Visible and invisible complexities.

Information technologies are reshaping the process of architectural production in complex unseen ways which make the currently fashionable preoccupation of architects with the visual imagery of complexity increasingly redundant, argues Chris Abel. This essay is extracted from the author's forthcoming book Ditching the Dinosaur Sanctuary: Essays on Architecture and Identity, to be published this spring.

A distinguishing feature of much architecture in the 1990s has been a preoccupation with complexity for its own sake, most of all with its formal expressions. Rejecting both the reductionism of early Modernists and the eclecticism of Post-Modernists - healthy reactions in themselves - many architects and students favour instead irregular and hard-to-fathom compositions based on mixed geometries, fragmented or folding surfaces and other abstract devices. Project drawings, which are treated as having a purpose and value of their own, often seem intentionally obscure and offer few clues to the uninitiated. Usually, but not always convincingly, they are rationalised by reference to the complexities of the programme, the context, or even modern life in general. At a more consciously elevated level, they have been justified by other criteria borrowed from literary theory and criticism or, most recently, from scientific theories concerning the general nature of complexity itself. Occasionally, perhaps more honestly, architects are content to rest on the artistic merits of their designs in the time-honoured fashion of the profession.

Coincidental with the surface complexities of this movement, other more profound forces for complexity have been at work shaping the environment. These are the invisible systems of electronic communication and production which are revolutionising the way architecture is conceived and made. Though not as tangible as the built or paper products of the former movement, it is arguable that these invisible human creations provide the more significant evidence of an emergent architecture appropriate to the twenty-first century. Not least, they challenge the role of architects themselves in directing the future course of building.

AGE OF COMPLEXITY

Organic machines

The origins of this revolution lie in a series of related developments in science, technology and architectural theory mostly concentrated over the period from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. The star of all these developments is the computer, a machine made like no other machine before it. Previously, all machines were built for a specific and limited purpose, conceived and designed to handle a predetermined and never varying sequence of operations, each following the other as effect follows cause until the designated task was complete. The very description 'machine-like' conjures up threatening images of something unbending and essentially inhuman and unnatural. Inserted as they were into human and natural environments with which they had little or no reciprocity, the products of the First Machine Age have created as many if not more problems as they have solved.

The first fully working electronic computer in 1949 marked the arrival of the general purpose machine, designed and built for no particular task other than to make whatever decisions it was called upon to make by its human users. Significantly, the binary principles on which it was designed were essentially the same as those which governed the switch-like neurons and neural nets of the human brain. Around the same time, a whole new computer-based science, cybernetics, was evolving whose special focus was decision-making and control systems, especially the sorts of self-regulating or self-organising systems (the terms are interchangeable) which characterise organic life. The combined epoch-making result of these scientific and technological innovations was machines with feedback: adaptive machines capable of responding to changing tasks and situations and even, through self-learning, improving on their own performance.

The basic meaning of a machine and its relation to the human and natural environment was therefore completely reversed. Instead of bending nature and human behaviour to the dictates of inflexible, fixed-purpose machines - an attitude which included picturing the entire universe as a kind of static, predictable clockwork - machines are now modelled on the emerging principles of nature's own organic processes.

Indeterminant forms

By the early 1960s, the information era was already beckoning architects and surfaced in a number of experimental projects by a small avant-garde in Britain, France and the US. Beginning with the 'Fun Palace' and 'Potteries Thinkbelt', Cedric Price began exploring the impact of information technologies on indeterminate forms of architecture whose invisible attributes were as important, if not more important than any physical or formal aspects. Partly influenced by Price's work, students at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London proposed dispersed urban educational networks and mobile learning stations loaded with computing and communications hardware, which could be fitted into both old or new buildings with equal ease. Based on biological and cybernetic concepts, the learning stations-cum-space modules were designed to resemble living cells, combining and splitting off just like the organisms which had inspired them.

From Paris, Yona Friedman presented another vision of the liberating flexibility information technology proffered. For Friedman, it was not so much the form of a dwelling that counted as who was responsible for it. He suggested that ordinary people could make use of the new technology to design their own homes as part of a larger, open-ended structural and services framework.

In place of conventional design and build procedures, Friedman posited a new process which does away with the architects' intermediary role, incorporating instead 'direct feedback from the user' to the builder via a host of information technologies, computer aided design techniques and adaptable building structures. As part of a more comprehensive feedback system he envisaged networks of city-wide information infrastructures which would monitor changes in the urban fabric and oversee transportation systems.

Man-machine dialogue

While Friedman's visions were purely speculative, a group of young architects and computer experts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology were pursuing a more rigorous, experimental approach toward similar goals. Led by Nicholas Negroponte, the Architecture Machine Group, as it was known, was formed with the specific purpose of harnessing computer power to create and investigate a new man-machine dialogue.

The Group's research was concentrated on three parallel developments: technical improvements to the man-machine interface, especially graphics, which enhanced a professional designer's skills; user-friendly techniques and aids which helped non-professionals to become their own architects, and personalised, 'intelligent' environments or 'soft architecture machines', which would respond to occupants' individual whims and environmental needs. All three developments built on parallel cutting-edge research at MIT and other universities into artificial intelligence (AI) or machine cognition, which was itself based on research into human cognition. With the guidance of Gordon Pask, the British cybernetician and cognitive scientist, the idea was developed that the combination of human being and machine-environment forms a reciprocal learning system, each building his/her/its knowledge from what he/she/it learns about the other.

