I- Toward resilient architectureBiology LessonsWhy Green Often Isn'tHow Modernism Got SquareThe Geometry of ResilienceAgile DesignII- Science for designersThe Transformation of WholesScaling and FractalsThe Meaning of ComplexityComplex Adaptive Systems

III- Frontiers of design scienceEvidence-based DesignSelf-OrganizationBiophiliaThe Network CityComputational Irreducibility

IV- The remarkable technology of Christopher AlexanderThe Radical Technology of Christopher AlexanderThe Sustainable Technology of Christopher AlexanderThe Pattern Technology of Christopher AlexanderThe Living Technology of Christopher Alexander

Toward Resilient Architectures 1: Biology LessonsMichael Mehaffy and Nikos A. Salingaros

The word resilience" is bandied about these days among environmental designers. In some quarters, its threatening to displace another popular word, sustainability. This is partly a reflection of newsworthy events like Hurricane Sandy, adding to a growing list of other disruptive events like tsunamis, droughts, and heat waves. We know that we cant design for all such unpredictable events, but we could make sure our buildings and cities are better able to weather these disruptions and bounce back afterwards. At a larger scale, we need to be able to weather the shocks of climate change, resource destruction and depletion, and a host of other growing challenges to human wellbeing. We need more resilient design, not as a fashionable buzzword, but out of necessity for our long-term survival.Aside from a nice idea, what is resilience really, structurally speaking? What lessons can we as designers apply towards achieving it? In particular, what can we learn from the evident resilience of natural systems? Quite a lot, it turns out.Resilient and non-resilient systemsLets start by recognizing that we have incredibly complex and sophisticated technologies today, from power plants, to building systems, to jet aircraft. These technologies are, generally speaking, marvelously stable within their design parameters. This is the kind of stability that C. H. Holling, the pioneer of resilience theory in ecology, called engineered resilience. But they are oftennotresilient outside of their designed operating systems. Trouble comes with the unintended consequences that occur as externalities, often with disastrous results. On the left, an over-concentration of large-sale components; on the right, a more resilient distributed network of nodes.Drawing by Nikos A. SalingarosA good example is the Fukushima nuclear reactor group in Japan. For years it functioned smoothly, producing reliable power for its region, and was a shining example of engineered resilience. But it did not have what Holling called ecological resilience, that is, the resilience to the often-chaotic disruptions that ecological systems have to endure. One of those chaotic disruptions was the earthquake and tsunami that engulfed the plant in 2010, causing a catastrophic meltdown. The Fukushima reactors are based on an antiquated U.S. design from the 1960s, dependent upon an electrical emergency cooling system. When the electricity failed, including the backup generators, the emergency control system became inoperative and the reactor cores melted. It was also a mistake (in retrospect) to centralize power production by placing six large nuclear reactors next to each other. The trouble with chaotic disruptions is that they are inherently unpredictable. Actually we can predict (though poorly) the likelihood of an earthquake and tsunami relatively better compared to other natural phenomena. Think of how difficult it would be to predict the time and location of an asteroid collision, or more difficult yet, to prepare for the consequences. Physicists refer to this kind of chaos as a far from equilibrium condition. This is a problem that designers are beginning to take much more seriously, as we deal with more freakish events like Hurricane Sandy actually a chaotic combination of three separate weather systems that devastated the Caribbean and the eastern coast of the U.S., in 2012.

Hurricane Sandy on October 28, 2012.Courtesy LANCE MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFCAs if these unforeseen dangers were not enough, we humans are contributing to the instability. An added complication is that we ourselves are now responsible for much of the chaos, in the form of our increasingly complex technology and its unpredictable interactions and disruptions. Climate change is one consequence of such disruptions, along with the complex and unstable infrastructures we have placed in vulnerable coastal locations. (In fact, Japan's technological infrastructure has been heavily damaged over a much wider area by the chaotic domino effects of the Fukushima disaster.) Our technological intrusion into the biosphere has pushed natural systems into conditions that are far from equilibrium and as a result, catastrophic disruptions are closer than ever.Biology lessonsSo what can we learn from biological systems? They are incredibly complex. Take, for instance, the rich complexity of a rainforest. It too generates complicated interactions among many billions of components. Yet many rainforests manage to remain stable over many thousands of years, in spite of countless disruptions and shocks to the system. Can we understand and apply the lessons of their structural characteristics? It seems we can. Here are four such lessons extracted from distributed (non-centralized) biological systems that we will discuss in more detail:1. These systems have an inter-connected network structure.2. They feature diversity and redundancy(a totally distinct notion of efficiency).3. They display a wide distribution of structures across scales,including fine-grained scales.4. They have the capacity to self-adapt and self-organize.This generally (though not always) is achieved through the use of genetic information.

Map of the Internet: a paradigmatic resilient network in part because it is scale-free and redundant.Image: The Opte Project/WikimediaThe Internet is a familiar human example of an inter-connected network structure. It was invented by the U.S. military as a way of providing resilient data communications in the event of attack. Biological systems also have inter-connected network structures, as we can see for example in the bodys separate blood and hormone circulation systems, or the brains connected pattern of neurons. Tissue damaged up to a point is usually able to regenerate, and damaged brains are often able to re-learn lost knowledge and skills by building up new alternative neural pathways. The inter-connected, overlapping, and adaptable patterns of relationships of ecosystems and metabolisms seem to be key to their functioning. Focusing upon redundancy, diversity, and plasticity, biological examples contradict the extremely limited notion of efficiency used in mechanistic thinking. Our bodies have two kidneys, two lungs, and two hemispheres of the brain, one of which can still function when the other is damaged or destroyed. An ecosystem typically has many diverse species, any one of which can be lost without destroying the entire ecosystem. By contrast, an agricultural monoculture is highly vulnerable to just a single pest or other threat. Monocultures are terribly fragile. They are efficient only as long as conditions are perfect, but liable to catastrophic failure in the long term. (That may be a pretty good description of our current general state!) Why is the distribution of structures across scales so important? For one thing, its a form of diversity. By contrast, a concentration at just a few scales (especially large scales) is more vulnerable to shocks. For another thing, the smaller scales that make up and support the larger scales facilitate regeneration and adaptation. When the small cells of a larger organ are damaged, its easy for that damaged tissue to grow back rather like repairing the small bricks of a damaged wall. Distribution of inter-connected elements across several scales.Drawing by Nikos A. SalingarosSelf-organization and self-adaptation are also central attributes of living systems, and of their evolution. Indeed, this astonishing self-structuring capacity is one of the most important of biological processes. How does it work? We know that it requires networks, diversity, and distribution of structures across scales. But it also requires the ability to retain and build upon existing patterns, so that those gradually build up into more complex patterns. Often this is done through the use of genetic memory. Structures that code earlier patterns are re-used and re-incorporated later. The most familiar example of this is, of course, DNA. The evolutionary transformation of organisms using DNA gradually built up a world that transitioned from viruses and bacteria, to vastly more complex organisms.Applying the lessons to resilient human designsHow can we apply these structural lessons to create resilient cities, and to improve smaller vulnerable parts of cities by making them resilient? Developing the ideas from our previous list, resilient cities have the following characteristics:1. They have inter-connected networks of pathways and relationships.They are not segregated into neat categories of use, type, or pathway, which would make them vulnerable to failure.2. They have diversity and redundancy of activities, types, objectives, and