New paradigm? - Old - Letters - Letter to the Editor

Architectural Review, The, August, 2003 by Charles Jencks

SIR: Whether or not there is a new paradigm in architecture and if so, is it worthy, are issues for debate and as my article suggested (AR February) one should be sceptical of all such claims. Nevertheless an argument has to be made and, in the nature of such things as trends, movements and world views, they are only ever statistical, partial and, 'more or less'. No architect has ever completely summarized the Gothic any more than been completely Modern; historians have made these points time and again.

Thus some partial answers to your sceptics. 'Yes', Graham McKay is right (AR April), form-givers such as Foster and Libeskind have also dominated old paradigm architecture, they often will; but 'No', Gehry's Bilbao was not 'clay shaped by hand', but rather a multivalent work shaped by twenty or so working models at many scales, as well as computer-cut ones. That multiple method of investigating human scale, light, surface and space is what makes the building still the leading exemplar of the paradigm, even though it was designed first in 1993. And why should buildings 'mimic' the cosmos? Partly because we identify with natural evolving beings--have an empathy for the human, animal and mineral kingdoms among others--and partly because architecture should symbolize our relationship to the universe (as it did with many old paradigms). To go beyond a neutral abstraction it needs such iconography and rootedness.

Peter Davey finds that one building of the New (Old) Paradigm Federation Square--is lacking in human scale and relationship to the city of Melbourne. Other critics, such as William Mitchell and I who have seen it, feel quite the opposite. It is precisely the way it breaks down the surrounding larger 'inhuman'-scaled and repetitive buildings that makes it more related to our bodies, size and perception. One virtue of fractal architecture, as Benoit Mandelbrot pointed out, was its superiority to Modernism in providing scaling devices at many levels--from a great distance right up to the touchable detail. The magic of fractal scaling is this continual transformation, as indeed the fractal now given his name has revealed to us.

Davey, also like McKay, questions why architecture should be modelled on, or 'copy', nature, while Matthias Bauer (AR May) asks, by contrast, why UK and US architecture isn't nearly as green as Germany's building. Ecological performance is important, as is the green iconography of fractals and growing plants etc: no doubt the Germans are way ahead on much of this. But we should disentangle the different levels of 'nature' here and how we relate to them.

Davey, following Darwin and Dawkins, finds nature 'wasteful and cruel', that is hardly an ethical model. So, in its competitive mode, where it decimates nine out of ten species, it is immoral. However, in its Gaian mode, as a self-organizing, balancing system it shows harmonies, creative emergence and the sustenance of life. It even shows some purposefulness, or teleonomy, as it balances oxygen, nitrogen and other physical conditions at their best ratios for sustaining life, Gaian nature is just one more example of the beauty and morality inherent in the universe even before there are humans around to appreciate such qualities. Part of the new paradigm in science and architecture is to reveal that these benign aspects are cosmic and just as much a standard for culture as the humanist values that Davey supports.

Man is not the measure of all things, nor is the universe as a whole but rather, as the new paradigm scientist Ilya Prigogine said, the continual dialogue between the two.

Yours etc

CHARLES JENCKS

Dumfries, Scotland