to the collective
judgment of that society – there are cases where they
got it wrong, too – so the textbook version of a proof
as a sequence of statements, each following logically
from previous statements, doesn’t capture the social
reality. The problem with extremist postmodernism is
that it maintains that any opinion is as valid as
any other. Science and mathematics do rest on opinions,
but those opinions are tightly constrained by experiment
and the rules of logic. Even postmodernists enter a room
through the doorway and not the wall, although their own
stance implies that if enough people decided that the
wall was an acceptable entrance, it would be. And if all
opinions were equally valid, why is it necessary to
argue the postmodernist position against alternatives?
It used to
be thought that mathematical truth was shining, perfect,
absolute. We now know better, thanks to Kurt Gödel, Alan
Turing, Gregory Chaitin and the like. I don’t like the
Platonist view that mathematics is ‘out there’ in some
ideal universe, not of this world. I think mathematics
is being built, day by day, by the combined activities
of the world’s mathematicians. It is, in this sense, a
social construct.
BH:
To what extent do you think that the society of
artists should be allowed to misrepresent or
relativise scientific concepts for their own ends?
Stewart:
I do think that there is a tendency among some people of
an artistic bent to try to understand science in the
terms that are familiar with them, especially metaphor
and verbal arguments. This sometimes works well, but it
runs into trouble when the scientific words have a
specific technical meaning and the metaphors go wrong.
The fiasco with the Sokal article[27] doesn’t mean that
all of these metaphors are wrong, but it did make it
crystal clear that pretentious language had its own
appeal, independently of any meaning. I recall the
phrase ‘axiom of choice’ being used very loosely, as if
it referred to human free will. Unless you actually
understand what that means, you shouldn’t bandy the
phrase around.
No
reputable science journal would publish an article that
tried to spoof science the way Sokal spoofed
postmodernism[28].
BH:
Phil, you
have always been careful, as far as possible, to
minimise the use of metaphor in your discussions of the
implications of new scientific theories.
Ball:
Metaphor is immensely useful – essential really – as a
pedagogical tool for scientists and science
communicators. But I am constantly dismayed at how, as a
culture, we have rather lost sight of what a metaphor
is. There is grotesque abuse of what I would call the
‘just as’ argument: just as this happens in
this system, so we can conclude that the same thing
applies in this other totally unrelated system.
One finds that happening a lot to quantum theory, and
also to Darwinism. The Uncertainty Principle is one of
the most maltreated ideas in science – it is taken as
evidence for the assertion that we can never be
objective about anything, that we can never avoid
perturbing an experiment by looking at it. Few people
ask the question ‘by how much?’ [This is an area where I
think] we have swept aside the quantitative for the
qualitative.
BH:
Do you
think the “truth” of science risks getting lost in all
this?
Ball:
The only thing that has come close to appalling me in
this sphere recently is the notion that postmodernism
might destroy any belief (at least within academia) in
real knowledge and understanding of the world. But I
don’t think there is much danger of that, at least in
the long term – the idea is too patently ridiculous, not
to mention pointless. No, I don’t mind at all these
other views being raised, even if I remain sceptical of
them. I have often found them a valuable spur to
clarifying my own views about what science is and where
it starts and stops. My only plea is that we should try
not to confuse science with philosophy. There are plenty
of scientists who are guilty of that.
BH: Ian, there was an interview with
you in Nature some time ago[29] in which
you talked about the need to reach beyond metaphors: an
example you gave was your description of speciation as a
form of symmetry-breaking, which you thought might be
more than a metaphor.
Stewart:
There seems to be a tendency for science and mathematics
to be taking on a more human face in certain respects –
focusing on questions about humanity’s place in the
universe and on human-level experience. If this
development can be continued, and turned into something
better than geometric or structural metaphors, then
there should be some prospect of applying the same
viewpoint to architecture ( which concerns humanity’s
place in its human-level environment).
BH:
One reason
I am asking such questions is that there is clearly more
than one way of applying the same new scientific
concepts to architecture and urbanism, and not all of
them would seem to have the same scientific validity: I
am thinking of Charles Jencks compared with Christopher
Alexander.
Stewart:
I think they both have elements that are worth
considering. I know that sounds wishy-washy, but I think
that creativity and artistry are so intertwined with
accidents of human evolution that it’s expecting too
much to get a really neat, tidy formalism that captures
them. The best we can hope for is what Jack Cohen and I
called the “glass menagerie” in Collapse of Chaos
– lots of overlapping paradigms, each working well in
its own limited domain …
I like a lot of what Charles Jencks does,
and I’m more familiar with it. I’d characterise his
approach as a slightly self-mocking use of visual
metaphor with a scientific basis. In some ways he takes
it very seriously, but he does enjoy a good joke too. I
like that, and I like a lot of his work. But not all of
it comes off …
Alexander writes very well, and I have a lot
of sympathy for many things that he says … [He] is more
holistic, in attitude if not always in detail, and that
appeals to me because I think the biggest mistakes now
being made, in everything from science to politics, is
to ignore context. It’s in the spirit of complex
systems, for instance. But mathematicians always like
nice, clever examples, and I get a lot of pleasure from
some of Jencks’s instantiations of his principles.
Whether the principles hold good, or how widely, are up
for grabs; but the best examples are wonderful.
There does seem to be a common paradigm
shift under way in science, art, and society. Maybe
that’s an illusion, but I think that ideas shuffle
around between human minds and every so often something
starts to take root. Our minds are metaphor machines –
they can spot connections that are invisible to logic,
and be right. The metaphors can drive our thinking …
I think that both [Jencks and
Alexander] are contributing to the kind of future I’d
hope will happen. They are putting forward different
paradigms, and at this point I don’t care which,
if either, is right. I just think we need effective, new
ways to think about our place in the universe, and to
express that. All scientific research starts with lots
of possible ideas, and modifies them according to what
seems to work. That’s what the future will do to their
work.