populations.There are many different kinds of people doing many different kinds of things, any one of which might provide the key to surviving a shock to the system (precisely which can never be known in advance).3. They have a wide distribution of scales of structure,from the largest regional planning patterns to the most fine-grained details. Combining with (1) and (2) above, these structures are diverse, inter-connected, and can be changed relatively easily and locally (in response to changing needs). They are like the small bricks of a building, easily repaired when damaged. (The opposite would be large expensive pre-formed panels that have to be replaced in whole.)4. Following from (3),they (and their parts) can adapt and organize in response to changing needs on different spatial and temporal scales, and in response to each other.That is, they can self-organize. This process can accelerate through the evolutionary exchange and transformation of traditional knowledge and concepts about what works to meet the needs of humans, and the natural environments on which they depend.Resilient cities evolve in a very specific manner. They retain and build upon older patterns or information, at the same time that they respond to change by adding novel adaptations. They almost never create total novelty, and almost always create only very selective novelty as needed. Any change is tested via selection, just as changes in an evolving organism are selected by how well the organism performs in its environment. This mostly rules out drastic, discontinuous changes. Resilient cities are thus structure-preserving even as they make deep structural transformations. How do these elements contribute to resilient cities in practice, in an age of resource depletion and climate change? Its easy to see that a city with networked streets and sidewalks is going to be more walkable and less car-dependent than a city with a rigid top-down hierarchy of street types, funneling all traffic into a limited number of collectors and arterials. Similarly, a city designed to work with a mix of uses is going to be more diverse and be able to better adapt to change than a city with rigidly separated monocultures.A complex resilient system coordinates its multi-scale response to a disturbance on any single scale.Drawing by Nikos A. SalingarosA city with a rich and balanced diversity of scales, especially including and encouraging the most fine-grained scales, is going to be more easily repairable and adaptable to new uses. It can withstand disruptions better because its responses can occur on any and all different levels of scale. The city uses the disruption to define a pivot on a particular scale, around which to structure a complex multi-scale response. And its more likely to be able to self-organize around new economic activities and new resources, if and when the old resources come to be in short supply.The evolution of non-resilient citiesSo where are we today? Many of our cities were (and still are) shaped by a model of city planning that evolved in an era of cheap fossil-fuel energy and a zeal for the mechanistic segregation of parts. The result is that in many respects we have a rigid non-resilient kind of city; one that, at best, has some engineered resilience towards a single objective, but certainly no ecological resilience. Response is both limited and expensive. Consider how the pervasive model of 20th century city planning was defined by these non-resilient criteria:1. Cities are rational tree-like (top-down dendritic) structures,not only in roads and pathways, but also in the distribution of functions.2. Efficiency demands the elimination of redundancy.Diversity is conceptually messy. Modernism wants visually clean and orderly divisions and unified groupings, which privilege the largest scale.3. The machine age dictates our structural and tectonic limitations.According to the most influential theorists of the modernist city, mechanization takes command (Giedion); ornament is a crime (Loos); and the most important buildings are large-scale sculptural expressions of fine art (Le Corbusier, Gropius, et al.).4. Any use of genetic material from the past is a violation of the machine-age zeitgeist,and therefore can only be an expression of reactionary politics; it cannot be tolerated. Novelty and neophilia are to be elevated and privileged above all design considerations. Structural evolution can only be allowed to occur within the abstracted discourse of visual culture, as it evaluates and judges human need by its own (specialized, ideological, aestheticizing) standards.From the perspective of resilience theory, this can be seen as an effective formula for generating non-resilient cities. It is not an accident that the pioneers of such cities were, in fact, evangelists for a high-resource dependent form of industrialization, at a time when the understanding of such matters was far more primitive than now. Here, for example, is the architect Le Corbusier, one of the most influential thinkers in all of modern planning, writing in 1935, and providing a blueprint for modern sprawl: The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car. We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline. All of which will necessitate a great deal of work ... enough for all. Sadly, there is no longer enough for all! This relatively brief age of abundant fossil fuels and the non-resilient urban architecture that it has spawned all over the globe is rapidly drawing to a close. We must be prepared for what has to come next. From the perspective of resilience theory, the solutions are not going to be simple techno-fixes, as so many naively believe. What is required is a deeper analysis and restructuring of the system structure: admittedly not an easy thing to achieve since it doesnt make money short-term.Postscript: a lesson from our own evolutionPeople tend to be carried along by the present, and put both past and future out of their mind. Even in our information-glutted age, the past is remote and abstract--just another set of images like any movie. And so we ignore where we have come from, and the path that brought us here to our marvelous technological culture. We are ill prepared to see where we must go next. For our techno-consumerist culture, tomorrow will bring no surprises. But new research in anthropology, anthropogeny, and genetics suggests that we humans are, quite literally, creatures of climate change. Thanks to ingenious detective work, we now know that 195,000 years ago, our species very nearly became extinct down to hardly more than 1,000 survivors clinging to the southern African coast, as a mega-drought swept that continent. Our evident response was to diversify, and to develop many new sources of food as well as new technologies for acquiring them: fishhooks, barbs, baskets, urns, and other innovations. More complex language probably followed, allowing us to coordinate more sophisticated strategies for hunting and gathering. 10,000 years ago, it now appears, we adapted once again to a mini-ice age, prompting us to innovate with new agricultural technologies, and new forms of settlement around them. These innovations arose more or less simultaneously in many parts of the then-disconnected world, suggesting that the trigger was very likely the climate. Now we are facing the third great adaptation of our history to climate change. But this time it is we, ourselves, who have triggered it with our own technologies. If we are going to adapt successfully, we will need to understand the opportunities to innovate yet again, in the way we design and operate our technology. Our comfortable lifestyle (in the wealthy West, and among those socioeconomic classes that can afford to copy us) is significantly less resilient than most people would care to admit, or even dare think about. If we are going to continue our so-far remarkably successful run as a technological civilization, we had better take the lessons of resilience theory to heart.AUTHORS NOTE: With this post we begin a new five-part series on the concept of resilience, and how designers can apply its insights.Michael Mehaffyis an urbanist and critical thinker in complexity and the built environment. He is a practicing planner and builder, and is known for his many projects as well as his writings. He has been a close associate of the architect and software pioneerChristopher Alexander. Currently he is a Sir David Anderson Fellow at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, a Visiting Faculty Associate at Arizona State University; a Research Associate with the Center for Environmental Structure, Chris Alexanders research center founded in 1967; and a strategic consultant on international projects, currently in Europe, North America and South America.Nikos A. Salingarosis amathematician andpolymath known for his work onurban theory, architectural theory, complexity theory, and design philosophy. He has been a close collaborator of the architect and computer software pioneer Christopher Alexander. Salingaros published substantive research on Algebras, Mathematical Physics, Electromagnetic Fields, and Thermonuclear Fusion before turning his attention to Architecture and Urbanism. He still is Professor of Mathematics at theUniversity of Texas at San Antonioand is also on the Architecture faculties of universities inItaly,Mexico, andThe Netherlands.