Uncertainty and change

Over the same period, architectural theory was also undergoing a sea-change, from a claustrophobic field inhabited solely by critics with an art-historical inclination, to a vibrant interdisciplinary forum in which science, once again, played the lead role. Unlike the deterministic sciences once favoured by orthodox Modernists, however, the sciences that now aroused such intense excitement and speculation were the postwar new sciences of complex systems - cybernetics and its cousins, information theory, general systems theory and the theory of self-organising systems.

From the late 1960s onwards, occasional articles on related environmental topics began showing up in the less conservative architectural journals. These individual forays were substantially reinforced in 1969 and 1972 with the appearance of two special issues of Architectural Design on the subject of complexity edited by Royston Landau, a teacher at the AA School. Together, the two journals presented a heady mix of philosophical analysis, abstract concepts and speculation on the relevance of the new sciences to architecture, planning and computer aided design. The overriding idea which emerged from this double-barrelled blast at architectural and urban conventions was that uncertainty, change and conflict were inseparable features of both natural and human evolution. This was the 'age of complexity', and architects and planners were going to have to grasp its nettle if they were to continue making any serious contribution.

NETWORKS WITHIN NETWORKS

Customised architecture

After a period of incubation, the pace of innovation quickened again in the 1980s, which also saw the application to architectural practice of many earlier ideas and inventions. A small group of mostly British architects working in collaboration with a few adventurous engineers and manufacturers began using increasingly sophisticated methods of customised building production, in which information technology and flexible manufacturing systems played a vital role. Smart tools of a kind already widely used in other industries were used in the production of the unique steel structure for Norman Foster's Renault Centre, as well as in the cladding for the same architect's Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. Like Richard Rogers' Lloyd's HQ in London, the Bank was one of the first office buildings to be designed specifically for the information era and incorporates raised floors of the type first developed for computer centres, as well as a computer controlled, tracking 'sunscoop'. Both buildings also feature fully computerised building management systems, monitoring energy use and maintenance schedules on a continuous basis.

Since these early innovations the idea of the self-regulating, intelligent building has gained widespread currency and even entered popular culture. In his sci-fi novel, Gridiron, Philip Kerr depicts an intelligent building gone haywire which turns on and kills its own architect. Entertaining as the thought is, it remains a remote prospect. For the most part, aside from building management systems the description applies to such relatively benign features as responsive skins which absorb, distribute and generate energy, or automated lift systems which use fuzzy logic to build their own models of changing use patterns. Looking ahead, Mike Davies of Richard Rogers Partnership foresees a more encouraging prospect than Gridiron's author: 'I propose that the average building should know how it feels. Such a building is an intelligent building; basically a building which is aware of itself; aware of the energy falling on its facade; aware of the energy coming through the facade; aware of the people inside the building and what their needs are'.

These innovations have been supplemented by an even greater explosion in the nature, distribution and availability of computer-aided design and production methods. The most advanced multi-user systems, like Reading University's knowledge-based engineering (KBE) system, reach into the entire process of design and manufacture, enabling designer, fabricator and user to explore alternative designs in real time. Virtual reality has also literally added another whole new dimension to the design, manufacture and build process, enabling future users as well as designers to 'walk through' and visually test a design concept before it goes into production. Related advances in virtual prototyping promise not only to speed up design and production but also - crucially - to open up the whole process to wider inspection and participation. Combined with other innovations such as rapid prototyping and Japanese style Just-In-Time production methods, which have already narrowed previous gaps between demand and production in other industries, virtual reality technology marks a major step in the direction of a user-oriented architecture.

Cybercity

The future shape and impact of this electronic architecture may already be detected in the explosive growth of the Internet and other shared networks. Described by Negroponte, now head of MIT's Media Lab and number one cyberspace guru, as a 'network of networks', the Internet has transformed communication between computer users, knitting together smaller networks and connecting people in different parts of the world who would otherwise have no contact. In the process, new forms of both professional and non-professional collaboration have been created which are reverberating throughout all levels of society. Even more radical in its implications is the argument advanced by Kevin Kelly and others, that the Internet as a whole exhibits self-organising characteristics similar in kind to those of a living organism, or to be more precise, clusters of organisms. Kelly likens the phenomenon to the behaviour of a swarm of bees searching for a new location for the hive. Scouts will check out a number of alternative locations and compete for attention from the rest of the swarm for their choice. Somehow a collective decision on the new site by the whole swarm eventually emerges though it is impossible to trace it to any single prior event or signal. In the same way, the Internet may already be reshaping the nature of human intercourse in ways that could not be predicted from any particular use or application of the system, but which nevertheless has a direction of its own. The on-going development of semi-autonomous, intelligent software agents or 'alter-egos' which would roam cyberspace digging out information for their owners, is only likely to boost claims that such networks are nothing less than an evolution of human intelligence, albeit in a distributed form.

