architectural SYSTEMS

An Essay based on the initial text Cybernetics and the Mangle by Andrew Pickering John Harding MSc. Architecture, Computing & Design, CECA, May 2008

.... Cybernetics, and especially the work of the English cyberneticians is all about this shift from epistemology to ontology, from representation to performativity, agency and emergence, not in the analysis of science but the within the body of science itself.1 "Understandably, mathematical difficulties become prohibitive in the case of three- or multi-compartment systems.2

Introduction
This essay looks at two things. First, a short history of cybernetic thinking, in particular English cybernetics with respect to Andrew Pickerings 2002 paper Cybernetics and the Mangle. Secondly, a look at some of the architectural applications of this approach to science & design, with particular attention to the work of Cedric Price.

3 bodies exerting gravity on each other cannot be solved in a classical sense, even though the system is deterministic.

The Mangle
In his 1995 book, The Mangle of Practice: Time Agency and Science., Pickering pointed out that the classical way of doing 20th century science was purely representational- i.e. finding mathematical ways of classifying things that already existed. This approach to science is closely related to epistemology, the accumulation of more and more collective human knowledge of things, a representational idiom.. Some examples he sighted were the recent progress in particle physics, and the traditional view of biology being a long list of taxonomies and classifications. The limitations of this approach to science are also exposed in the book, for example the inability to find a solution to Poincars 3-body problem... multi-agent complex systems just cannot not be solved analytically.
Diagram of a classic cybernetic system Ashbys homeostat showing feedback between subsystems A & B. (source: Ashby, 1957)

In his view however, machines, facts, theories, mathematical structures and humans are in constantly shifting relationships with one another"mangled" together in unforeseeable ways that are shaped by the forces of culture, time, and place this should concern scientific practice just as much as anything else.

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Pickering, A. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science, 1995 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von., General Systems Theory, 1968, P.19. The classic example is the 3 (or n>3) Body Problem in Physics. 2

Science, Pickering argues, should be thought of as being alive; a system of constant progression of interaction between human and environment, a dynamic interplay of constant change. One can draw parallels with Zuses Calculating Space thesis of 19693 with regards to an cellular automaton theory of the universe a theory performance, of doing.... an ontological standpoint as opposed to a strictly epistemological one. It was therefore in his 2002 paper Cybernetics and the Mangle that Pickering writes about his self-discovery that this philosophy of Science had been approached 50 years ago by a group of English cyberneticians, William Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer & Gordon Pask and he goes on to say how their approach can inspire a science not of representation, but one of performance.
Zuse saw the universe as a vast closed system, an interconnected lattice of cells with inputs and outputs - deterministic but infinitely complex. (source: Zuse, 1969)

Cybernetics
Cybernetics is a theory of control systems based on communication (information transfer) between system & environment , and control (using feedback) of the systems function in regard to environment.4 Most of these systems are interesting to cyberneticians when there is a display of stability, not necessarily in the individual components, but in the system organisation as a whole. The field should also be seen as antidisciplinary in the sense that many cybernetic models can be applied in various scientific fields indeed, its origins are from the fact that same models were cropping up in disparate areas of study. The system is therefore abstracted from a physical assembly and studied in its own right. 5 With regards to the human brain for example, the system can be seen as a brain, but actual physical things like neurons are meaningless to the cybernetician. The first known example of a cybernetic system was the so called governor by James Watt, analysed as a system by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865. This device utilised the principle of negative feedback to exert control on a steam supply to power an engine at a constant rate, using information from the environment (in this case the current speed of the engine).

diagram showing controller A subsytem with input & output relationship with the environment.

An analogous system to this is the common thermostat, which uses information from a given room in order to control the output of heat energy into it. In this case the decision rule as it is called is the required
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Zuse, K. Rechnender Raum, 1969. Bertalanffy, Ludwig von., General Systems Theory, 1968, P.19 5 Pask, G. An Approach to Cybernetics, 1961, P.15 3

temperature, and this requires external input (by a human in the case of the thermostat). By removing the feedback from the environment, the controller is said to dominate the environment. The name Cybernetics was given by Wiener (1948) in his book of the same name, its literal translation being steersman. Others such as Von Neumann, Walter, McCulloch, Pitts and Shannon for example were crucial to the foundations of cybernetics, however Pickering concentrates more on the English cyberneticians due to their relationship to ontological thinking being more relevant to his Mangle. Of particular relevance is a device called the homeostat, conceived in the late 1940s by Mr. William Ross Ashby.

