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‘the harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of
mathematical beauty’
D’Arcy Wentworth ThompsonOn Growth and Form
1917
‘The ‘‘symphonic’’, organized planning which, through all the great periods of
European Art, was its characteristic feature, was without any doubt conscious’
Matila Ghyka. The Geometry of Art and Life.
“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . is Astonishment…… and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror”
Edmund Burke. Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1757
Descending from the region of the clouds,And starting from the hollows of the earthMore multitudinous every moment, rendTheir way before them - what a joy to roamAn equal among mightiest energies
William Wordsworth. 1770-1850
The Age of Reason
“A mere naturalistic copy of a plant on to
an industrial object will not in itself form
ornament….In order to become ornament,
natural forms must be arranged in some orderly pattern…”
1895
Eugene Grasset. 1897.
“Modern thought”Jencks. 1995
• “The snare laid down in the 17th century that proved to most scientists and thinking people that nature was a machine, that L’homme Machine ruled over the other animals, and that everything was as deterministic, mechanistic and rational as a machine”
Octagonia. The Garden of Cosmic Speculation. Charles and Maggie Jencks
“Nature, however, seems to be based neither on a game of snakes and ladders, where some win and some lose, nor
on a completely pre-ordained set of plans”
“an excessive respect for order is self defeating, since it restricts the possibility of growth”
Alan Powers. Nature in Design. 1999
Tao Ho. 1936-
• …Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, particularly those ideas related to cosmology and nature, bear a remarkable similarity to the spirit of new physics and scientific thoughts developed this century…..unity amongst Heaven, Earth and Man….
Cosmic Harmony. Crystal candle stand. For Swarovsky. 1996
A Paradigm Shift
“great towns, are usually badly constructed in comparison with those which are regularly laid out on a plain by a surveyor……The former have large buildings and small buildings indiscriminately placed together…rendering the streets crooked and irregular…it might be said that it was chance rather than the will of men guided by reason, that led to such an arrangement”
Discourse on Method. Descartes. 1637
Le Corbusier. Ville Radieuse. 1930 Batty and Longley. The Fractal City. 1997
“The universe is as unpredictably creative as a mad nineteenth century inventor; it changes its mind and jumps”
ComplexityOrder and chaosSelf regulationNon linear dynamics
Bifurcating Weather Systems
The Lorenz Attractor
Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set off a Tornado in Texas?
Edward Lorenz. 1972
Order and chaos in dynamic systems
A strange attractor depicts the “chaotic but still ordered organisation of movement around a maxima and minima” It is the symbol of deterministic chaos; nature as wild, unpredictable and disordered but constrained
Strange Attractor
Gallery of Modern Art. Edinburgh. Jencks
The Henan Attractor
This new world view will be most visibly expressed in architecture. Architects express the ideals of an age….Architecture is “built” meaning….architecture reveals what we believe…. Jencks. 1995
It is not just a case of copying forms; but rather it is a matter of getting inside the processes of nature and transforming them through the medium of the human mind........ Powers. 1999
Model. Boilerhouse extension. 1996-9 V & A Museum. Daniel Libeskind.
Aesthetic parallelism between Westernand Eastern art is possible, if the artistis able to penetrate beyond apparent reality in the search for a universalexpression of nature…Tao Ho. 1998
Complexity is the theory of how emergent organisation may be achieved by interacting components pushed far from equilibrium (by increasing energy, matter or information) to the threshold between order and chaos.
The important border or threshold is where the system often jumps, bifurcates or creatively interacts in a new nonlinear, unpredictable way.
Jencks. 1997
Nature’s patterns – order and chaos in form and structure
The Guggenheim Museum. Bilbao. Frank Gehry. 1993-7
“Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightening travel in a straight line” The Mandelbrot Set
The Fractal Geometry of Nature. Benoit Mandelbrot. 1977
Barnsley’s Fern. 1988
A special mathematical technique…takes a real fern, computes how its branches transform into one another at different scales…then applies the formula by computer using the identified mathematical structure
Bifurcating systems and self similarity
Any form in nature which is self similar is likely to be fractal
Fractal objects are irregular in shape but their irregularity is similar across many scales….enabling them to be described mathematically and to be generated computationally.
Fractal Cities
Michael Batty and Paul Longley
1994
Eisenman Architects. Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences.St George Ferry Terminal. Computer rendering.
Eisenman Architects. Aronoff Centre for Design and Art. University of Cincinnati. 1986-96
“matter in the throes of creation”
Sanford Kwinter
“a clunky multi coloured stick and ball plaything”
This art…..proposes the layering of ideas and patterns into a complex whole. The layers should make one slow down and think, and wonder about received notions. It should celebrate the beauty and organisation of the universe but above all re-supply that sense of awe and wonder
Charles Jencks. 2003
Unlike computer brains, human brains change, develop, deterioriate and forget; this gives us the capacity to think subjectively, to change our opinions, and to forgive.
It is the difference between a mechanical brain and a human mind.
These are our flaws, and they make us human. They also determine whether our creations will be spiritual, inspirational, and poignant.
If we diminish our beautiful capacity to forget and to forgive, to err and to gauge our surroundings with subjectivity, we render ourselves less human and our designs, less personal
Tao Ho. 1998