BH:
But doesn’t Jencks’s deconstructivist polemic
ignore your own insistence that, in the context of chaos
it is “symmetry-creation”, not symmetry-breaking, that
is the more natural phenomenon; and your argument in
The Collapse of Chaos, about symmetry-breaking being
more about order than disorder.
Stewart:
[His] metaphor is stretched a bit, but I actually
discussed this with Charles Jencks [some time ago], and
I don’t think it’s stretched to breaking-point. It is,
if you wish, one of his jokes, and a rather good one.
There is enough of a grain of truth in the metaphor that
the reasoning leads to creative ideas. In particular,
the tension between the human love of symmetry, and the
dislike of too much regularity.
BH:
Jencks’s account of
The Architecture of the Jumping Universe seems to
rely on a similar bit of “stretching” . He speaks of
“the creativity and surprise of a universe that evolves
in phase changes – sudden jumps in organization” –
which, in his view demands an architecture equally
unstable. But this seems to be built on a (deliberate?)
misconstruction of what is implied by “phase changes” –
in which surely the important thing is the stable system
which ensues, rather than the “jump” which leads to it.
Stewart:
I guess it’s the change that really matters, and
the fact that it is sudden. Margaret Boden talks of two
types of creativity[30]. One is like writing a new
sonnet. The other is like inventing a new art form
altogether. The second kind is a phase change,
metaphorically. And it’s a much bigger creative jump.
That kind of creativity is where the radical new ideas
come from. New paradigms, the rebounding of life after
mass extinctions… all these look like phase changes. I
agree that jumps alone don’t add a lot. But here, I
think that the size of the jump can correlate with the
degree of creativity, or of novelty. (One of my
students, Toby Elmhirst, is trying to formalize
innovation as a mathematical model. It seems to need
something even more radical than a phase change!)
BH:
Phil, does
it seem reasonable to you that new scientific concepts
are being used to argue for an architecture which
eschews stability, and which dwells in a permanent
non-equilibrium state?
Ball:
This is precisely the point at issue. Why does the one
thing (the existence of non-equilibrium states) imply
the other (that this is the ‘proper’ mode for
architecture)? … I don’t know whether deconstructivist
architects understand the science of non-equilibrium or
not – although they would certainly be mistaken to
imagine that there is anything ‘out-of-equilibrium’
about an asymmetric or strangely shaped building, since
it must of course be in mechanical equilibrium to stand
up at all. But I do sense a misapplication of the
scientific ideas here.
BH:
And Jencks’s
Jumping Universe? Does the phenomenon of phase
transitions really require the architect to think now
more about how to break rather than how to
make symmetry? This seems a striking misuse of a new
scientific concept.
Ball:
You are quite right: phase transitions are unusual
points in the ‘phase space’ of possible states, while
most of this space is occupied by stable states. If I
understand it rightly, Jencks was framing his discussion
within the context of chaos theory, so the jumps he is
talking about would be out-of-equilibrium dynamical
states (that is, where the system isn’t static) – but
the same applies. Indeed, raising the notion of a
‘jumping universe’ as a bold new idea in physics is
pretty spurious anyway. Phase transitions between
equilibrium states have been known since the
nineteenth century. One of the points I want to make in
[Critical Mass][31] is that much of the framework
for understanding stable states and abrupt changes
between them was in place at the beginning of the 20th
century.
Moreover, ‘symmetry breaking’ does not necessarily imply
transitions to states of low symmetry – that is,
asymmetry. Many steady states of non-equilibrium systems
have rather high symmetry, such as the hexagons and
stripes of convecting fluids. Their symmetry is only
‘broken’ in the sense that it is lower than that of
completely uniform (isotropic) states.
BH:
To move on
to Alexander. At the heart of his method is an idea to
which I believe all three of our interviewees subscribe:
namely, that wholeness is the starting point; from this,
through true (spontaneous) symmetry breaking, the
undivided, unstructured, homogeneous, field is
progressively differentiated into
lesser
symmetries possessing stronger structure.
Alexander’s design method seems a rare (maybe unique)
attempt to participate in this symmetry breaking, this
creation of structure out of wholeness.
Ball:
This is a nice way of putting it. Intuitively, it seems
to make sense. But I’m not sure that it is yet more than
a metaphor. It seems to me that the criterion for
whether an architectural space ‘works’ or not is still
going to be a subjective one. I can see how such an
approach can work empirically – for example, if one has
a list of possible solutions to specific problems of
space or design that people seem to respond to well. But
how do you make that scientific? If I have an empty,
uniform space, there are countless ways I can break its
symmetry. Which is the ‘right’ one?
BH:
Brian,
do you think the attempt to differentiate between
various applications of new scientific concepts to
architecture gets us anywhere? Alexander himself sees
his work
as science, not as some cultural application
of science.
Goodwin:
I [also] think that we need to move on beyond questions
about whether or not post-modern or deconstructivist
buildings are consistent with the new ideas that are
coming from the new sciences connected with chaos,
complexity and the study of emergent order in physics,
biology and the social sciences, and to ask what these
developments imply with respect to the nature and the
practice of science itself. This is because I take these
implications to be deeper and more relevant to the
practice of architecture than questions about
consistency with new scientific ideas. The primary
feature of the new science for me is the extension of
the domain of reliable scientific knowledge about
reality from quantities and their mathematical
relationships, to include the qualities of coherent
wholes. The distinctive feature of Western Science is
the restriction of the objectively real to that which
can be measured. This was a good strategy to follow as
far as it made sense, and it has gone a very long way.
However, the denial of qualities as aspects of reality
that are basic to understanding the properties of
complex wholes has now ceased to be useful and is
causing serious problems in the way we seek to relate to
the complex wholes on which the quality of our lives
depend (e.g., our bodies, buildings, communities,
ecosystems, climate, the biosphere, the earth as a
whole). Health is not something that can be measured
with an instrument, though specific physiological
measurements can be useful in reaching judgements about
well-being and disease in bodies.