Toward Resilient Architectures 2: Why Green Often Isn'tMichael Mehaffy and Nikos A. Salingaros

Before its cancellation, the Anara Tower was planned to be one of Dubais tallest buildings, and an icon of sustainability despite its west-facing glazing, high embodied energy in materials, and, remarkably, a giant non-functional (i.e. decorative) wind turbine. The building offered the consumer packaging of an image of sustainability at the apparent expense of real sustainability.Image by WS Atkins PLCSomething surprising has happened with many so-called sustainable buildings. When actually measured in post-occupancy assessments, theyve proven far less sustainable than their proponents have claimed. In some cases theyve actually performed worse than much older buildings, with no such claims. A 2009 New York Times article, Some buildings not living up to green label, documented the extensive problems with many sustainability icons. Among other reasons for this failing, the Times pointed to the widespread use of expansive curtain-wall glass assemblies and large, deep-plan designs that put most usable space far from exterior walls, forcing greater reliance on artificial light and ventilation systems.Partly in response to the bad press, the City of New York instituted a new law requiring disclosure of actual performance for many buildings. That led to reports of even more poor-performing sustainability icons. Another Times article, Citys Law Tracking Energy Use Yields Some Surprises, noted that the gleaming new 7 World Trade Center, LEED Gold-certified, scored just 74 on the Energy Star rating one point below the minimum 75 for high-efficiency buildings under the national rating system. That modest rating doesnt even factor in the significant embodied energy in the new materials of 7 World Trade Center. Things got even worse in 2010 with a lawsuit [$100 Million Class Action Filed Against LEED and USGBC] against the US Green Building Council, developers of the LEED certification system (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). The plaintiffs in the lawsuit alleged that the USGBC engaged in deceptive trade practices, false advertising and anti-trust by promoting the LEED system, and argued that because the LEED system does not live up to predicted and advertised energy savings, the USGBC actually defrauded municipalities and private entities. The suit was ultimately dismissed, but in its wake the website Treehugger and others predicted, based on the evidence uncovered, that there will be more of this kind of litigation. Whats going on? How can the desire to increase sustainability actually result in its opposite? One problem with many sustainability approaches is that they dont question the underlying building type. Instead they only add new greener components, such as more efficient mechanical systems and better wall insulation. But this bolt-on conception of sustainability, even when partially successful, has the drawback of leaving underlying forms, and the structural system that generates them, intact. The result is too often the familiar law of unintended consequences. Whats gained in one area is lost elsewhere as the result of other unanticipated interactions. Energy-wasting glass box from the 1960s compared to a new LEED-certified curtain-wall building. Spot the difference? The trouble is, (paraphrasing Albert Einstein) we cannot solve problems with the same basic typologies that created them.Drawing by Nikos A. SalingarosFor example, adding more efficient active energy systems tends to reduce the amount of energy used, and therefore lowers its overall cost. But, in turn, that lower cost tends to make tenants less careful with their energy use a phenomenon known as Jevons Paradox. Increasing efficiency lowers cost, and increases demand in turn increasing the rate of consumption, and wiping out the initial savings. The lesson is that we cant deal with energy consumption in isolation. We have to look at the concept of energy more broadly, including embodied energy and other factors. There are often other unintended consequences. A notable case is Londons sustainability-hyped Gherkin (Foster & Partners, 2003), where the buildings open-floor ventilation system was compromised when security-conscious tenants created glass separations. Operable windows whose required specifications had been lowered because of the natural ventilation feature actually began to fall from the building, and had to be permanently closed. The ambitious goal of a more sophisticated natural ventilation system paradoxically resulted in even worse ventilation.No building is an islandAnother major problem with green building programs happens when they treat buildings in isolation from their urban contexts. In one infamous example [Driving to Green Buildings], the Chesapeake Bay Foundation moved its headquarters to the worlds first certified LEED-Platinum building but the move took them from an older building in the city of Annapolis, Maryland to a new building in the suburbs, requiring new embodied energy and resources. The added employee travel alone whats known as transportation energy intensity more than erased the energy gains of the new building. The theory of resilience discussed in our article,Toward Resilient Architectures 1: Biology Lessons,points to the nature of the problem. Systems may appear to be well engineered within their original defined parameters but they will inevitably interact with many other systems, often in an unpredictable and non-linear way. We look towards a more robust design methodology, combining redundant (network) and diverse approaches, working across many scales, and ensuring fine-grained adaptivity of design elements. Though these criteria may sound abstract, theyre exactly the sorts of characteristics achieved with so-called passive design approaches. Passive buildings allow the users to adjust and adapt to climactic conditions say, by opening or closing windows or blinds, and getting natural light and air. These designs can be far more accurate in adjusting to circumstances at a much finer grain of structure. They feature diverse systems that do more than one thing like the walls that hold up the building and also accumulate heat through thermal mass. They have networks of spaces that can be reconfigured easily, even converted to entirely new uses, with relatively inexpensive modifications (unlike the open-plan typology, which has never delivered on expectations). They are all-around, multi-purpose buildings that arent narrowly designed to one fashionable look or specialized user. And perhaps most crucially, they dont stand apart from context and urban fabric, but work together with other scales of the city, to achieve benefits at both larger and smaller scales.Older buildings perform better sometimesMany older buildings took exactly this passive approach, simply because they had to. In an era when energy was expensive (or simply not available) and transportation was difficult, buildings were naturally more clustered together in urban centers. Their shape and orientation exploited natural daylight, and typically featured smaller, well-positioned windows and load-bearing walls with higher thermal mass. The simple, robust shapes of these buildings allowed almost endless configurations. In fact many of the most in-demand urban buildings today are actually adaptive reuse projects of much older buildings. The results of this passive approach are reflected in good energy performance. While New Yorks 7 World Trade Center actually scored below the citys minimum rating of 75 out of 100, older buildings in the city that had been retrofitted with the same efficient heating, cooling, and lighting technologies fared much better: the Empire State Building scored a rating of 80, the Chrysler Building scored 84. But just being old is clearly not a criterion of success. The 1963 MetLife/PanAm building (Walter Gropius & Pietro Belluschi), now a half-century old, scored a dismal 39. Another mid-century icon, the Lever House (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1952), scored 20. The worst performer of all was Ludwig Mies Van der Rohes iconic Seagram building, built in 1958. Its score was an astonishingly low 3. Whats the problem with these buildings? As the earlier New York Times article noted, they have extensive curtain-wall assemblies, large window areas, large-scale deep-plan forms, and other limitations. On a fundamental level, as we can now begin to see from resilience theory, they lack many crucial resilient advantages of older building types. There may be something inherent in the building type itself that is non-resilient. The form language itself could be an innate problem something that, according to systems thinking, no mere bolt-on green additions can fix.Oil-interval architectureArchitectural critic Peter Buchanan, writing recently in the UK magazine, The Architectural Review, placed the blame for these failures squarely at the feet of the Modernist design model itself, and called for a big rethink about many of its unquestioned assumptions [The Big Rethink: Farewell To Modernism And Modernity Too]. Modernism is inherently unsustainable, he argued, because it evolved in the beginning of the era of abundant and cheap fossil fuels. This cheap energy powered the weekend commute to the early Modernist villas, and kept their large open spaces warm, in spite of large expanses of glass and thin wall sections. Petrochemicals created their complex sealants and fueled the production of their exotic extrusions. Modern architecture is thus an energy-profligate, petrochemical architecture, only possible when fossil fuels are abundant and affordable, he said. Like the sprawling cities it spawned, it belongs to that waning era historians are already calling the oil interval. Cities built using a form language whose dominant feature is to maximize the consumption of fossil fuels. Though a successful economic development strategy during the oil-interval era, it has left us with a looming catastrophe.Drawing by Nikos A. SalingarosBuchanan is not alone in calling for a big rethink about the assumptions of Modernist design. It is fashionable among many architects today to attack Modernism, and argue instead for various kinds of avant-garde and Post-Modernist styles. Buchanan lumps these styles together under a category he calls Deconstructionist Post-Modernism. But he insists that the Deconstructionists have not actually transcended the Modernist paradigm they attack: they still operate almost entirely within the industrial assumptions and engineering methodologies of the oil interval. Once again, resilience theory provides insight into the serious flaws carried by this family of related form languages and indeed, flaws in their very conception of design. (Those will need to be examined in great detail.) Ironically, this modern model is now almost a century old, belonging to an era of engineered resilience that is, resilience within only one designed system, but unable to cope with the unintended consequences of interactions with other systems (like urban transportation, say, or true ecological systems). Because the Modernist form language and its successors are tied to the old linear engineering paradigm, they cannot in practice combine redundant (network) and diverse approaches, nor work across many scales, nor ensure a fine-grained adaptivity for design elements though they can certainly create the symbolic appearance of doing so. Contrary to such dubious claims (in what sometimes takes on aspects of a massive marketing effort), they cannot actually achieve what C. H. Holling called ecological resilience. This seems to suggest an important explanation of the alarmingly poor performance of these buildings and places, when actually evaluated in post-occupancy research. Seen in this light, the various avant-garde attempts to transcend Modernism appear more as exotic new wrappings for the same underlying (and non-resilient) structural types and industrial methods. But as Albert Einstein famously pointed out: A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels. Just as it is not possible to achieve resilience by merely adding new devices like solar collectors to these old industrial-Modernist building types, it is not possible to get meaningful