Mathematical and Scientific Design Values
A movement to base architectural design on scientific and mathematical understanding started with the early work of Christopher Alexander in the 1960s, Notes on the synthesis of form. Other contributors joined in, especially in investigations of form on the urban scale, which resulted in important developments such as Bill Hillier's Space syntax and Michael Batty's work on Spatial analysis. In architecture, the four-volume work The Nature of Order by Alexander summarizes his most recent results. An alternative architectural theory based on scientific laws, as for example A Theory of Architecture is now competing with purely aesthetic theories most common in architectural academia. This entire body of work can be seen as balancing and often questioning design movements that rely primarily upon aesthetics and novelty. At the same time, the scientific results that determine this approach in fact verify traditional and vernacular traditions in a way that purely historical appreciation cannot.
Social and environmental issues are given a new explanation, drawing upon biological phenomena and the interactivity of groups and individuals with their built environment. The new discipline of biophilia developed by E. O. Wilson plays a major role in explaining the human need for intimate contact with natural forms and living beings. This insight into the connection between human beings and the biological environment provides a new understanding for the need for ecological design. An extension of the biophilic phenomenon into artificial environments suggests a corresponding need for built structures that embody the same precepts as biological structures. These mathematical qualities include fractal forms, scaling, multiple symmetries, etc.. Applications and extensions of Wilson's original idea are now carried out by Stephen R. Kellert in the Biophilia hypothesis, and in by Nikos Salingaros and others in the book "Biophilic Design".
Read more about this topic: Architectural Design Values
Famous quotes containing the words mathematical, scientific, design and/or values:
“The most distinct and beautiful statement of any truth must take at last the mathematical form.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The aggregate of all knowledge has not yet become culture in us. Rather it would seem as if, with the progressive scientific penetration and dissection of reality, the foundations of our thinking grow ever more precarious and unstable.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)
“Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand—a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)