… we need to take responsibility for our actions as
participants in this creative cosmos and learn to
cultivate the awareness of how to engage in right action
through attention to feelings and intuitions as well as
using our analytical faculties. This is the lesson I
take from the new science, that goes beyond the
post-modern to a new form of ethical realism, now called
(by Roy Bhaskar) critical realism.
Subjectivity and objectivity
Post-Modernists who exploit scientific concepts are able
to get by without investing too much in the
objectivity of those concepts: they merely sees them
as another useful “pretext” for making architecture, in
the way that linguistic and philosophical ideas (some
now discredited) were in the past. On the other hand,
those trying – through participating with “natural
creativity” – to fit architecture to the true pattern of
the world, do rely on the scientific concepts
they apply having objective validity. Can we ever
get beyond the idea that the arts – architecture
included – have ultimately to be judged subjectively?
BH:
Ian,
You have recognised an “innate human appreciation for
pattern”. Architects committed to the
avant-garde argue that the popular preference for
traditional forms is learned, not innate, and that the
public could just as easily learn to love marked
asymmetry, minimalism, lack of ornament, flat roofs etc.
Does the avant garde have a point, or does our
“innate … appreciation for pattern” suggest there are
limits to what we can learn to love?
Stewart:
My own experience is that there are limits to what I can
learn to love. Acquired tastes have to be
acquired, and sometimes the effort is too much, or the
taste simply doesn’t stick. But the avant garde
is right to argue that tastes need not be fixed. The
human brain has evolved to get bored if things stay the
same for too long. It’s a great survival characteristic
– if you’re too predictable, predators and parasites may
have time to evolve a way to use that predictability
against you.
We are very much creatures of our
environment, and we get used to whatever surrounds us
when we grow up. But in order for us to grow up,
those surroundings have to lie within certain broad
limits.
I don’t see any great point in the kind of art that
claims to ‘challenge our conception of what art is’ by
producing things like Tracey Emin’s bed[32]. There’s no
intellectual gain in that sort of in-your-face
‘challenge’. Anyone can do it. Most people have enough
sense not to, and not to be impressed by it.
The trick is to be open to innovation, without losing
your critical sense. The Sokal spoof (and for me, the
bed) shows how easy it is to get the balance wrong.
BH:
You have predicted that in fifty years time we will have
a “rigorous mathematical theory” to help us understand
the ways certain patterns emerge from complexity. Do you
think by then we may also have come to know why people
prefer certain patterns to others?
Stewart:
Well… mathematical theories and human psychology are two
different things. But it’s a pretty good test of a
theory, to see whether it can help us understand how our
preferences form. The human brain is a complex system,
and consciousness is clearly some sort of emergent
property. So if my hope is realised – I could easily be
wrong here, it’s such a hard problem – then I’d agree,
yes. We would be able to understand how the evolution of
the brain, and its perceptual abilities, predisposes us
to like particular patterns.
There are a few examples of this already. Our liking for
symmetry in patterns is probably a side effect of the
symmetric structure of the early sections of the visual
system (layer V1 in the visual cortex has a beautiful
symmetry of neural connections, and the panoply of
hallucination patterns – revolving spirals, tunnels,
spiderwebs – stems from this, for example).
BH:
Brian,
you seem to agree with Alexander that the qualities we
have been discussing are really “out there”, not only in
our minds. Indeed, your own science of qualities relies
on the possibility of our reaching qualitative
consensus. Can we ever hope to answer, to most people’s
satisfaction, this knotty question of what is and isn’t
subjective in our responses to the world?
Goodwin:
The status of qualities is crucial to this whole
discussion, and I very much agree with Alexander’s
position that they are objective properties of beings as
process, whether these are organisms, landscapes,
buildings, or organisations. Goethe’s work on colour[33]
seems to me a major contribution to our understanding
of qualities as real, inherent in the process we are
paying attention to such as a sunset or an apple or a
human’s complexion. Colours, and qualities generally,
tell us something about the activity that generates it,
so that they are not subjective and idiosyncratic but intersubjective and real, though of course observers
bring a complex history of experience to any situation.
This is why it requires considerable cultivation of the
intuition (non-inferential way of knowing) to
distinguish between the personal aspects of experience
and the objective reality that is revealed.
BH:
Phil, do you think it likely that the new sciences could
bring about a situation where aesthetics could be taken
out of the “subjective” sphere, and made a matter of
objective discussion?
Ball:
Possibly. But I suspect we’ll agree that there are
limits both to how far we can go with this and to how
far it is desirable. Most great art (visual, aural,
literary, whatever) has an important element of rational
planning, but a still greater element of intuition. One
can learn pitfalls to be avoided, but one can probably
never learn how to make truly great art.
BH:
Brian Goodwin has elsewhere[34]
made the following observations about the relationship
between objective and subjective knowledge in the
context of a science of qualities:
… 'objective' knowledge comes from
consensus between subjects who agree on particular
methods of getting knowledge, as scientists do in
acquiring quantitative knowledge about parts of the
world by measurement procedures. This gives us a science
of quantities, a Galilean science. But we experience
more than quantities; we also experience qualities such
as color, texture, pain, joy, health, beauty, coherence,
and a host of other properties. Science tends to dismiss
these as 'subjective', outside the realm of scientific
investigation. But people are hankering after a better
quality of life — not just the quality of air and water
and food, but quality of experience, relationships with
people, community values. Subjectivity is getting
squeezed out by science, and everything's being turned
into this counter-intuitive objective way of looking at
the world.
This suggests to me that this whole issue of
subjectivity
v. objectivity – long familiar in the arts – is now
becoming a matter of debate within science also?