benefits with dazzling new designer permutations and tokenistic ecological thinking within the same essentially industrial design process. We do need a big rethink about the most basic methods and systems of design for the future.A wave of neo-modernismYet if anything, in recent years there has been a remarkable resurgence of an even more unapologetic form of Modernism. In light of the evidence, this is a decidedly reactionary trend: we seem to be witnessing a back to roots movement one that, like other such movements, is based more on doctrinal belief than on evidence. This fashionable Neo-Modernism ranges from outright retro boxy white buildings, interiors, and furnishings, to swoopy futuristic-looking buildings and landscapes. Stylistically, the shapes are eye-catching and often edgy, and some people (especially many architects) clearly like them.Curiously, after one century of unfettered design experiments, the Modernist form language evolves back to the traditional glass box.Drawing by Nikos A. SalingarosNot everyone seems to care for this new/old aesthetic, however. Some see the new structures as sterile, ugly, and disruptive to their neighborhoods and cities. Defenders of the designs often attack these critics for being presumably unsophisticated, nostalgic, or unwilling to accept the inevitable progress of a dynamic culture. This battle of stylistic preferences rages on, with the Neo-Modernists claiming the avant-garde high ground, where they tend to dominate the media, critics, and schools. Of course, fashions come and go, and architecture is no different: in a sense this is just another phase in the more or less continuous waxing and waning of architectural Modernism for almost a century now, along with raging debates about its aesthetic merits. Those debates have never really died down. Critics like Buchanan are not new: in the 1960s and 1970s equally vociferous critics like Christopher Alexander, Peter Blake, Jane Jacobs, David Watkin, and Tom Wolfe made withering critiques, but little has changed. What has now changed, however, is that we are asking newly urgent questions about the resilience of this kind of structure, at a time when we need to rigorously assess and improve that resilience. As this discussion suggests, it is not only the particular and practical issues of expansive glazed curtain walls, bulky and transparent buildings, and exotic assemblies overly reliant on petrochemical products that are the root of the problem. It is perhaps the very idea of buildings as fashionable icons celebrating their own newness, a quintessentially Modernist idea, which is fundamentally at odds with the notion of sustainability. As they age, these buildings are destined to be less new and therefore less useful, not more so. The pristine Modernist (and now Post-Modernist and Deconstructivist) industrial surfaces are destined to mar, weather, and otherwise degrade. The eye-catching novelties of one era will become the abandoned eyesores of the next, an inevitability lost on a self-absorbed elite fixated on todays fashions. Meanwhile the humble, humane criteria of resilient design are being pushed aside, in the rush to embrace the most attention-getting new technological approaches which then produce a disastrous wave of unintended failures. This is clearly no way to prepare for a sustainable future in any sense.Modernism is more than just a styleIn this light, why have the form language and design methodologies of Modernism proven so stubbornly persistent? The answer is that Modernism is not merely a style that one may care for or not. It is part and parcel of a remarkably comprehensive even totalizing project of aesthetics, tectonics, urbanism, technology, culture, and ultimately, civilization. That project has had a profound effect upon the development of modern settlements, for better or worse, and (especially visible in the light of resilience theory) made a huge contribution to the current state in which we find our cities, and our civilization. The origins of architectural Modernism are closely affiliated with the progressive goals of the early Twentieth Century, and the humanitarian ideals even the utopian zeal of well-meaning visionaries of that day. Those individuals saw a promising capacity, in the dawning industrial technology of the age, to deliver a new era of prosperity and quality of life for humanity. At their most credulous, its leaders were clearly enraptured by the seemingly infinite possibilities for a technological utopia. From that they developed an elaborate and in surprising ways, still poorly-evaluated theory about the necessary new tectonics and form languages of the civilization of the future. Their followers today still argue that it is, unquestionably, Modernism that is best positioned to don the mantle of sustainability. Many things did improve under this technological regime, of course, and today we can cure diseases, reduce backbreaking toil, eat exotic foods, travel fast in comfortable motoring and flying craft, and do many other things that would astonish our ancestors. But along with that new regime has come a calamitous ecological depletion and destruction of resources, and an erosion of the foundation on which all economics and indeed all life depends. So today, in an age of converging crises, it is well worth our asking hard questions about the assumptions of that industrial regime and the complicity of architectural Modernism as a kind of alluring product packaging within it. The story goes back to a remarkably small group of writers, theorists, and practitioners in the early 20th Century, and notably the Austrian architect Adolf Loos. We will need to look more closely at this history and what its ongoing legacy means for us, and our very daunting design challenges today.

Toward Resilient Architectures 3: How Modernism Got SquareMichael Mehaffy and Nikos A. Salingaros

The fractal mathematics of nature bears a striking resemblance to human ornament, as in this fractal generated by a finite subdivision rule. This is not a coincidence: ornament may be what humans use as a kind of glue to help weave our spaces together. It now appears that the removal of ornament and pattern has far-reaching consequences for the capacity of environmental structures to form coherent, resilient wholesImage: Brirush/WikimediaAs we enter a transition era that demands far greater resilience and sustainability in our technological systems, we must ask tough new questions about existing approaches to architecture and settlement. Post-occupancy evaluations show that many new buildings as well as retrofits of some older buildings, are performing substantially below minimal expectations. In some notable cases, the research results are frankly dismal [see Toward Resilient Architectures 2: Why Green Often Isnt]. The trouble is that the existing system of settlement, developed in the oil-fueled industrial age, is beginning to appear fundamentally limited. And were recognizing that its not possible to solve our problems using the same typologies that created them in the first place. In a far-from-equilibrium world, as resilience theory suggests, we cannot rely on engineered, bolt-on approaches to these typologies, which are only likely to produce a cascade of unintended consequences. What we need is an inherent ability to handle shocks to the system, of the kind we see routinely in biological systems. In Toward Resilient Architectures 1: Biology Lessons we described several elements of such resilient structures, including redundant (web-network) connectivity, approaches incorporating diversity, work distributed across many scales, and fine-grained adaptivity of design elements. We noted that many older structures also had exactly these qualities of resilient structures to a remarkable degree, and in evaluations they often perform surprisingly well today. Nevertheless during the last century, in the dawning age of industrial design, the desirable qualities resilient buildings offered were lost. What happened?A common narrative asserts that the world moved on to more practical and efficient ways of doing things, and older methods were quaint and un-modern. According to this narrative, the new architecture was the inevitable product of inexorable forces, the undeniable expression of an exciting industrial spirit of the age. The new buildings would be streamlined, beautiful, and above all, stylistically appropriate. This was the thinking that gave birth to the modernist style and form language, still popular with architects today and part of a design movement that in various forms has dominated the world for a century. But such choices of style and type are not independent of how well our buildings perform on criteria of sustainability and resilience a growing body of evidence is damning. So what does recent science tell us about the soundness of this approach to architecture? Science forces us to conclude that the modernist view of environmental structure itself appears un-modern and unsustainable. It rests upon now largely discredited theories of culture, technology, environmental geometry, and building form; theories that have never been properly re-assessed by their proponents. Far from being an inevitable product of inexorable historical forces, the evidence reveals 20th century design to be developed as a series of rather peculiar choices by a few influential individuals. The story goes back to a small group of German, Swiss, and Austrian architect-theorists, and at its seminal moment, the particular ideas of one of them regarding ornament which turns out to have far-reaching implications.Adolf Loos idea takes holdIn his famous essay of 1908, Ornament and Crime, the Austrian writer/architect Adolf Loos presented an argument for the minimalist industrial aesthetic that has shaped modernism and neo-modernism ever since. Surprisingly, he built this argument upon a foundation that is accepted today by almost no one; the cultural superiority of modern man [sic], by which he meant Northern European males. Loos proclaimed that, in this new era of streamlined modern production, we had apparently become unable to produce authentic ornamental detail. But are we alone, he asked, unable to have our own style do what any Negro [sic], or any other race and period before us, could do? Of course not, he argued. We are more advanced, more modern. Our style must be the very aesthetic paucity that comes with the streamlined goods of industrial production a hallmark of advancement and superiority. In effect, our ornament would be the simple minimalist buildings and other artifacts themselves, celebrating the spirit of a great new age. Indeed, the continued use of ornament was, for Loos, a crime. The Papuan, he argued, had not evolved to the moral and civilized circumstances of modern man [sic]. As part of his primitive practices, the Papuan tattooed himself. Likewise, Loos went on, the modern man who tattoos himself is either a criminal or a degenerate. Therefore, he reasoned, those who still used ornament were on the same low level as criminals, and Papuans.Ethiopian silver ceremonial cross, carried in liturgical processions, represents a mathematically sophisticated fractal. Was Loos implying that observers of such millennial religious practices the world over dependent as they are upon ornamented ritual, artifacts, chant, music, and dance are no better than "criminals"?Drawing by Nikos A. SalingarosBuilt on an essentially racist worldview, Loos seminal essay codified a fateful series of four tenets that have seeped into design culture and remain largely unquestioned, even today.1. Geometrical fundamentalism.The march of technological progress inevitably compels the elimination of detailed or ornamental features, and focuses on features that nakedly display (and celebrate) technological expediency and geometrical reduction.2. Tectonic determinism.The geometric character of any addition to the built environment can only be a unique expression of its own specific technological moment in history (defined in stylistic terms, of course).3. Typological prejudice. It follows that all previous architectural geometries of older eras are wholly inconsistent with modernity, and must be marked for elimination. Revival a constant evolutionary fugue throughout the