Nature talking with nature

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2004 by Charles Jencks

In a Scottish garden that I started with my late wife, Maggie Keswick, we worked on these landforms together; she designed the lakes, I the mounds, and they all followed self-similar curves. Later, after she died, I worked on many areas of the garden that needed completion and began to focus more clearly on the idea that one should use nature to interrogate nature's fundamental secrets and her main elements, or events, of self-organization. The atom and Gaia (the earth as a self-sustaining system) were obviously salient units, and after working with scientists on various models of these, I went on to explore the black hole, the DNA molecule, the universal notion of symmetry breaking and the universe as a whole (8). At this point, in 1996, I started to conceive of the project as 'the garden of cosmic speculation', and see it partly as a critique of reductive science and its dumb metaphors ('selfish genes', 'big bangs') and partly as a traditional instrument to celebrate the cosmos. In these two ways it was just a continuation of the post-modern project, a resistance to the reigning notions that architecture and art must be abstract and that we live in a mechanistic universe.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Of course, the universe on one reading is highly abstract and some of its laws are mechanistic and deterministic. The argument for abstract art was partly motivated by this recognition and attempted to embody the fact that so much contemporary science could only be represented by equations (and they are a form of ultimate abstraction). Indeed, there is the argument put by Alfred North Whitehead, the philosopher, that modern science was invented once and only once, in the West (and not in China where technology was much more advanced) because of the propensity of Western thinkers to believe that God, although laying down very complex laws, was a reasonable, mathematically-inclined geometer. His work was, as Einstein said, 'subtle but not malicious'--after inventive labour it could be understood. Hinduism, Taoism, Islam, Confucianism and all the other faiths did not have the faith that the world was ultimately decodable into rational equations.

Western science, religion, art and architecture of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance were motivated by the attempt to find, and then represent, the underlying truths of zero nature--or the abstract laws. There are many wonderful paintings of this metaphysics and one in particular, The Creation of the World produced by Giovanni di Paolo in 1445, makes this and another key point (1). It shows a male God coming down from on high, generating, to the left, the abstract laws and constants: perfect inscribed circles, planetary orbits, and the elements of earth, air, water, fire. However, to the right, is the other side of Christianity that is so important to the unfolding of modern science: the narrative history of our place in the universe, the projection of ourselves into cosmic history, from the Genesis myth to the final judgement. On one reading, this duality presages the battle between science and religion that has dominated the modern world since the seventeenth century. And literally the picture shows the expulsion from the garden of Paradise.