Ball:
I have a lot of respect for Brian, but I don’t really
agree with him on this …
Why insist that science needs to be something it is
patently not ‘designed’ to be? Isn’t it like insisting
that garage mechanics become poets? It seems to me that
the problems only arise (and they do) when we get a
small clique of vocal and puritanical scientists
insisting that objective knowledge is the only sort
worth having. Of course it isn’t. The qualities that
Brian lists are absolutely central to human experience,
and we dismiss them at our peril. But isn’t there
something badly amiss if the only way we can get them
taken seriously is to give them a spurious patina of
scientific respectability? My view is that we need to
make science humbler, not more all-embracing. Mostly
science is just a form of doing useful things –
of engineering, if you like …
I’m often baffled by the unease created by what people
see as the exclusion of subjectivity from science. (Of
course, scientists themselves are always being
subjective, but that shouldn’t be news to anyone. The
scientific method is all about coping with that and
ironing out the biases it might create.) If science
ceases to strive for objectivity, it ceases to be
science …
And I have to say that I don’t think there is a great
deal of debate about this within science at the moment.
It shouldn’t be confused with the debates about the
ethical limits or responsibilities of science, essential
though those are. Brian has an interesting view, but
it’s not really the mainstream view.
BH:
Would you say the same about the case Goodwin has made
for the continuing validity of “animism”: his
inclination, as he expresses it, “to put a tiny bit of
feeling or sentience into matter in some form and allow
it to get amplified in systems organized in particular
ways”[35].
Ball:
That’s one solution. Mine is simply to ask ‘What’s the
hurry?’ Clearly, the brain and how it creates
consciousness are things we still understand very
poorly. I can’t help thinking that current attempts to
explain things like sentience are going to end up
looking like the clumsy attempts of ancient or
Renaissance ‘scientists’ to understand complicated
things such as conception or comets. They did not have
either the requisite tools or the fundamental
theoretical framework on which to proceed. So their
explanations were more or less qualitative inventions
invoking enormous yet untested ideas. Why would we want
to repeat that? What’s wrong with saying ‘I haven’t a
clue?’
This is far too grand a way of saying it,
but I feel that Brian (and in a different way, Stephen
Wolfram – and indeed Alexander, it seems) is like
Descartes, trying to explain everything according to one
great over-arching scheme. I’d identify myself more as a
British empiricist, looking for small-scale and limited
explanations that seem to be useful and that ideally
conflict with one another as little as possible.
BH:
So you think Alexander’s attempts to define “life”
constitute a “qualitative invention” rather than real
science?
Ball:
What I have seen of Alexander’s ideas leads me to
suspect that I would find his architecture very pleasing
and sympathetic, and much preferable to a lot of
buildings today. I applaud his attempts to develop a
rational architecture that accords with people’s
instincts … [but his] definition [of life] is utterly
subjective …
It seems a shame that he feels it necessary
to develop an entirely new and seemingly arbitrary
cosmology in order to justify his ideas. The problem is
that he speaks of objectivity while apparently wanting
to deny such a thing. His prima facie evidence
for his theories is his own subjective responses. I
think we all probably know what he means when he says he
experiences more ‘life’ in certain structures, but to
then attribute this as a property of the space or
structure, rather than as a psychological construct,
seems wholly unjustified. In The Nature of Order
he confesses that “I know that it simply is so” – that
is, I assert that I am right. I do think that there are
times when we must trust the evidence of our senses, in
order to avoid the dangers of solipsism – but this is a
philosophical standpoint, not a scientific one. Much of
this ‘theory of life’ is really about cognitive
psychology, projected onto the outside world. It seems
to me that it might be more productive to explore why
the brain perceives, orders and responds to things this
way, not why the world is constructed this way. So in
terms of what Alexander has to say about space, life and
cosmology, these seem to be [personal]
views rather than anything scientists would
regard as a theory. In terms of a system for making
better architecture, I can well believe that he is on to
something useful.
BH:
Phil,
do you see any connections between the themes being
explored in
Katarxis 3, and your own concerns with the physics of
nature, and – in your new book – of society?
Ball:
I see that the potential is there for such links, but
I’m not sure it has yet been realised. The general
principle – a rational view of how humans use and
respond to space – seems to me to be certainly something
that could be explored using some of the ideas I outline
in my book on the physics of society. In terms of the
relation to pattern formation in nature, I still see
rather little. It is true that nature often finds good
ways to partition space efficiently or to solve the
problem of maintaining a structure while it grows, and
there may well be lessons in this for us.
BH:
In the new book, you deal with people as particles in
order to explain certain social phenomena – crowds,
traffic flow etc. – in terms of the new scientific
principles. How far do you think that these principles
can come to embrace, say, collective decision-making
about built environment issues? Is it valid to extend
them beyond the point where people are making extremely
simple decisions about speed, distance from neighbours
etc. – not unlike the “boids” in computer simulations of
flocking? Do you think it remains valid when the
decisions being made are more subtle? Or do particles
possessing greater intelligence necessarily weaken the
model?
Ball:
It’s a good question, and an open one. My suspicion is
that the more complex and ‘intelligent’ one makes the
‘agents’ in a model, the further one gets from reality –
because once we are in a situation where we have a great
deal of choice, simple ‘physical’ models become too
psychologically naïve. At present, I think that models
of voting behaviour lie close to this boundary: there
are several physics-based models of voting, and they
suggest some interesting things, but I’m not at all sure
how relevant they are to the way people really make up
their minds in a political environment that can be so
dominated by ephemeral single issues and which is so
manipulated by the media. So at present, trying to model
situations where too much psychology is involved does,
in my opinion, result in a weaker (less realistic, less
reliable) model. All the same, one of the messages that
emerges from a ‘physics of society’ is that there are
robust, collective modes of behaviour even in systems
that seem complex (such as negotiation of international
alliances). It may well be that such things don’t
disappear completely when the choices and psychological
complexity broaden.
BH:
Do you think it might be possible to try to understand
the highly-developed products (buildings, places,
cities) of classical civilisations partly in terms of
self-organization, given that traditional building
culture invested greater freedom of action (within the
limits imposed by the various trades) in those diverse
individuals actually engaged in building?