greatest civilizations is now rejected, for the first time in history.4. Modernist exceptionalism. Civilization has arrived at a fundamentally different and superior cultural status, elevated beyond previous historical constraints by its powerful technology. Architecture will serve this technology most appropriately by drawing from a limited form language derived from early 20th century production technology. No other form language is valid or authentic.What was this limited form language? It employed the repetitive production of standardized machine components, conceived in the most limited sense (eliminating complex artifacts, tools and utensils, and complex architectural components). It was an extreme strategy to exploit economies of scale and quantity to achieve efficiencies. Those industrial parts blank flat sheets, razor-straight line cuts, simple unadorned squares, cubes, and cylinders were standardized to allow for easy and low-cost assembly.Some holes were evident in Adolf Loos theories, even at the time they were written. On the left, mass-produced Art Nouveau silver jewelry box by P. A. Coon, 1908. On the right, hand-made Machine Aesthetic silver teapot by C. Dresser, 1879. The machine aesthetic was an artistic metaphor of modernity chosen by Loos not a true functional requirement.Drawing by Nikos A. SalingarosPrecisely because of its limitations, this form language made for dramatic, somewhat disquieting new shapes, readily suited to metaphoric use as the attention-getting expressions of a great new age. The raw, simple forms were well suited psychologically to the streamlined shapes of the breathtakingly fast-moving new vehicles like locomotives, aircraft, and ships. In turn, these reinforced the idea of streamlined buildings as a metaphoric style although, of course, buildings do not actually move. In an age enthralled with the promise of the future, this radically novel form language became unexpectedly popular and entirely displaced its contemporary competitors, many of which are largely forgotten today. Innovative architectural form languages that emerged included Jugendstil, Secession, Art Nouveau, Stile Liberty, Edwardian, and Art-and-Crafts as well as the early F. L. Wright. In fact, Loos was specifically attacking the relatively innovative forms of Art Nouveau not the over-the-top rococo work of late Victorian designers, as some assume today. The cube ate the flower: how the machine aesthetic devoured all other form languages, from Architecture for Beginners by Louis Hellman, 1994.Adapted and redrawn by Nikos A. SalingarosCorporate branding with science fictionThe clever use of machine parts production, through the early application of industrial technology, as a romantic new form language was not lost on Loos German contemporary Peter Behrens. Known now as the father of corporate branding, Behrens recruited industrial minimalism as an aesthetic tool to create a streamlined marketing image to help his client AEG (Germanys version of General Electric) sell its products. He created striking logos, stationery, advertisements and buildings, which, in effect, were converted into giant billboards to help to sell the companies and their products. In taking this momentous step, Behrens was masterfully solving a critical problem for environmental designers offering their services in a new age of standardization and mass production. If we were no longer going to generate the form of buildings in place, through localized craft-like processes, but must rely instead upon (supposedly superior, and certainly cheaper) combinations of standardized parts, then how were we, as designers, going to create aesthetically distinctive works? By theming them with an exciting stylized vision of the future to be created by industry (and specifically, by the client company, and by the currently-employed design firm). So we would turn buildings and objects into canvases to brand our companies and our own talents as visionary designers, leading civilization into a thrilling new age. More than that, these packaged designs would have the special allure, in the skilled hands of Behrens and his artistically minded protgs, of a great new fine art. At its heart were industrial manufacturing and the commodification of products. Working from the self-imposed limitations of this new aesthetic minimalism, the image that Behrens created was of power, industrial might, order, and cleanliness. Above all, it was the promise of a wonderful new technological future. His brilliant recognition paved the way for a dominant theme of modern marketing one that can sell almost anything if its successfully linked to romantic imagery of the future. The allure of such a product is, by definition, beyond any claim that can be evaluated in the present. It is the selling of hope, dream, and desire even if it is one thats destined to quickly tarnish and be discarded. Indeed all the better, for planned obsolescence means another new, improved product can be sold in its place. The seductive power of this futuristic message was not lost on Behrens young protgs, each going on to have a profound effect on 20th century design. Their names, Walter Gropius; Charles-douard Jeanneret-Gris (later known as Le Corbusier); and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; are familiar to architects. In fact, architectural students are required to study and copy them in school. In the next decades they would announce their total architecture (Gropius) that signaled a great epoch of industrial production (Le Corbusier) and the will of an epoch that less is more (Mies). In the words of their most important theorist and propagandist, Sigfried Giedion, mechanization takes command. Our buildings must reflect the unavoidable reality of our modern world. This was not merely a stylistic prescription that one might (or might not) find visually pleasing. It was a complete blueprint for remaking the world according to specific concepts of scale, standardization, replication, and segregation; all codified within a form of visual culture. It became (especially through CIAM, the modernists profoundly influential international group) the template for the urbanization and suburbanization that took place rapidly in the U.S. and globally after World War II, and that still continues at an astonishing pace in China, India, Brazil, and elsewhere. The structure of this urbanization has profound consequences, for better or worse; for the use of resources and other critical issues of our age. From todays scientific perspective that structure has attributes that ought to provoke deep concern, if not outright alarm. As the urbanist Jane Jacobs famously pointed out a half-century later, the modernist approach did not reflect an understanding of the organized complexity of natural and biological systems that underlies human biology, human life, and cities inhabited by human beings. It reflected instead an outmoded and unfounded but totalizing theory of the nature of cities, of technology, and of geometry itself. The form language of nature is not mechanical in the modern sense. The only known exception: Donald Duck discovers square eggs, from Lost in the Andes by Carl Barks, 1948.Redrawn by Nikos A. SalingarosMore recent scientific investigations reveal the richly complex geometry of living environments including human ones. The geometries of those natural structures evolve in context, as complex adaptive forms, through a process known as adaptive morphogenesis. As a result of that process, living geometries have particular characteristics. They differentiate into a range of subtly unique structures, and they adapt to local conditions, giving such environments stability and resilience. They achieve great complexity and efficiency through their evolution and great beauty, in the form of a perceivable deeper order.A new view of the nature of environmental structure, aesthetics, and ornamentKey to resilience is the way different parts of geometry lock together into larger functional (but not rigid) wholes. In the most ecologically resilient structures, they do this by forming symmetries across inter-linked scales. The resulting structure has the hallmarks of adaptive, evolutionary self-organization: redundant (web-network) relationships, diversity of mechanisms and components, innate ability to transfer information among many different scales, and fine-grained adaptivity of design elements. There is also evidence from neuroscience and other fields that the aesthetic experience of such structures is not a superficial psychological aspect, but rather, a kind of cognitive gateway allowing us to experience and react to this deeper order of our environment. The artistic dimension lies in the way this gateway is shaped, and in its resonance with other emotional experiences in life. Creative abstractions are added to but do not replace the natural complexity of our world. As conscientious artists working to improve the human environment, our role is to enhance, express, and clarify that complex adaptive order. Certainly, its not merely to apply a veneer of visually dramatic gimmicks. In this picture of things, ornament is far from mere decoration. It is a precise category of articulation of the connections between regions of space by the human beings that design them. It can be thought of as an essential kind of glue that allows different parts of the environment to echo and connect to one another, in a cognitive sense and even in a deeper functional sense. Ornament, then, is an important tool to form a complex fabric of coherent symmetrical relationships within the human environment.Is this ornamental embroidery? Actually, a fractal antenna which, when miniaturized, makes cell phone reception possible. There is an important role here for functionalism, understood in a much deeper sense.Drawing by Nikos A. SalingarosWe are beginning to understand that the industrial form language represented a catastrophic loss of this adaptive structural capacity, bringing with it enormous negative consequences for the environment we inhabit. It deprived us of the thought processes necessary to conceptualize the characteristics of resilient environmental structure--web-network relationships, diversity, linking of scales, and fine-grained adaptivity. As one functional example, a certain kind of cell-phone antenna incorporating ornament-like fractal patterns (see above) offers the best performance for its tiny size but cannot be conceptualized within a minimalist form language.The big re-thinkWe are now beginning to see a pattern in the momentous changes to industrial civilization of the last century. The excessive reliance on standardization and commodification, the birth of a consumer society dominated by branding and theming, the rapacious and unsustainable consumption of resources as an addictive economic fuel are intimately related to the non-resilience of the form languages that were handed down to us. The products of that related group of form languages are a failing industrial civilizations art supply. True resilience does not result from artistic metaphors, or by sticking veneers over the same failing industrial model. Biological resilience and sustainability require the capacity to endure, to adapt, and to maintain a dynamic stability in the face of sometimes-chaotic environments. They require the cognitive flexibility that enables the genesis of technological innovations. We will have to think outside the modernist box to find new forms and new uses for very old forms, just as natural evolution does. It seems clearer than ever that the survival of our planet depends upon it. Yet we are the heirs of Loos erroneous and limiting ideas about geometrical fundamentalism, tectonic determinism, the exceptionalism of modernism, and the typological prejudice rooted in an illusory aesthetic functionalism. All of these dogmas are enforced by self-perpetuating elite privileges, and the proprietary commodification of design as a fashion and brand. Even now, a reactionary old guard, wearing frayed progressive trappings, condemns virtually any use of ornament, pattern, or precedent as reactionary, uncreative, and lacking in imagination. But in an age that demands new thinking, perhaps it is that attitude itself that betrays the ultimate lack of imagination.

