Biology Lessons: I-Toward Resilient Architecture

I-
Toward resilient architecture

Biology Lessons
Why Green Often Isn't
How Modernism Got Square
The Geometry of Resilience
Agile Design
II-
Science for designers

The Transformation of Wholes
Scaling and Fractals
The Meaning of Complexity
Complex Adaptive Systems
III-
Frontiers of design science

Evidence-based Design
Self-Organization
Biophilia
The Network City
Computational Irreducibility
IV- The remarkable technology of Christopher Alexander

The Radical Technology of Christopher Alexander
The Sustainable Technology of Christopher Alexander

The Pattern Technology of Christopher Alexander
The Living Technology of Christopher Alexander
Toward Resilient Architectures 1:

Biology Lessons
Michael 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 systems
Lets 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 often not resilient 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. Salingaros
A 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 oftenchaotic 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 GSFC
As 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 lessons
So 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 (noncentralized) 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/Wikimedia
The 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.

Self-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 designs
How 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, interconnected, 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 selforganize. 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 structurepreserving 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 cardependent 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.
A 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 cities
So 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 evolution
People 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 thendisconnected 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 Mehaffy is 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 pioneer Christopher 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. Salingaros is a mathematician and polymath known for his work
on urban 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 the University of Texas at
San Antonio and is also on the Architecture faculties of universities
in Italy, Mexico, and The Netherlands.

Why Green Often Isn't
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 PLC
Something 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 highefficiency 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 curtainwall building. Spot the difference? The trouble is, (paraphrasing Albert Einstein) we
cannot solve problems with the same basic typologies that created them.
For 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 island Another 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 sometimes Many 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 architecture Architectural 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.
Buchanan 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 PostModernist 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 industrialModernist 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-modernism Yet 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.
C
uriously, after one century of unfettered design experiments, the Modernist form
language evolves back to the traditional glass box.
Not 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 style In 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.

How Modernism Got Square
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 wholes
Image: Brirush/Wikimedia
As 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. Postoccupancy 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, bolton 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 unmodern. 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 hold In 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 neomodernism 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"?
Built 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.
Precisely 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. Salingaros
Corporate branding with science fiction The 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 JeanneretGris (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. Salingaros
More 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

ornament Key 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.
I
s 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.
We 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-think We 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.

The Geometry of Resilience
Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros
We 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 titled Biology
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, the diffraction 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 morphogenesis

As we are learning from todays biological sciences, all four characteristics
of resilience are aspects of a more fundamental natural process of finegrained 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 in The 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 as The
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 selforganization 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 information
What 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 solutionspace 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 a hilltop village in Spain, both incorporating the four classes
of geometries discussed above.
Courtesy Michael Mehaffy
The modern loss of genetic types and differentiated forms

Now 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 (in How 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 postoccupancy 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/differentiation
In 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-called economies of
scale, and economies 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 impressive economies 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 the economy 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 massproduced: 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 economies
Natural 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 of other kinds of
economies that 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 the geometry of resilience.
For example, designers tend to ignore the economy 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, the economy 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 via www.livingneighborhoods.org
The 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 ahead
By 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 Globe
In 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 nonresilient. 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.

Agile Design
Courtesy Steve Slater
As humanity progresses into an increasingly technological 21 st century, 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 in On 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 have written previously, many of the claims

to sustainability and resilience are disproven by remarkably damning postoccupancy 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 of what it is
to design that is, how we transform resources into the structures of our
world. We must recognize that our 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,
more resilient kind 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, nonlinear 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, Wikimedia
Generate, dont specify

Some 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,specifying the desired behaviors always required
elaborate definitions and standards, while, paradoxically, generating them
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 have noted 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
our own technologies. 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 our own technologies.
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 to specify the behavior desired,
but rather, create the conditions in which that behavior is most likely to
be generated. 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 Bing
Transform, dont replace

Another 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, transitserved street grid.
Simplify and adapt the operating system for growth

Closely 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
environmental structures (and other artifacts and systems) around the
world.
Like a computer operating system, or the rules of a game, this operating
system for growth allows some activities but not others. If you want some
processes to function in ways that are not currently permitted, you will have
to reform the operating system in this case, the models and other
standards of planning, architecture, and development.
Many of the results of the current operating system are perverse that
is, they are not what people would have wanted originally, but they result
from the distorted way that the incentives and other requirements interact.
Those incentives (few of which seem objectionable in isolation) encourage
some people to make excuses for these perverse outcomes to pretend