Ball:
Self-organization is not necessarily about freedom of
individual agents. Often, the models that are used to
study it place rather severe constraints on the agents
themselves: in modelling human behaviour, for example,
the agents are often permitted only a few possible
courses of action. Termite nests are self-organized, but
termites do not exercise a great deal of freedom of
choice. The real point is that the collective
result of individual actions can be surprising and
almost impossible to predict simply by looking at the
behaviour of single individuals.
Of course, classical Greece tended to be at
least as geometric and rule-bound as today’s
architecture, albeit for different reasons.
BH:
What, then, do you think is the right balance between
top-down planning, and bottom-up self-organization in a
well-balanced social system? Is it ever likely we will
achieve such a balance?
Ball:
It’s very hard to generalize about this. One of the main
messages of Utopia Theory is that it is folly to
think that science is going to come up with a single
scheme for telling us how best to direct our affairs (or
even that science has anything useful to say at all
about many social situations.) What a physics of society
might do is to help us see which options are realistic
and which are not – to see the possible range of
choices. Which of them we pick is then a question of
making ethical and practical choices about the kind of
society we want to live in. But at present there is a
danger of trying to ‘plan into being’ an outcome that is
simply not a stable state of the system in question. I
read a nice quote [some time ago] from the philosopher
Michael Oakeshott: “To try and do something which is
inherently impossible is always a corrupting
enterprise.” Economic markets provide a good example.
The loudest voices over the past couple of decades have
come from the right, who argue that a totally free,
deregulated market is the best solution. They make this
assertion without the slightest theoretical basis—there
is no evidence that such a market works best for
businesses as a whole, nor that it distributes wealth
evenly, nor that it makes the best use of available
resources. In fact, there is some evidence now that it
does none of those things. It was an assertion of
personal belief about how they would like to see
things done, shored up by the absurd and now discredited
(though still much used) notion of market equilibrium.
On the other hand, there has been a tendency to try to
micro-manage the market, as if to imagine that a little
manipulation will iron out all the fluctuations. This
too was based on a false belief, a refusal to see that
the fluctuations (of almost all sizes) are a fundamental
characteristic of the way markets operate. Governments
cannot control markets arbitrarily. But with
physics-based models, one might be able to start to see
the limits of that control. Perhaps we can ‘soften’ the
worst convulsions. Perhaps we can level out the wealth
inequalities. Perhaps we can avoid imposing some
constraints that will have adverse and unintended
consequences.
I think the same [may] sometimes be true for
architecture and civic design, for example in the uses
of open spaces or in traffic planning.
BH:
Can you elaborate on the applications you see for
architecture and civic design?
Ball:
[It] would be extremely useful for architects to be able
to run computer models of people moving about within the
spaces they design (including situations such as rapid
exits in emergencies) to see how they will function in
practice. The results might often be surprising and
counterintuitive. The principle, I think, should be to
try to mould the environment to the way that people
naturally use it, rather than forcing people to try to
adapt to a pre-imposed plan. The principles behind the
kinds of computer simulation I describe are not too
difficult either to grasp or to implement – I think it
should be fairly easy to make these tools available.
Whether or not people can be persuaded to use them is
another matter. Perhaps they will be welcomed! – I don’t
know.
BH:
I’m
reminded by this of some of the earliest applications of
computer technology to architecture, in the 1950s and
‘60s – in which Christopher Alexander played an
important part[36].
Ian, you also see immediate applications arising
from this kind of “functionalist” tradition.
Stewart:
I think that some kind of adaptive “cellular automaton”
in which cells can move, change shape, divide, or die,
according to various rules, may hold the key. You could
imagine a self-modifying building, say. Better still, an
evolving building, which adapts according to what works
and what does not.
My friend (and former student) Keith Still
has thought a bit about such things. His PhD thesis was
about mathematical models of crowd flow, and those ideas
have since been developed into a commercial system for
computer modelling of crowds in buildings. It’s not such
a big step to give the computer options, and let it
evolve people-friendly buildings by changing bottlenecks
or other problem areas. It’s a kind of organic model of
the design process …
Keith Still’s approach to crowds is at root
combinatorial – to model a crowd of 100,000 people
(which is perfectly feasible) the computer holds 100,000
‘entities’. The programmer provides the rules for
movement; the computer works out what they lead to. If
linked to a selection procedure for what “works”, this
would be an example of an architectural relationship
between layout and function. More interesting still
would be an understanding of how people-level rules
prescribe effective buildings and public spaces. Then
we’d get architecture as an emergent process.
Wider implications for architecture and urbanism
I asked all three scientists for their views on the
implications for the practice of architecture and
urbanism of the new scientific concepts – going beyond
mere extensions of functionalism. To begin with, I asked
how we might deal with the fact that, fascinating though
it is for analysing and appreciating complex phenomena,
the concept of “emergence” is not yet refined enough to
be a predictive tool, and is still therefore of limited
use to the architect and planner.
BH:
Ian, you have said that the idea of emergence allows
of “no way for humans to trace consequences back to the
rules” – a conclusion that is echoed in Wolfram’s
principle of “computational equivalence”. Is this
conclusion not a pessimistic one for architects
believing they can ever uncover, and apply in their own
work, the rules that generate living complexity?
Stewart:
It may not be that bad. My personal definition of
“emergence” is that the logical path from the underlying
small scale rules to the overall behaviour is too
complex to trace in complete detail. That’s the
reductionist programme taken to its logical extreme. But
we don’t have to be reductionist. We already understand
some emergent systems, in this sense, quite well –
crystal structure, let’s say …
Complexity
science is necessarily about qualities – these are where
progress can be made and where emergence is not
necessarily a barrier to understanding. If you bend a
stick until it breaks, the details on a molecular level
are emergent and horrendously complicated. (Which fibre
goes first affects all the rest.) But qualitatively we
all know that if you bend it enough, at some point it
will break because it isn’t strong enough to withstand
the bending force. That’s a leap across what Jack Cohen
and I call the Ant Country of the low-level rules, and a
logically valid one too … We can “leap over” the Ant
Country, by finding appropriate high-level principles.