Toward Resilient Architectures 4: The Geometry of ResilienceMichael Mehaffy and Nikos SalingarosWe have previously described four key characteristics of resilient structures in natural systems: diversity; web-network structure; distribution across a range of scales; and the capacity to self-adapt and self-organize. We showed how these features allow a structure to adapt to shocks and changes that might otherwise prove catastrophic (in a post titledBiology Lessons).We also argued that a more resilient future for humankind demands new technologies incorporating precisely these characteristics. As a result, environmental design, especially, is set to change dramatically.But such desirable characteristics do not exist as abstract entities. Rather, they are embodied in the physical geometries of our world the relationship between elements in space. As we will discuss here, these geometries typically arise from the processes that produce resilience, but in turn they go on to create or to destroy the capacity for resilience in their own right. So if we want a more resilient future, we first need to understand these geometries, and the technological and economic processes that produce them.Three examples of naturally-occurring resilient geometries in nature: left, the structure of wood fibers; center, thediffraction scattering pattern from a beryllium atom; and right, a self-organizing pattern of magnetic domains in cobalt. All three examples demonstrate the geometries of resilience: differentiated symmetries, web-networks, fractal scaling, and self-organizing groupings.Courtesy Christopher Alexander, from The Nature of Order I (pp. 256, 266, 288)The fundamental role of adaptive morphogenesisAs we are learning from todays biological sciences, all four characteristics of resilience are aspects of a more fundamental natural process of fine-grained adaptation producing differentiated growth. This is the essence of the evolutionary process by which biological systems achieve their astonishingly complex forms, which also exhibit remarkable resilience in the face of chaotic disruptions in the environment. The design pioneer Christopher Alexander refers to this process as adaptive morphogenesis the generation of form through a stepwise process of evolutionary transformation. This robust capacity for adaptive morphogenesis lies at the heart of healthy and sustainable growth in both natural and human systems. Alexander argues that without this intrinsic systemic capacity, regardless of how much bolt-on sustainable technology we employ, we are headed inevitably to an unfolding ecological disaster. (We discuss his specific argument inThe Radical Technology of Christopher Alexander.)Alexander also demonstrates that adaptive morphogenesis is closely associated with certain geometries, which he identifies according to 15 classes of geometric property. These geometries both result from the process, and affect the progression of the process. If the geometries are constrained, then the process of generating form is itself constrained, and vice versa. In a sense, then, the form and the process that creates it are two sides of the same coin.We will not enter here into the details of Alexanders analysis, which is extensive (over 2,000 pages within four volumes of his magnum opus,The Nature of Order). But we can describe several categories of these geometries, and point out some important implications for the resilience of the human environment and its capacity to promote wellbeing. Together, these geometric elements make up what we will describe asThe Geometry of Resilience.What will become apparent is that these geometries are the counterparts of the four characteristics of resilience: diversity; web-network structure; distribution across a range of scales; and the capacity to self-adapt and self-organize. They are:1. Geometries of differentiated symmetries.Diversity is created through small-scale adaptive changes that arise with the stepwise development of structure. For example, every flower in a vast meadow is slightly different from all the others. The genetic code of one individual is also slightly different from all others (except in the case of clones). This differentiation also produces other familiar geometries, such as local symmetry: for example, our bodies have two hands and two legs. Evidence suggests that the ability to perceive this kind of symmetry (along with other related kinds) is a very important aspect of our evolutionary psychology, and an environmental attribute that promotes human wellbeing. The presence of symmetry generated through differentiation also appears to be essential to structural resilience; without it, the result is lifeless rigidity. Differentiation introduces contrast, and symmetries introduce groupings, while counteracting uniformity.2. Geometries of web-networks.Differentiation with connectivity tends to produce hierarchical structures, but importantly, these structures also develop many redundant crossover relationships that appear irregular at larger scales. However, this irregularity is not a defect, but an essential feature of complex network structures. This web-network structure is also a key characteristic of rich human environments, in which movement is interesting because of the combination of connections and variety, and the possibility of perceiving multiple ambiguous relationships. Moreover, such connections work just like fractals, freely linking all scales together in a non-deterministic manner. Being scale-free means that the system works equally well on all spatial and time scales one scale does not predominate.3. Geometries of fractal scaling.Differentiation in the morphogenesis of plants and animals frequently results in self-similar forms distributed across a range of scales, and these self-similar forms are known as fractals. Tree trunks look like branches that look like twigs; big veins look like small capillaries, and so on. Other forms of differentiation (such as between species) produce similar self-similarities across scales (e.g. big trees often look like small plants, etc.) This scaling symmetry contributes to structural stability. The ability to perceive fractal symmetry is also an important element of evolutionary psychology, and an essential attribute of the biophilic quality of the human environment which, when applied to the public realm, promotes resilient characteristics like walkability, livability, and vitality.4. Geometries of boundary groupings.The process of self-organization requires interaction between adjacent regions of space, whose interactions create differentiated boundaries. These groupings are relatively small in number, and hierarchically clustered in space. For example, a larger region will tend to become surrounded by smaller regions, each of which will become surrounded by smaller regions, and so on. It is not a coincidence that our cognitive systems also utilize such low-order groupings (called chunks by psychologists). This is one reason that most people seem to prefer simple proportional group relationships: they are more easily perceived within our environment, promoting our emotional comfort and physiological wellbeing. Similarly, because of the natural formation of boundaries and clusters of boundaries, there is an apparent innate preference for frames, trim, and other ornamental details, which define the hierarchical relation of regions of space. Far from superfluous in design, these elements appear to aid our ability to perceive coherent relationships between regions of space.Why are these four geometries associated with resilience? As should be apparent from our earlier discussion, they provide greater capacity to adapt successfully to chaotic disruptions. In the example of wood fiber (Figure One), the redundancy of the symmetrical pattern, their network of connections, their efficient fractal distribution, and the clustering of the cellular groups, all greatly enhance the structural resilience of the wood, in its ability to resist stress from chaotic events (in the case of wood, powerful windstorms).Recurrent types and genetic informationWhat causes many geometric characteristics to occur repeatedly in nature? One mechanism is adaptive recapitulation. Biological evolution often recapitulates previous solutions, for the simple reason that the problems themselves commonly recur and thus, the adaptive solutions are the same. For example, the porpoise dorsal fin recapitulates the shark dorsal fin of 300 million years earlier, because the problems of turbulence and hydrodynamics in nature are unchanged.Similarly, the possible set of solutions to problems of living well within large numbers of people within cities also have many recurrent aspects that are remarkably stable over centuries of human experience. (For example, the dynamics of urban networks continue to behave in similar ways, and urban network patterns frequently recur across many eras and conditions.) Mathematicians refer to such recurrent patterns within solution-space as attractors. Thus, geometries of recurrent pattern or type are seen throughout the natural world.Another important mechanism that reproduces forms is genetic coding. When design solutions are discovered through a laborious step-by-step adaptive process, the result embodies valuable information into a pattern. In many cases, this pattern is re-usable, which saves vast amounts of time, energy, and effort. Nature found out how to replicate organismic patterns through stored genetic information what we call life.Something similar happens within human technologies. We encode genetic information as patterns or types, which are then expressed through differentiated processes. The result is a reliable set of generative patterns, which take on endlessly variable forms, across myriad cultures, times, and places. There is ample scope within this generative process for the greatest of human arts, and for profound adventure and daring in design.Or, we should say, this has been the case for most of human history, up to the beginning of the last century the era when we began to experience a possibly catastrophic loss of resilience