Ashby & Ultrastability

Ross Ashby was an English pschyciatrist & cyberneticist, mostly known for his Law of Requisite Variety, a important cybernetic concept which I shall not go into detail here, but roughly states that in order for a system to be stable, the number of control states must be greater than or equal to the number of states being controlled.6 Ashbys other famous cybernetic work was the Homeostat; an assemblage of self-similar machines with electrical inputs and outputs and a random number source, the inspiration for which drawn from his interest in the human brain and its self-regulation. On their own the units are useless, but linked together they displayed behaviour that although was initially chaotic and impossible to predict in advance, settled into a stable system over the course of time. The system would randomly reconfigure itself without any external observer telling it to do so. It could also take a knock from the outside world, and still settle into a stable state. It was this resistance to not being anything other than stable that Ashby termed Ultrastability. This is the opposite of an unstable system a good example being trying to balance a pencil on its end. In Pickerings text, he goes as far as agreeing with Wieners description of the homeostat being one of the great philosophical contributions of the present day.7 High praise indeed!
Ashbys sketch showing the setup of a single homeostat device
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2 variable system in phase space: (i) stable sink (system falls into equilibrium point if inside dotted region). (ii) unstable source system diverges from current state. (source: Pask, 1961)

(source: Ross Ashby Digital Archive)

For a full description see Ashby, R. 1957. (p.134) Pickering, A. Cybernetics & the Mangle, 2002. (p.5) 4

The homeostat can also be seen as one of the first machine like analogues of the neural network, first studied by Walter Pitts & Warren McCulloch in the 1950s, where the output of a neuron is dependant on the inputs of other neurons. The feedback is cyclic in the sense that output information from a single homeostat does have an effect on the input to the same device. In effect, the tripping of a relay in the homeostat is similar to the firing of a neuron in a brain. This ultrastability is related to the study of homeostasis8, where changes in for example body temperature, are regulated over long time scales. It is this ultrastability too that I think has broad appeal in its applicability to architecture - in the face of changing environments and human users with ephemeral goals, the long-term stability of an architectural system (between humans and their built environment) can be seen as a measure of good design.

Social Systems
A single homeostat unit amongst its conversational colleagues. (source: Ashby, 1957)

Pickering also refers to Stafford Beer9, another English cyberneticist, in particular his investigations regarding the application of cybernetics to social studies. In one of Beers early projects for example, he looked at childrens decision making in the light of feedback, and how they began to learn which selections led to pleasure and which to pain. The children were adapting or self-organising their brains to secure rewards in the long term, much like the homeostat was reconfiguring itself to a stable state, but with no pre-programmed objective to do so. Of other notable interest is his Viable System Model and its near application to the peoples of Chile in 1971. Beers idea was that organisations needed homeostatic controllers in order to regulate unpredictable inputs, much like the homeostat. Beer saw society as a giant brain, an exceedingly complex system and hence the Viable System Model was modelled on the human nervous system with all kinds of filtering devices, redundancy & feedback loops. His work was interesting, because it can be seen as one of the first applications of cybernetics in social control, and hence of interest to architects and controllers of the built environment but it still treated people as participants only in the sense that they were components of companies, for example individual human emotions and the suchlike were not considered. It was the finance and productivity of companies where the control was to be regulated based on dynamic information feedback.
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As described by Cannon, W.B. Wisdom of the Body, London, 1932. See Pickering, A. Cybernetics and the Mangle, 2002 (p.12) 5

New Cybernetics
In the 1970s, Second Order Cybernetics, or New cybernetics as Gordon Pask called it grew in popularity. This definition represented a shift from Wieners machine & physics based approach to a more biological one how in the face of increasing entropy, can organisms arrive at a stable organisation? New Cybernetics also included the observer into the mix... the observer no longer just observes, but partakes and exerts influence on the system and the system exerts influence on it a participant observer10. The observer was therefore a sub-system within his or her own right with inputs and outputs, parameters and variables, and humans were thought of as being Black boxes, ready to be explored cybernetically.11
Diagram showing how structural coupling between a living system and its environment modifies through time via communication channels. (www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/t.quick/autopoies is.html)

This version of cybernetics was explored from a theoretical standpoint in biology by two Chilean biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, culminating in their theory of Autopoesis, in particular its application in work concerning the animal cell. This work concerns the dynamics of living systems (such as humans). In autopoesis, the environment itself is part of a closed system that is coupled with the organism (itself a subsystem). There are no goals or objectives set from the outside, living systems just live because they are stable survivors co-evolving with their environment and whose only products are themselves. This inter-relationship between a living system & its environment, co-evolving with each other over time is called Structural Coupling. Maturana & Varela see this relationship as a definition of cognition in living systems be that machine, man, or anything else displaying the same behaivours. It is this Second order cybernetics draws parallels to architecture. Our subject matter is exactly this, mans interaction with the built environment he conceives can thus be seen as a kind of structural coupling. Autonomous systems are not individual humans, but a posthuman coupling between people and their environment.