(or to believe) that they were desired all along. Perhaps, some are misled
to think, these outcomes are even something wonderful. This is what is
known as a cognitive illusion, and it helps to explain a number of current
professional dysfunctions in architecture and planning.
But again, the goal is not to clutter up the operating system with rules and
procedures that are fragile because of their intricacy and patched-on
quality, but to identify (through an evolutionary cultural process of
adaptation) relatively simple, agile sets of incentives and processes that will
create the conditions under which the desired behavior is most likely to be
generated. Sometimes, the solution is to remove over-complicated and
malfunctioning elements; sometimes, however, it is a matter of making
transformations with slight additions. (This is not at all a simple-minded
libertarian prescription.)
Two universities. (L) The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington is an

isolated, car-dependent campus. (R) Portland State University is fully integrated into the
walkable street network of Portland, Oregon.
Value externalities
The most powerful incentive fueling any operating system for growth lies
simply in the way the underlying economic processes work, and how
certain kinds of economies (strategies to achieve economic efficiency and
benefit) are rewarded, while others are neglected. We wrote in "The
Geometry of Resilience about the powerful economies
of scale and standardization displacing two other essential economies
needed for resilience: the economies of place and differentiation.Correcting
this imbalance will bring in more local economic functionality, as well as
more diverse kinds of economic activities. (A familiar example of both might
be, say, a local farmers market that offers a wide variety of heirloom
vegetables by different growers. The opposite might be a standardized kind
of corn that dominates international markets and drives local varieties to
extinction.)
At present there is an unequal contest between the economics of scale and
standardization on the one hand, and those of place and differentiation on
the other. This comes from the failure of markets to value what are known
as externalities negative (and sometimes positive) external factors that
are not taken into account in the economic calculations for a project. Such
a project could end up damaging these external resources, or it may fail to
create the benefits that would otherwise be possible.
The problem may be understood as the unequal competition between
distinct temporal scales (processes defined on very different time intervals).
Natural and human systems eventually adjust to forces that are destroying
them, but with a relatively long reaction time. By contrast, global finance
can move very quickly to intervene significantly in human and natural
ecosystems. This is a historically novel phenomenon, which our
technological systems are not equipped to handle. If such moves damage
long-term processes and they often do, because they are oriented
strictly towards the extraction of short-term profits then the system
cannot possibly respond in time.
True modernity lies...in a different way of thinking about

what it is to design for the full participation of all human
beings.
One evident example is depletion of natural resources, which is typically
not valued until the resource in question is so close to total depletion that
shortages put upward pressures on prices. Another related one includes
the externalities of conventional sprawl development. Current developers
are not required to pay for the external costs (externalities) that include
future infrastructure repairs, damage to ecosystems, impacts on human
health, degradation of air quality, and many more.
Economies of scale and standardization by themselves create significant
externalities, which can only be re-balanced by the finer-grained economies
of place and differentiation. But if the operating system provides no
information feedback (such as financial reward) for employing these other
economies, they will continue to be neglected, and the balance between
the economies will remain unequal (as they are today).
One thing we can do is to put a price on externalities. That means, for

example, paying for carbon when it is emitted into the air, or for ecosystems
when they are destroyed, or for other resources when they are depleted.
Systems need to do this pricing in a largely consensual way exposed to
the checks and balances of a larger participatory process, and not based
on the decisions of one self-interested party or
another.
Two industrial districts. (L) The Intel Ronler Acres campus in Hillsboro, Oregon, planned for
an area with limited industrial uses. (R) The new North American headquarters of Vestas Wind
Systems, in the walkable street grid of Northwest Portland, an area popular with high tech
employees.
Implementation requires a functional participatory process a democratic