and technological sustainability.A meadow below ahilltop village in Spain, both incorporating the four classes ofgeometries discussed above.Courtesy Michael MehaffyThe modern loss of genetic types and differentiated formsNow we can confront a troubling finding a major explanation for the loss of resilience in our time. The fact is that almost all of the above geometric characteristics are radically diminished within the built environments of the last century or so. This is not an accident. Nor is it a trivial outcome, or even a modest price for progress. Its the consequence of entrusting the fate of humanity to the whims of artistic style, created as a rationale for the historic limits of an oil-age industrial regime.Current design technologies are restricted by rigid ideological approaches that replace robust processes of adaptation with largely metaphorical and artistic solutions. As we have noted in a series of articles, this is an inevitable outcome of the modern role of designers as apologists and product packagers for what are fundamentally maladaptive but profitable (and visually eye-catching) solutions. Yet those examples are solutions to a highly abstracted problem of visual design, not a problem of adaptive design, and these are two totally distinct kinds of problems.As we describe it (inHow Modernism Got Square), the relatively crude industrial technology of the last century (an age of cheap fossil fuels that is now approaching its inevitable end) created significant distortions in the architecture of human settlement. It suggested, wrongly, that large concentrated solutions are always superior, and offer a suitable regime to remake the world as a more efficient machine. That distortion was rationalized and it was accelerated by architect/artists, who found a powerful new role as, in essence, industrial marketers and product packagers. They cloaked their prosaic role in the imagery of fine art and political progressivism; but this was pure fantasy. Their actual work was sponsored and funded by institutional and corporate clients, who had their own very different goals and self-interests.This dangerously limited form of technology has had devastating ecological consequences. At the scale of regional planning, it generated sprawling, segregated, auto-dependent suburbs. At the scale of buildings, the result was a form language that was more suited to marketing questionable (but profitable) building types with an exciting image of the future than it was to creating resilient, responsive buildings and settlements. In fact, the post-occupancy research on the actual performance of many buildings from that era and up to the present day is damning (as we review inHow Green Often Isnt).Importantly for this discussion, oil-age technology has generated a set of highly constrained geometries within the built environment. According to the argument presented here, the result radically limits the capacity for adaptive morphogenesis that critical ingredient of resilient environments.Economies of scale/standardization, versus economies of place/differentiationIn order to understand how this geometrical poverty has come about, we need to look beneath the level of the specific geometries that designers employ, and consider the underlying economic processes that contribute to generate system geometries. For designers, the over-reliance on two narrow forms of economic benefit is most relevant: so-calledeconomies of scale, andeconomies of standardization.We noted earlier that the fine-grained adaptation present in biological systems is not nearly as prevalent in todays human technologies. Thats because the latter rely upon the benefits of large-scale industrial processes, which can achieve impressiveeconomies of scale. Those work either with large numbers, or with large sizes. All other things being equal, its far cheaper to produce identical objects in large quantities than it is to make them individually, or in small groups. This is true for computer chips, automobiles, buildings, and components of buildings. An important corollary is that its also generally cheaper per unit of space (all other things equal) to make much bigger buildings.The other related industrial economy is theeconomy of standardization. Henry Ford was one of many inventors who took advantage of the standardization of parts in order to reduce the costs of their production, as well as their assembly into larger systems. Both aspects of production became far less labor-intensive through the use of standardization. Again, this has helped enormously with the delivery of affordable cars, computer chips, and buildings. This affordability in buildings was achieved through a high standardization of components, so that most of the parts of our buildings (like many other products) are today standardized and mass-produced: doors, windows, details, etc. (This is one reason it is premature at best, and wishful thinking at worst, to talk of a Post-Fordist society.)The same is true for the other elements of the built environment: gas stations, shopping malls, fast-food restaurants, and even entire neighborhoods, have been standardized and homogenized. Architects have occasionally been brought in to add some fine-art design allure to this runaway replication, without having much power to challenge it. Here and there, a building might be dramatically designed with imaginative new aesthetics, but those are cloaked over essentially the same standardized product.The missing economiesNatural systems also exploit the economies of scale and standardization. The genetic process of growth uses remarkably standardized genetic and typological components. These are tools, and aspects of nature, that are enormously important, to be sure.Note, however, that natural systems rely upon a variety ofotherkinds of economiesthat we do not utilize in our technologies today, for the most part. Crucially, these economies are necessary to produce the geometric characteristics we discussed previously thegeometry of resilience.For example, designers tend to ignore theeconomy of place. They treat a component of a system as though it were entirely independent of its physical location anywhere in the production process. Of course, this is not true, and an important efficiency comes from mere proximity of place. More than that, as this discussion begins to show, physical adjacency promotes interaction and self-organization one of the most important engines of resilient and resource-efficient economic development.Another crucial form of natural economy, theeconomy of differentiation,is also mostly ignored today, with profound consequences. Differentiation creates diversity, which allows more efficient adaptation to varying conditions, as well as enhancing the potential to resist unforeseen problems. Differentiation is a key component of adaptation, the crucial process in the evolution of resilient natural systems. Adaptation is successful when this differentiation responds to adaptive pressures, and takes place in a small enough grain of scale. Unfortunately, our current human technologies are not very good at this and hence, they are not resilient. The Alhambra in Spain incorporates, to a remarkable degree, all of the geometric properties of resilience discussed herein. It has endured since the 14th century, and is still widely regarded as one of the worlds beloved treasures.Drawing Courtesy Oleg Grabar viawww.livingneighborhoods.orgThe key point here is not that economies of scale and standardization are necessarily bad in and of themselves. It is that the world has become dangerously dependent on these particular factors in isolation, and built an enormous and dangerously unbalanced industrial civilization around them. The result has been enviable growth and prosperity for some in the short term but in the long term, a likely catastrophic loss of resilience and wellbeing.The second point, for designers, is that this loss is manifested in the particular forms of geometric poverty that we have discussed, and the associated loss of capacity for adaptive morphogenesis. This geometric poverty in form, and in the process that generates form is itself an important contributor to the loss of resilience in human environments.The reforms aheadBy definition, the environmental design professions bear singular responsibility for the pattern of settlement across the face of the planet, and its resilient characteristics or lack of them. So those same professions must play a crucial role in the critical transition ahead to a more resilient world. But we argue here that this can only be done through major changes to business as usual. In particular, a rigorous re-assessment is urgently needed a big re-think as some have termed it of the foundational theories and assumptions of modern (now almost a century old) tectonics, aesthetics, design, and even technology itself. Three examples of Chinas so-called ghost cities, some 400 new cities planned for the next 20 years. These and many other new developments around the globe employ the functionally segregated geometries of early 20th century architectural theory, heavily exploiting economies of scale and standardization. The theory of resilience suggests that this approach is leading us toward global disaster.Courtesy Google Earth and Digital GlobeIn this series of posts we propose just such a re-assessment, letting you judge for yourself the merits of the specific logic presented. We have discussed the disturbing evidence of a disastrous over-reliance on simple geometrical concepts, which have nevertheless helped to provide enormously profitable short-term results. That heady era has amounted to a kind of resource Ponzi scheme that is ultimately unsustainable and non-resilient. For civilization, and quite possibly, for life on earth to survive, designers will have to embrace a far more robust environmental geometry:The Geometry of Resilience. This is an important component of the necessary transition ahead: the careful, adaptive re-structuring of our technology, and our global economy, to achieve a much more resilient, more survivable form of human development.