Abstraction showing the inner processes of a cell. Note the communication channels crossing the boundary. (source: Maturana & Varela, 1973)

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Pask, G. An Approach to Cybernetics, 1961. (p.35) Black Box in the sense that they themselves could not be observed themselves as a system. For example, at present at least I can ever know exactly what is going on in your head! 6

Architectural Systems
The role of the architect here, I think, is not so much to design a building or city as to catalyse them; to act that they may evolve. That is the secret of the great architect12 The antidisciplinary approach that cybernetics offers finds its natural partner in architecture at traditional mix of arts and science, and by and large from modernism onwards, a field open to cross-pollination from many different fields. This combination along with an attitude of cultural optimism was most reflected in architectural design and the arts during the 1960s. The traces of modernism & direct social control were fading away in the face of post-war Europe. The machines for living in became dynamic machines to interact with. This attitude towards a more dynamic architecture was reflected in the attitude of certain design movements of the time: Archigram, for example with the Sin Centre project by Michael Webb; the Situationists with the New Babylon project for a city by Constant Nieuwenhuys,13 & the philosophies of design pursued by Buckminster Fuller to name a few. But perhaps the best example to talk about here is the unrealised project by Cedric Price, first conceived in the early 1960s called the Fun Palace A project that if realised, would have been one of the greatest architectural experiments of its time.

Detail of the New Babylon Project, Constant Nieuwenhuys,1962. (source: google images)

Fun Palace
The Fun Palace was a fully flexible space, designed without any specific brief as such other than to house, inspire and respond to any creative activity the users of the space saw fit. The project was conceived at the beginning of the 1960s as a joint collaboration between Price and Joan Littlewood, a member of the Theatre Union with a joint ambition to change the way architecture could combine dynamically with the creative arts it traditionally housed.

Isometric of Fun Palace, 1964. (source: google images)

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Frazer, J. An Evolutionary Architecture, 1995, (p.7. Gordon Pasks forward) A lecture by Nieuwenhuys on the New Babylon project was attended by Price, and no doubt influenced the Fun Palace to a degree. 7

Thus, the concept behind the Fun Palace was the antithesis of the static building, designed merely as shelter. In Prices opinion, the architecture should be part of the theatre it housed part of the ongoing dance between man and his environment. As he said, it was his first true antibuilding in that there was no way even the architect would be able to predict how the system would precisely function,only have a good enough idea that system could function. The Fun Palace space was to be surrounded by a spaceframe for supporting the movable units. That the spaceframe was architecturally sparse was the key- its completely homogenous nature was what kept the Fun Palace so adaptive to change and fully flexible. In effect, the whiter the canvas, the more possibilities on offer.
Fun Palace early plan detail, 1962 showing movable partitions. (source: Matthes, 2007)

Although Price was the main architect on the job, the project was so collaborative it is hard to say who designed what in the end the concept of the author architect was forgotten, indeed Price referred to himself as an anti-architect. Price drew in consultants from all creative disciplines, including cybernetics. The fact that the architecture was heavily system based in its dynamic nature lent itself nicely to cybernetic input. The Fun Palace would have to self-regulate, and its physical configuration and operations would need to anticipate and respond to probable patterns of use.14 Price realised managing this kind of complexity was the real challenge and duly convinced Gordon Pask to become involved.

Cybernetics & The Palace

Born in Derby, 1928, Gordon Pasks first involvement in cybernetics came while at Cambridge in a theatre group. With his friend Robin McKinnonwood, Pasks interest in technology combined with his own theatrical connections resulted in a succession of interesting machines for example a Musical typewriter, a self-adapting metronome, and the Musicolour machine (see later). This background meant there was always a continuing theatrical theme in his work.15 This theatrical background no doubt helped when Price approached Pask in 1963 to offer him the poisiton: cybernetic consultant on the Fun Palace Project. Pask got to work, setting up the Fun Palace cybernetics sub-committee. This committee began to develop psychological & sociological models,
Pasks diagram of the cybernetic control system of Fun Palace. (source: Matthews, 2007)
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Matthews, S. From Agit Pop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price,2007 (p.73). Pasks Colloquy of Mobiles for example as described in Pickering (2002) which involves an ongoing theatrical dance between male and female balloon-shaped objects. 8

thinking about the possible activities that might occur as to have some idea at least of possible connections and associations that could be formed. These activities ranged from archery to restoration of vintage cars, from drama tutoring to finger painting. The Palace had come a long way from its theatre origins. The Fun Palace was seen as a vast social control system as can be seen on Pasks system network diagram (see page 8 images). This attitude of abstracting people as modified or unmodified systems at first glance seems like it should be treated with caution, Pasks language however merely referred to whether the user had modified the system previously, and hence in a kind of architectural conversation, had been modified by it. Here one can see a comparison to Beers Viable System Model as mentioned previously, as a model of social control but with underspecified goals, with the architecture working in tandem with its users. The difference here was that the users themselves were systems to be altered and Pask refers to the Fun Palace as an ongoing conversation between the building and its users - an assemblage of interactive systems of interaction.16

