Recently I read a very nice collection of essays that was published about two years ago: Anthony Burke, Therese Tierney (ed.), “Network Practices : New Strategies in Architecture and Design“, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2007.
It is interesting, relevant and readable, and certainly very ambitious on the backflap: it ‘offers a unique analysis of how art, science, and architecture are responding to our rapidly changing mobile, wireless and information-embedded environments’. It sure does offer a number of thought-provoking essays, clustered around themes like networks, multitudes and adaptive systems.

For instance I really liked reading the text by Dagmar Richter about the Dom-in(f)o House, a project by DR_D Lab. There are also two great texts by George Legrady and Casey Reas about the development of their work; I didn’t really know Legrady’s work before reading this, so that was a discovery. And the principles behind Casey Reas’ work are well known – somewhat of a classic by now – but it is always a pleasure to read such a clear exposé of how one thing led to the next.
There’s a fantastic text by Mark Wigley, unearthing loads of material I had never heard of and making interesting connections. It seems to be a sequel to an earlier essay of his which I haven’t been able to read yet. I like the way he writes about the circuit board as a metaphor for spatial planning, the work of Cedric Price he discusses is very interesting, and above all he writes about a fascinating plan by Konrad Wachsmann for a university, inspired by his space frame architecture.

Konrad Wachsmann and a scale model of a space frame.

For me, the high point of the book was the essay by Peter Bentley, ‘Climbing Through Complexity Ceilings‘. I’ve read several texts by Peter Bentley now, he edited several books I own, I heard him speak once and he is always sharp and articulate. He is one of those rare scientists who seems to be really interested in art that is as contemporary as his science: he refers to artists and artworks to make points, includes them in his books, and often it is even interesting art too.
In his essay he talks about how we seem to be getting stuck in the growing complexity of big design and engineering problems, using methods that have not really changed for a long time. I remember that I was shocked a couple of years ago to hear an informatics professor say that software has not really evolved in the last fourty years; he said that what has mainly evolved is hardware, and the changes in hardware are pushing things along. He was right, but now there is Peter Bentley who writes that also hardware has not really evolved since the invention of the transistor; because of our refined production methods we can put a hell of a lot more of the same on a little chip, but the principles are not really different. It is more, but not radically differently organized. (Isn’t that shocking when you come to think of it ?) To be able to tackle big projects in an intelligent way, he proposes that we start looking much more to artificial evolution and embryology as design methods, and that we think of making adaptive systems instead of solving problems by hand. We should make devices that can learn by themselves…

I’ve been reading a lot on autopoiesis recently (more on that in a later post), and for a reason, so these remarks of Peter Bentley somehow struck a chord quite deeply (and I might not be summarizing his argument very accurately, since I read it a while ago). If you go on holiday, you might observe that walking paths in nature become more easy to walk on when they are used more, while in our urban world roads invariably get worse. Pretty much all systems in nature can adapt and improve themselves, and humans can only build crude, non-recursive machines that ‘consume’ lots of energy, erode over time and need a human hand to maintain them. Also with all the standards, protocols and formats humans invent, why can’t we make computers that sort these connection issues out between themselves ? With all this talk of the singularity being imminent, I do think we might be a lot lower on that curve than some think we are. And then I am already assuming we are on a curve together, which is far from sure either.