We don’t have to deduce them in full rigour; we just
have to be sure that they’re widely valid.
Symmetry, continuity, statistical properties are simple
examples. I hope we can do better than those.
So architects should continue to follow
their noses, and seek out the principles. The
reductionist story may not matter that much …
Many areas of science got through a series
of stages: description, classification, prediction,
control. Chaos Theory, for instance, began as a
descriptive area of mathematics (“This is what the
Lorenz attractor looks like”) and has now progressed to
the stage where “chaotic control” makes use of chaos to
exert control with very little effort (make the
‘butterfly’ flap its wings in the right place and at the
right time). Beyond control lies spontaneous evolution
of desired or selected characteristics.
BH:
Phil,
do you share Ian’s optimism on this?
Ball:
I think that the techniques of ‘complexity theory’ (a
term I dislike, but it will do) can already be used as a
predictive tool, because of the possibilities offered by
computer simulation. The question of whether an
analytical mathematics will emerge is an interesting
one, but largely for physicists alone. My suspicion is
that Ian may be right; but one of the big obstacles here
is that the steady states in non-equilibrium science may
depend not just on their own properties but on the
history of the system: how it got to be that way. That
may not be an insurmountable problem, however. But when
scientists can’t handle a problem analytically –
with soluble equations – they now typically turn to
making simulations on the computer, which don’t
necessarily provide a deep and rigorous understanding
but do at least allow prediction.
BH:
Brian,
you have argued that we may only be able to grasp the
implications of the new principles science is presenting
us with, by learning to
participate: not only with nature, but with other
people.
Goodwin:
In the context of cultural processes, the focus is on
participation in which no privileged component or set of
components is in control, and appropriate creative
activity can arise from an organic process of feeling
the way to the order that expresses the lived experience
of the whole group. I understand this to be like
Alexander’s notion of group or community participation
in architectural construction, and the way in which
cities with an organic quality have emerged from an
ongoing process (in Book 3 of The Nature of Order[37]).
It is opposed to any imposed plan from an architect or a
developer in which the whole is conceived in advance of
the process of creation. Any plan should be held lightly
and be allowed to change as the process of construction
develops and the participants experience the
consequences of particular structures. This process has
an element of chaos and unpredictability about it, and
resists any rigid planning preconception that has
produced such disastrous consequences in city
development and housing construction.
BH:
I am reminded by this that you refused to prophesy, even
in as inherently forward-looking a work as John
Brockman’s
The Next Fifty Years[38], arguing that we should be
“fully tuning in to the present so that the future
arrives as an unexpected revelation from engaged action
in the now, not from prediction and planning”. This
seems to question both the value of history, and
the possibility of planning for the future.
Goodwin:
To be tuned in to the present implies paying attention
to the historical process that brings us to where we are
now, but only as an indicator of where we have been and
not as a plan to project into the future. I think that
planning, to be effective, has to be a kind of
facilitation that is prepared to engage with and hold a
process of confusion and chaos long enough for something
new and relevant to emerge from what has passed as
history. This is rather like the alchemical process of
dissolution prior to transformation, or the Dionysian
aspect of communal action that holds off Appolonian
order while new possibilities are explored and
experienced. The new order cannot be predicted or
planned in advance if it is to be genuinely relevant to
context, but as it emerges it can be experienced so that
some judgement is exercised through feelings and
intuition and observation as the process develops, so
that choice and influence can be exercised in the fluid
phase of emergence. The right balance between order and
chaos in this process can only be gauged through present
awareness within the whole community engaged in the
activity …
[T]he
implications with respect to participation and walking
carefully in the present, not making great plans for the
future, are clear and connect with Alexander’s approach
to planning and living the process of construction … A
fundamental aspect of a science of qualities is the
process of reaching consensus by communities, whatever
their nature and intentions may be … It is not for
specialists to judge the quality of the designed space
in which people choose to live, but for the people
themselves, in discussion with whoever they wish to
involve in the process … The age of experts is over,
including architects and scientists as decision-makers
for others.
BH:
The editor of Katarxis, Lucien Steil, was interested to
know your reaction to “the idea of a living Tradition in
architecture as an organic paradigm, as a natural
foundation of the New and as a natural support of an
organic collective intelligence.”
Goodwin:
My position … recognise[s] the positive potential in
human action, as does [Roy] Bhaskar and also Chomsky in
his ‘libertarian anarchy’, the belief that human
communities can make the best decisions for themselves
and are best without any type of elite, privileged
subgroup. The aspect of nature that should inform human
action is the participatory, ecological, sustainable
mode of relationship that we see operating throughout
the natural world. The phrase ‘organic collective
intelligence’ that Lucien Steil uses is very relevant
here.
BH:
What you are saying seems to suggest (as the Prince of
Wales, for one, has argued[39])
that the fullest community participation is not
incompatible with the most sophisticated (one might say
classic, or classical) approaches to building and
place-making. The new sciences seem to support the idea
that greater devolution might go hand in hand with
greater sophistication in the end product.
Goodwin:
Devolution, going local in all aspects of human
activity, does seem to me precisely the way to achieve
sophisticated and appropriate artefacts that sit well
with the natural world. This is a radically new idea
within our whole Western conception of education and
planning, which emphasises control and manipulation of
nature, but it is the primary mode of acting in many
indigenous cultures. By going global, centralised and
abstract, we are losing virtually all knowledge of the
particularities of place that indigenous cultures have
developed, and we are rapidly destroying these cultures
and the planet in the process. A homogenised culture is
death just as certainly as homogenised energy, maximum
entropy, is death to natural creativity.
BH:
Do you regard these various indigenous cultures – as
some would – as sharing a “perennial philosophy”,
expressed through sacred geometry?
