Discovered Not Designed Building Things In The Age Of Complexity
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Discovered, Not Designed: Building Things in the Age of Complexity
To build is to be human. Creating things is part of our nature, and our principal mode of survival. The things we have built throughout history have always relied on design to turn discoveries into workable tools. But the underlying premise of design is that we can reason about the pieces and connections that make a thing work. From the stone axe to the rocket engine, design is predicated on our ability to see causal connections between the parts of a system. But what happens when such causality is no longer apparent? When the things we must build to solve our challenges have inner workings that cannot be discerned? The answer lies in nature. Nature fashions truly complex objects that solve categorically hard problems. Complex things produce their most important outputs via emergence, whereby a system’s structures and behaviors arise in ways that cannot be designed. This book argues that we are entering an age where humanity must build truly complex things to continue our progress. This means learning to build as nature builds, and as it turns out, forces us to redefine knowledge and skill, and more broadly our scientific and engineering paradigm.
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
Foreword by Arthur Drexler. Introduction by Vincent Scully.
Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age
Author: Juval Portugali
language: en
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Release Date: 2012-02-03
Today, our cities are an embodiment of the complex, historical evolution of knowledge, desires and technology. Our planned and designed activities co-evolve with our aspirations, mediated by the existing technologies and social structures. The city represents the accretion and accumulation of successive layers of collective activity, structuring and being structured by other, increasingly distant cities, reaching now right around the globe. This historical and structural development cannot therefore be understood or captured by any set of fixed quantitative relations. Structural changes imply that the patterns of growth, and their underlying reasons change over time, and therefore that any attempt to control the morphology of cities and their patterns of flow by means of planning and design, must be dynamical, based on the mechanisms that drive the changes occurring at a given moment. This carefully edited post-proceedings volume gathers a snapshot view by leading researchers in field, of current complexity theories of cities. In it, the achievements, criticisms and potentials yet to be realized are reviewed and the implications to planning and urban design are assessed.