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".
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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)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
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“Westerners inherit
A design for living
Deeper into matter—
Not without due patter
Of a great misgiving.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Any relation to the land, the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling of patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who merely uses it as a support to his desk and ledger, or to his manufactory, values it less.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)