Goodwin:
My sense of the sacred is [not] something dead and
static, such as ‘sacred geometry’ … It is being in touch
with the creative process in which we are all engaged,
experiencing the continuous coming-into-being that is
what we and the rest of nature are, and feeling your way
into right action that is the experience of this process
in feeling. We need now to engage in this collectively,
having experienced what it means to do this
individually.
BH:
Phil, it seems to me that if complexity science is
encouraging all of us – artists as well as scientists –
to participate with rather than control natural
processes, architects ought to be increasingly
interested in more “spontaneous” forms of ordering, and
form-making, and less interested in controlling
everything by means of “forced” symmetries or
asymmetries – more concerned, in other words, with what
Salingaros calls “evolved” as against “non-evolved”
structure.
Ball:
I agree with all of this. It may be, however, that the
number of situations in which architects need to
consider some form of spontaneous symmetry-breaking is
quite small. Pedestrian motion is the obvious example,
and Brian [Goodwin] is right that here participation
seems very important – what do people want to do, rather
than what does the architect want to force people to do.
I expect that in urban planning there are other
instances – for example, how districts, towns and cities
fragment as they grow. Engineers concerned with
something like the design of a dam or of river levees
need also to think more about how they can collaborate
with natural processes instead of trying to control
them. But surely a lot of architectural and design
choices are aesthetic ones. I was looking [some time
ago] at the model for the proposed V&A Spiral. I’m not
sure there are any scientific arguments for or against
it, but aesthetically it looks to me as though,
particularly in that location, it would be abominable …
Scientific paradigms do influence society in
the broadest sense, but I suspect that influence is
often rather minor compared with issues about cultural
history, political structures, economics and so forth.
That said, I would like to think that perhaps the
biggest shift in thinking, which would gain support from
today’s science, would be away from hubristic and
dogmatic ideas about planning and control and towards an
empirical approach: “can we predict what will happen if
we try to do this?” And then: “is that what we
want?” I’m not sure whether there are many signs of
that happening yet, however – we live in a political
climate in which our leaders feel obliged to tell us
what the answers are, rather than confessing that they
won’t know until they’ve tested them.
BH:
But how could we be sure that if this did happen
the balance was maintained, and that subtle,
self-organizing processes were not completely
overwhelmed by grand plans backed up by political and
financial might?
Ball:
That is, I think, mostly a political and professional
issue. Self-organization challenges the assumption of
planners and politicians that they have arbitrary
control over a system. They may not take kindly to
having this limitation pointed out. It will require the
relinquishment of a lot of egotism, and a recognition
that in the end plans should not be ‘personal visions’
but ways of assisting and directing what comes
naturally.
BH:
Stephen Wolfram has said that the reason we don’t see
more nature-like complexity in human artefacts is
because we narrow our ambitions to addressing certain
limited kinds of behaviour, and to dealing only with
certain soluble problems. In traditional societies, the
Building Culture seemed to be able to generate forms
that ensured many different purposes could be served at
once – including, of course, the need for Beauty. Even
if one could forsee some practicable algorithm being
developed that would help us replace some of the
qualities lost from the built world, this would probably
be incompatible with the way we do things now – namely,
architectural
profession, building industry, development
business. Alexander has always maintained that those
things will have to change in some significant ways.
Ball:
My impression is that Alexander is right: there would
need to be some big changes in working practices. I do
not see how these might be easily made, since there is
probably a fundamental conflict between doing things the
way Alexander would like and doing them in a low-cost
and time-limited manner. However, one might imagine that
new materials might make a difference to what can be
achieved, and at what cost. And I am struck by how, in
southern Spain, very attractive and apparently very well
thought-out and individualistic houses seem to be made
in an apparently economical way from low-cost breeze
blocks covered in stucco. Probably a large part of the
problem is getting rid of the prevailing
one-size-fits-all mentality.
BH:
Brian,
in yours and Solé’s book,
Signs of Life[40], you say that history teaches us
that top-down planning and bottom-up self-organization
might not have to be in conflict in the same city.
Goodwin:
The beauty of many cities is precisely the organic
quality of much of their structure, which grew gradually
together with the creation of planned spaces and
structures as opportunity arose during the development
of the city as a collective creation. There are
signatures of these organic spaces in the fractal
patterns that persist throughout city growth.
NOTES
[1] in what ways should architecture imitate nature?
There was a distinction in the early-nineteenth century
between French and British artists’ attitudes to nature.
The first was idealistic (as expounded by Quatremère de
Quincy), the second more realist (what was termed by
Ruskin a “science of the aspects of things”). The
English philosopher Roger Scruton has reintroduced this
distinction with his recent insistence that the
essence of nature and its appearance are
indistinguishable. Return to text.
[2] discernible structure in music
See Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?,
Oxford, 2002. Return to text.
[3] Ruskin
Peter Fuller, Theoria: Art, and the Absence of Grace,
London, 1988. Return to text.
[4] “biophilia”
Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life, London,
2002. Return to text.
[5] natural kinds
Goodwin explains this idea to Dr. David King in “An
interview with professor Brian Goodwin”, GenEthics
News, 11, Mar./Apr. 1996, pp. 6-8
Return to text.
[6] attractors
Attractors ( or “Lorenz attractors”) are a phenomenon in
the mathematical modeling of non-linear dynamics. They
demonstrate that certain systems tend towards a
relatively small number of states (two or more),
flipping back and forth between them unpredictably,
based on very small variations in the predictor
variables. (with thanks to Anthony L. Suchman) .
Return to text.
[7] Stephen Wolfram,
A New Kind of Science,
Champaign, 2002. Return to text.
[8] Structure-Preserving Transformations
These are explained in Part One of Book Two (“The
Process of Creating Life”) of Christopher Alexander’s
The Nature of Order, Berkeley, c.2003.
Return to text.
[9]
Growth and Form
D’Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form, Cambridge,
1917. Philip Ball discusses Thompson’s significance in
his Critical Mass, London, 2004.
Return to text.