process and, as most people recognize, in almost all countries we need
reforms here too. The current political process that would develop those
reforms is broken in the USA and other countries; specifically, it is unduly
influenced by narrow financial interests.
There is another major piece of economic reform that is related. Right now,
human creativity is taxed in a way that is largely indistinguishable from the
way depletion of resources is taxed. That makes no sense long-term. We
need to transition to a form of public valuation and pricing (that is, of
taxation) that prices the consumption and depletion of resources in a very
different way and usually at a significantly higher rate than the
creative activities of people. We suggest that this Georgist approach to
tax policy (so named for 19th century political economist Henry George) is
likely to be a key economic ingredient in the resilient transition ahead.
Two big box format buildings exhibiting very different urban models. (L) An IKEA in
suburban Portland, Oregon, characteristic of many thousands of similar retail facilities around
the world. (R) A Target Store in a 200,000 sq ft building in downtown Portland, occupying two
floors (about 90,000 sq ft). This historic building was one of the first department stores west of
the Mississippi River in the USA, and now includes an adjoining parking garage. The format on
the left vastly outnumbers that on the right.
Conclusion: Toward a new modernity
Most of those reading this post are, like us, at the higher end of the global
economic pyramid. It is sobering to recognize that the wellbeing of many
billions (as well as our own descendants) depends disproportionately on
our own actions in coming years. We face the difficult task of balancing
enjoyment in our own daily lives with the larger responsibilities of
stewardship over the culture and the planet.
It is understandably fun to engage in the edgy, attention-getting artnovelties of our consumer-based design culture. But it is silly to suppose
that this approach is in any genuine sense progressive, sustainable, or
modern. In fact it is only reactionary orthodoxy, clinging to a nearly
century-old, outmoded conception of industrial modernity. True modernity
lies in the embrace of new models of global growth, embodying
evolutionary pattern, organized complexity, and adaptive morphogenesis. It
lies in a different way of thinking about what it is to design for the full
participation of all human beings, for living systems, and for a living planet.
Comparison of object buildings on superblocks with fabric buildings within a walkable, transit-
served, multi-modal mixed-use community. The structure on the left is closer to a sculpture
gallery than to a functioning city.

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I-

Toward resilient architecture

Science for designers

Frontiers of design science

IV- The remarkable technology of Christopher Alexander

The Sustainable Technology of Christopher Alexander

Toward Resilient Architectures 1:

The word resilience" is bandied about these days among environmental

Aside from a nice idea, what is resilience really, structurally speaking?

On the left, an over-concentration of large-sale components; on the right, a more

A good example is the Fukushima nuclear reactor group in Japan. For

Hurricane Sandy on October 28, 2012.

As if these unforeseen dangers were not enough, we humans are

complex technology and its unpredictable interactions and disruptions.

2. They feature diversity and redundancy (a totally distinct notion of

3. They display a wide distribution of structures across

4. They have the capacity to self-adapt and self-organize. This

The Internet is a familiar human example of an inter-connected network

(especially large scales) is more vulnerable to shocks. For another thing,

Distribution of inter-connected elements across several scales.

Self-organization and self-adaptation are also central attributes of living

2. They have diversity and redundancy of activities, types,

3. They have a wide distribution of scales of structure, from the

A complex resilient system coordinates its multi-scale response to a disturbance on any

ecological resilience. Response is both limited and expensive. Consider

2. Efficiency demands the elimination of redundancy. Diversity is

3. The machine age dictates our structural and tectonic

4. Any use of genetic material from the past is a violation of the

From the perspective of resilience theory, this can be seen as an effective

marvelous technological culture. We are ill prepared to see where we must

Toward Resilient Architectures 2:

Something surprising has happened with many so-called sustainable

permanently closed. The ambitious goal of a more sophisticated natural

conception of design. (Those will need to be examined in great detail.)

A wave of neo-modernism Yet if anything, in recent years there has been

indeed all life depends. So today, in an age of converging crises, it is well

Toward Resilient Architectures 3:

The fractal mathematics of nature bears a striking resemblance to human ornament, as

As we enter a transition era that demands far greater resilience and

expectations. In some notable cases, the research results are frankly

Ethiopian silver ceremonial cross, carried in liturgical processions, represents a

Drawing by Nikos A. Salingaros

Built on an essentially racist worldview, Loos seminal essay codified a

2. Tectonic determinism. The geometric character of any addition to

3. Typological prejudice. It follows that all previous architectural

4. Modernist exceptionalism. Civilization has arrived at a

metaphoric style although, of course, buildings do not actually move. In

them with an exciting stylized vision of the future to be created by industry

alarm. As the urbanist Jane Jacobs famously pointed out a half-century

More recent scientific investigations reveal the richly complex geometry of

A new view of the nature of environmental structure, aesthetics, and

We are beginning to understand that the industrial form language

consumption of resources as an addictive economic fuel are intimately

Toward Resilient Architectures 4:

We have previously described four key characteristics of resilient structures

Three examples of naturally-occurring resilient geometries in nature: left, the structure

The fundamental role of adaptive morphogenesis

rigidity. Differentiation introduces contrast, and symmetries introduce

biophilic quality of the human environment which, when applied

The modern loss of genetic types and differentiated forms

Current design technologies are restricted by rigid ideological approaches

The Alhambra in Spain incorporates, to a remarkable degree, all of the geometric