Toward Resilient Architectures 5: Agile DesignMichael Mehaffy and Nikos A. SalingarosCourtesy Steve SlaterAs humanity progresses into an increasingly technological 21stcentury, we are confronted with a historic and alarming paradox.Over the last two and a half millennia, our species has made historic progress in achieving (partially but substantially) ancient ideals of democracy, human rights, justice, and equality. Our institutions of science and technology have made brilliant advances, while the global economy has created unprecedented wealth. Billions of people around the world are healthier, better educated, and more empowered to shape their own lives and futures.And yet, as many are well aware, we are entering an era of growing existential threat caused, ironically, by our very technological successes. We are depleting our resources at unsustainable levels, and creating unprecedented damage to the critical Earth systems on which prosperity and even life itself depend. Our own technology including our economic technology is triggering an interacting, cascading series of unintended consequences that degrade quality of life, and now threaten to become catastrophic. The most notable example (though by no means the only one) is anthropogenic climate change.Closely related to the malfunction of our technology is the malfunction of our institutions that are critical to learning, governance, regulation, and reform: politics, economics, journalism, law, and others. Worrisome evidence is growing that those institutions are unable to address the real problems we face dangerously degraded by unintended consequences and perverse incentives, fragmenting and confusing the essential processes of an intelligent culture. This is a formula for sure disaster in the years ahead. (Hence the clear warning of the great urbanist Jane Jacobs final book,Dark Age Ahead).A case in point is in the professions of architecture, planning, and development. Research in environmental psychology reveals a huge gulf between what most people judge to be good quality development, and what architects, planners, and developers actually build (and celebrate through relentless and effective group indoctrination). The chasm is so large that its common to hear ordinary people, un-bewitched by marketing, remarking on the ugliness, strangeness, or inferior quality of most new development [see "The Architect Has No Clothes inOn the Commonsmagazine].Those perceptions are also backed up by research into the actual performance of these places even highly touted green ones built by world-famous architects. As we havewritten previously, many of the claims to sustainability and resilience are disproven by remarkably damning post-occupancy evaluations.[O]ur current conception of design is bound up within a pathological form of growth.These lessons remind us that the problem is not simply that we need to be a bit more efficient with our resources, or to recycle more. That will only buy a small amount of extra time. To survive and prosper, we will need to change our fundamental relationship to the planets resources, and the ways we go about extracting, structuring, and transforming them.Among other things, this means a fundamental re-conception ofwhat it is to design that is, how we transform resources into the structures of our world. We must recognize thatour current conception of design is bound up within a pathological form of growth, which relies upon unsustainable levels of waste and debt.A fundamentally more sustainable, moreresilientkind of growth more like the evolutionary, cyclical growth that occurs within biological systems could save us. This in turn will require a different, intrinsically resilient kind of institutional system.Crucially, this new kind of growth must occur within our systems of settling and inhabiting the Earth: the architecture of our cities, towns, and countrysides. This ecologically resilient architecture, in the words of resilience pioneer C. S. Holling, must be able to withstand chaotic, non-linear events, beyond the narrow parameters of engineered resilience. More than that, our technological growth needs to become, as political economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb has termed it, antifragile able to learn, and even to gain from disorder.What sort of profound institutional changes will be required? A key insight comes from software design, and the methodology known as Agile. (L) Hundreds of thousands of gated communities and privatized pseudo-public spaces have arisen around the world, such as this isolated, car-dependent community in Argentina. (R) Contrast the continuous open, walkable network of great cities like Rome, shown in the famous Nolli plan. This network structure has profound economic implications.Photo by Alex Steffler, WikimediaGenerate, dont specifySome years ago in the world of computer software, programmers recognized problems with increasingly cluttered computer code. Its unpredicted interactions produced unacceptable malfunctions much as we are experiencing in other forms of technology today. One of the most effective responses came to be called Agile. As software pioneer Ward Cunningham described it,specifyingthe desired behaviors always required elaborate definitions and standards, while, paradoxically,generatingthem often only required the identification (through a process of adaptive iteration) of a much simpler set of generative rules.It turns out that many biological systems work in just this way. The complex pattern of bird flocks, to take just one example, is not created out of a kind of rigid blueprint, specifying the complex shape at any given instant. That would be an overwhelmingly vast set of instructions. Rather, each bird has only a few simple rules for maintaining its position relative to its leader and neighbors. From the interaction of these simple instructions, the beautiful complex geometric patterns of the flock are generated.As we havenoted previously, the beauty of such patterns is closely related to their capacity for resolving problems (such as the complex challenge of flock migration). We humans add other layers of structure into our designs, including symbolic, artistic, and abstract components. But it is mistaken to think of these as fundamentally different. Each aspect of structure, in its own way, helps the complex function of a living process.An Agile approach helps us to resolve the challenges created by ourowntechnologies. Instead of adding more bolt-on gadgets to address each of the malfunctions we encounter, we make an agile transformation of the system we are dealing with, which allows it to adapt better to the living function. Often this is a surprisingly simple change, in a surprising part of the system.An Agile approach helps us to resolve the challenges created by ourowntechnologies.Simple Agile principles can be applied to the older, more entrenched systems of designing our buildings and cities. The needed reform is not simply to make further bolt-on additions to the current operating system, in the form of additional regulations, laws, and restrictions. Those are what one immediately thinks of in such a discussion, but they have proven ineffective at best. Such additions are likely to increase the problem of unintended consequences and perverse outcomes, and not actually remedy the problem.A central principle, as with Agile Methodology in software design, is that the operating system should be re-written, not tospecifythe behavior desired, but rather, create the conditions in which that behavior is most likely to begenerated. This generative design approach employing complex adaptive transformations, engaging economic processes, and exploiting Agile self-organizing capacities is emerging as the key to resilient design for the future. Two hospitals in Portland, Oregon.(L) Providence St. Vincent Medical Center is an isolated campus style that disrupts the urban fabric around it. (R) Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center is fully integrated into the walkable mixed-use street grid of Northwest Portland.Photos courtesy BingTransform, dont replaceAnother principle of Agile Design is to invest more time understanding the existing structure, and seeking to find agile ways to transform it. This, too, is often a simpler approach than starting from scratch, requiring fewer but more effective rules.Design up to now is widely conceived as directing the complex assembly and composition of elements into consumable products (including buildings). This process also typically bestows a consciously created veneer of aesthetic novelty onto these products, as a way of promoting their (temporary) desirability. (Though often characterized as great art, it is only rarely regarded as such by later generations.) This linear process continues with the rapid obsolescence and disposal of the products, and the creation of new and improved products (with fashionably new artistic veneers) to replace them.This is a fundamentally unsustainable process.Adaptive design is a continuous (and continuously beneficial and profitable) process of transformation, in which novel aspects are typically combined with enduring and recurrent ones. Artistic aspects have to work in service to this evolutionary pattern, and not be allowed to dictate it. Design, according to this definition, creates a transformation from existing states to preferred ones, as the great polymath Herbert Simon put it.Of course Simons wonderful definition raises more questions than it answers but they are the right questions. For example, who is doing the preferring? It has to be a larger democratic process, and not solely specialists architects, developers, art-connoisseurs, or city-boosters. But how is this process going to proceed in an intelligent way, reconciling the preferences of multiple agents into an effective optimum? Beyond mere marketing to consumers, sustainable design must address this profound civic question too.Furthermore, a preferred state itself is not fixed, but by its nature, represents an optimum balance between a number of factors. Those factors are in a dynamic interaction, which requires that we experiment within an iterative, adaptive process to achieve what we prefer.[D]esign is...an evolutionary process of discovery and redefinition, which cant be predicted in advance.It is also challenging to know what is the existing state, and how to transform it. Perhaps, as we learn more about the existing state, our sense of what we prefer will also transform. We may find that there are aspects of the existing state that we will choose to retain. In this sense, design is necessarily an evolutionary process of discovery and redefinition, which cant be predicted in advance.As these evolutionary alternatives proliferate, some of them will frequently re-incorporate features that occurred previously (simply because those are still the best solutions). In nature, one notable example is the dorsal fin of a porpoise, which re-incorporates the much older shape of a shark fin.But in modern human design, we have allowed the dictates of artistic novelty to usurp this evolutionary process. As Jane Jacobs pointed out, this confusion of roles is bad for art, and even worse for cities.The art-clad novelty regime dominating todays consumer-oriented architecture and design is fundamentally non-resilient and unsustainable.Arts profoundly important role in design has become corrupted, and turned into novelty packaging, which has created a dangerous form of cultural clutter. The essential contribution of Art to communication, to legibility, to elucidating meanings, is now exploited as a kind of Trojan Horse for those who would profitably industrialize the built environment, without regard to the long-term consequences.Correcting this damaging state of affairs requires that we recapitulate good solutions from any evolutionary source, from any era. If we want to be truly sustainable, we need to freely utilize, as nature utilizes, the recurrence of evolutionary geometric patterns. (This includes the best solution-patterns evolved from centuries of human tradition, but foolishly rejected by nave modern designers.) Within this resilient framework, art can take its fully creative place.Two shopping centers in the Portland, Oregon area.(L)Washington Square in Tigard, Oregon is a large car-dependent campus. (R) Pioneer Square in central Portland extends over several blocks, engaging and preserving the walkable, transit-served street grid.Photos courtesy BingSimplify and adapt the operating system for growthClosely related to the way we design is the way we relate to others in the production process. At present, design is largely conceived as occurring within a specialists intricately prescribed context. This has to change.Instead, design must be expanded to engage the required tactical changes in what we refer to here as the operating system for growth. Working collaboratively with others, we can transform the interacting collection of incentives, rewards, penalties, regulations, standards, laws, and models constituting a kind of operating system that generates the growth of e