John Frazers generator realisation in hardware. (source: Frazer, 1995)

Generator & Musicolour

Another of Prices works of cybernetic relevance was the so called Generator Project from 1976. With the help of computational input from John Frazer, the Generator was a series of relocatable components , a kit of parts that could create enclosed spaces, corridors, screens, in different configurations depending on the requirements of a specific time. Much like the Fun Palace, there would be a mobile crane to move the parts around when these changes were implemented... the users of the space became the controllers of it. What was interesting was that instead of an abstract diagram acting from outside like the Fun Palace, the components became the hardware itself, with processing devices in each. In effect, the architecture was a massively parallel computer- and there was no need for any centralised control. As Price mentioned, architecture should have little to do with problem solving rather it should create desirable conditions and opportunities hitherto thought impossible. One key element that Frazer introduced to the project was boredom. Afraid that the users wouldnt reconfigure the system as desired, the building would subsequently get bored and suggest
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Sketch by Price showing possible configuration of units. (source: google images)

Pask, G., The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics, Architectural Design, September 1969. (p.494) 9

reconfigurations itself having learnt previously from the users possible layouts. It also learnt from the success of its own layouts. It was a truly intelligent building, however the system was somewhat closed in the sense that no site specific input, the original site was in Florida, was allocated for. I guess this was the point, that the people would shape the architecture to work with the local condition. It is probably no coincidence that this element of boredom was also prevalent in one of Pasks early works, the Musicolour Machine from the 1950s. This machine was to be used in tandem with a human musician by using a microphone input for voice and an electrical input from an instrument. A musicolour performance centred on a feedback loop running from the human performer through a musical instrument and the machine itself into the environment (lights displayed to the performer), and then back to the performer.17
Pask attempts to get a sound out of the Musicolour machine. (source: google images)

Again, there is no direct goal as such, no problem to solve other than to avoid repetition that perhaps the human on his own would not realise. The music created could be seen as not being possible by the human alone, rather a conversation between human and machine resulting in a unique gestalt performance.

Summary
To conclude, I would like to link some of our work this year to this short introduction to cybernetics, in particular, the computing of parallel systems within the study of cellular automata. This approach of distributed computing and architecture was recently explored in our urban coding work. Plots of land were given certain rules that society was to obey. The long-term behaviour of the system could not be known before hand no amount of scientific knowledge could predict what was to happen. The CA just had to be run on the computer in order to ascertain the long-term stability of the system whether it survives in a stable condition or whether it dies out altogether. Factors such as the initial conditions of the system could also be investigated. Real-time perturbations and their resultant behaviour was explored, much like with the homeostat. This was architectural system design a cybernetic approach of doing rather than representing. In my opinion, this example nicely shows that cybernetic models that have already been studied in their own right (such as CAs) have a lot to offer architects, especially when there is a wealth of the scientific research already completed. However, it should always be remembered that it is their careful application
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Cellular Automaton of an urban condition. Plots are given a wealth and rules governing the distribution of wealth to others are specified. Th e long term behaviour of the system can only be known by actually running it.

Pickering, A. Cybernetics and the Mangle, 2002. (p.16) 10

that requires skill, not simply a direct mimicking of scientific systems. This shift in architecture from problem solving a fixed brief, to creating a dynamic systems that adapt themselves to a fast changing world would definitely find favour with Pickering for sure.

Bibliography
Ashby, R.W. An Introduction to Cybernetics, Chapman & Hall, 1957. Bertalanffy, L. von. General System Theory, Penguin University Books, 1968. Frazer, John. An Evolutionary Architecture, 1995. Haque, U. Gordon Pask & Architecture, 2007. Matthews, Stanley. From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price, Black Dog Publishing, 2007.
Pask in conversation. (source: google)

Maturana, R.H. & Varela, F.J. Autopoiesis, The Organisation of the Living, 1973. Maturana, R.H. Biology of Language: The Epistemology of Reality, 1978. Pask, G. An Approach to Cybernetics, Hutchinson & Co, London, 1961. Pask, G. The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics, Architectural Design, September 1969. Pickering, Andrew. Cybernetics and the Mangle: Ashby, Beer & Pask (Social Studies of Science, Issue 32), 2002. Pickering, Andrew. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency & Science, University of Chicago Press, 1995. Price, Cedric. Works II, Architectural Association, 1984. Wiener, N. Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, MIT Press, 1948. Zuse, K. Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space), 1969. The Ross Ashby Digital Archive: http://www.rossashby.info
(front cover image from google image search)

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