Architectural Design Values - Mathematical and Scientific Design Values

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:

    What he loved so much in the plant morphological structure of the tree was that given a fixed mathematical basis, the final evolution was so incalculable.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough ... had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.
    Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)

    I begin with a design for a hearse.
    For Christ’s sake not black—
    nor white either—and not polished!
    Let it be weathered—like a farm wagon—
    William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)

    The return to solid values is always hard.... Distress, panic, and hard times have marked our pathway in returning to solid values.
    James A. Garfield (1831–1881)