[10] “phase space”
“any
abstract space formed [by plotting them on a 2D map] by
a position (either linear or angular) and its associated
speed”. Such spaces are used to study the behaviour of
complex systems.
Return to text.
[11]
“The Phenomenon of Life”
Alexander, Nature of Order, Book One, c2003.
Return to text.
[12] “how to define ‘life’”
See Ball’s article “What is life? Can we make it?” in
the August 2004 issue of Prospect magazine.
Return to text.
[13]The
Self-Made Tapestry
See Ball’s introductory biography. Return
to text.
[14]
how consciousness (and feeling) could emerge
The phenomenon of emergence is one where control is
exercised by the intrinsic rules of evolution of a
system, and not by any external authority. It is
discussed in M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The
Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos,
London, 1994; and Steven Johnson, Emergence: The
Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software,
London 2001. Return to text.
[15]
Whitehead or Bergson
Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was “the first to elaborate …
a process philosophy, which rejected static values in
favour of values of motion, change, and evolution” [Enc.
Brit.]. He is credited with the notion of “vitalism”
or “animism” in relation to
organic systems. Alfred North Whitehead
(1861-1947), whose 1929 book Process and Reality
has been called one of the greatest works of Western
metaphysics, developed what he called a “philosophy of
organism”, and criticised scientific materialism for
having replaced the concrete reality of nature with
abstractions. Return to text.
[16]
Stu Kauffman
A good starting point for understanding Stuart
Kauffman’s ideas is his Origins of Order:
Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution,
Oxford, 1992. Return to text.
[17]
Autocatalytic networks
An “autocatalytic set” is a set of molecules in which
the conditions are such that a “coherent,
self-reinforcing web of reactions” is set up – the web,
in effect, catalyzing its own formation. Described in
Waldrop, Complexity, pp. 123-4 et seq.
Return to text.
[18]
Charles [Jencks]
The Architecture of the Jumping Universe. A Polemic: How
Complexity Science is Changing Architecture and Culture,
London, 1995; The New Paradigm in Architecture: The
Language of Post-Modernism, New Haven and London,
2002. Return to text.
[19] making his power seen
Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the
City in Western Civilization, London 1994, p. 89.
Michel Foucault (1926-1984), a friend and colleague of
Sennett’s, traced the exercise of power through
institutions designed for “exclusion”, such as asylums,
hospitals and prisons. Return to text.
[20]
catalogue of patterns
Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern
Language, New York, 1977.
Return to text.
[21]
Elliot waves in economics
Ralph Nelson Elliot (1871-1948)
proposed that the complex cycles of stock prices
could be described in relation to five “waves”, the
relationship between which can be explained by the
Fibonacci series of numbers (a series which also
pervades natural forms). Return to
text.
[22] “extelligence”
See Stewart’s contribution to John Brockman (ed.),
The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the
Twenty-First Century, New York, 2002.
Return to text.
[23]
phase transitions
First-order phase transitions, common in nature, are
exemplified by the change from ice to water above a
certain temperature. Less common are second-order phase
transitions, which are not abrupt, but manage to combine
elements of order and chaos in juxtaposition. See
Waldrop, Complexity, pp. 228-9.
Return to text.
[24] Satish Kumar
Kumar is Programme Director
of Schumacher College, and editor of the magazine
Resurgence. His new
book is You Are Therefore I Am. A Declaration of
Dependence, Totnes, 2002.
Return to text.
[25]
New Paradigm in Architecture
See note 18.
Return to text.
[26] The Nature of Order.
See various mentions above. Return to
text.
[27]
Sokal article
“Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative
hermeneutics of quantum gravity”, Social Text,
46/47, 1996, pp. 217-52. Return to text.
[28]
Sokal spoofed postmodernism
The so-called “Science Wars”, to which Sokal’s spoof
article [above] was a contribution, are further
discussed in Jay A. Labinger and Harry Collins (eds.),
The One Culture: A Conversation about Science,
Chicago and London, 2001. Return to text.
[29] interview in Nature
conducted by John Whitfield. Return
to text.
[30] two types of creativity
Margaret Boden is attached to the Cognitive and Computer
Science department of the University of Sussex, and is
author of The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms,
London, 1990. Return to text.
[31]
Critical Mass
See Ball’s
introductory biography, and note 9.
Return to text.
[32] Tracey Emin’s bed
Emin’s “My Bed” (aka “The Unmade Bed” – literally that)
helped win her the Turner Prize in 1999. It was
destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2004.
Return to text.
[33]
Goethe’s work on colour
Modern physicists have been unkind to Goethe’s
Farbenlehre (1805-10), but he himself ranked his
scientific work of this kind on a level with, if not
higher than, his poetry. Return to
text.
[34]
Brian Goodwin … elsewhere
John Brockman, “A new science of qualities: a talk with
Brian Goodwin”, Edge –
www.edge.org/3rd_culture/goodwin/goodwin_p1.html.
Return to text.
[35]
tiny bit of feeling or sentience
“In the shadow of culture”, in Brockman, Next Fifty
Years. Return to text.
[36]
earliest applications of computer technology
Alexander’s work on design theory in the 1950s and ‘60s,
and in particular his time spent at Harvard –
culminating in his hugely influential Notes on the
Synthesis of Form, Cambridge, Mass., 1964 – put him
at the forefront of computer applications to
architecture, and to planning issues such as the optimal
design of motorways. Return to text.
[37] Book 3 of The Nature of Order
“A Vision of a Living World”. Return to
text.
[38]
The
Next Fifty Years
See above
[“extelligence”].
Return to text.
[39]
as the Prince of Wales … has argued
This is discussed in Brian Hanson and Samir Younés,
“Reuniting Urban Form and Urban Process: The Prince of
Wales’s Urban Design Task Force”, Journal of Urban
Design, vol. 6, no. 2, 2001, pp. 185-209.
Return to text.
[40]
Signs of Life
Brian Goodwin and Ricard Solé, Signs of Life: How
Complexity Pervades Biology, New York, 2000.
Return to text.
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