The extension of self-organising networks and software agents into all aspects of urban life along the lines predicted by Friedman is probably only a matter of time, and not much time at that. Singapore already boasts a fully integrated traffic control system which monitors traffic loads online and changes signals in different parts of the city to help ease the flow. Satellite navigation systems which present drivers with information on traffic flow and alternative routes on purpose-made receivers are also now commonplace. Other more diverse forms of community based networks are proliferating. In the US, the common language used to describe the habitation of cyberspace is that of the New Frontier. Typical of the new 'settlements' is the Blacksburg Electronic Village in Virginia, a collaboration between the town of Blacksburg, Bell Atlantic and Virginia Tech University, which ties the university town's businesses, citizens and students together and also gives them access to the wider world of the Internet. Just like the original settlers in the New World, the new settlers often borrow their place names from more familiar terrain. In Europe, Amsterdam's Digital City offers a whole urban world in cyberspace, complete with a 'Digital town hall', a 'social centre', 'neighbourhoods' and other 'sites' where citizens can pursue their representatives on local issues, socialise, just wander or 'surf'. Created as an experiment in civic networking and citizen participation, in addition to its regular inhabitants the Digital City supports thousands of passing tourists seeking information on the city, its services and attractions.

The implications of shared networks for architectural practice are no less profound. The UK's Construction Industry 'Superhighway Initiative', a joint venture between BT, Hewlett Packard, and On-Demand Construction Information, now provides a comprehensive information service to all members of the industry. High powered modelling and test facilities, such as Cham Ltd's PHOENICS Computerized Fluid Dynamics (CFD) programme, which uses simulation techniques to model environmental performance, are also now available as a service to architects who could otherwise afford neither the hardware nor software to test their own designs. Coupled with other KBE systems and CAD packages, such remote information services empower even the smallest practice with the potential to design, test and deliver large-scale and complex projects. Given that half of the architectural practices in the UK consist of one or two person enterprises, the model of the small, virtual practice, linking up online as necessary with other specialised firms and services, could become the norm. By the same token, similar user-friendly services designed for non-professionals may shift the balance of power toward the self-builder, at least for dwellings and simple building types, bringing Friedman's visions of a self-building community closer to reality.

PSEUDO-COMPLEXITIES

Superimpositions

The essence of all these innovations and developments, as of the organisational and social complexities which arise from them, is that they involve multiple human and technological agents combining with unpredictable consequences. No single designer or team of designers could possibly substitute the same order of complexity which is the natural and unplanned result of so many freely interacting agents. Yet that is precisely what many of the most fashionable architects appear to be attempting, by ever more devious and contrived means.

Co-op Himmelb(l)au exemplify the worst traits of the movement. Their early angst-ridden projects in Vienna - a city identified with the troubled subconscious - most clearly betrayed the violent undercurrents shaping what they revealingly declared as the 'architecture of the spiked chest'. Rejecting more rational design methods, the architects employed such 'spontaneous' methods as sketching blindfold. The design for the Groninger Museum in northern Holland springs from the same random methods and indifference to conventional restraints. The original drawing, a frenetic blur of abstract lines (it isn't clear if it was produced blindfold but it could have been), was overlaid three times and transformed into a block model, over which the same drawing was laid again. The combined drawing and model was then scanned straight into a computer and converted into plans by process of further abstract transformations, 'since we didn't care too much about the functions of the space'. All the resulting practical errors of the generative process are purposefully retained in the final construction, including an inaccessible courtyard.

Sometimes, as with Bernard Tschumi's Park de la Villette in Paris, a deliberately complicated design method has had an unexpectedly simple outcome. For his masterplan, Tschumi employed the then novel method of superimposition, or superposition as it is also called, whereby three independently composed plans based on differing ordering systems and features were overlaid to produce a composite design. Promoted by Tschumi as an alternative to the logocentric architecture of Western traditions, the method is intentionally disruptive of any preconceived order. Marginally more structured than Coop Himmelb(l)au's overlays, the resulting disjunctions between the different schemes, like the latter firm's 'errors', were carefully preserved in the final plan, the idea being that the resultant voids and ambiguities of purpose and meaning would be resolved by observers in their own fashion.

However, far from producing the intended tensions between order and disorder, the final result turns out to be a remarkably well ordered and predictable composition in the grand French manner, with few ambiguities. Part of the reason is the dominating presence of the three main buildings in the park, the Museum of Science and Industry, Grande Halle (the former Market) and Zenith Concert Hall, all vast structures. Other easily distinguished landmarks, like the arrow straight Canal through the centre of the Park and the regular grid of crimson red 'Follies', establish a clear system of co-ordinates and Baroque vistas by which a person may grasp the whole as easily as at Versailles. The Follies themselves, which were supposedly designed irrespective of any function, can also be readily separated by their configuration and bulk into those that are habitable and serve a purpose, and those that do not. Contrary to the architect's declared aims, La Villette demonstrates all too clearly that random methods are no guarantor of either complexity or ambiguity.

Like Tschumi, Peter Eisenman bolsters his arguments with references to Deconstructionist literary theory and other fields. These do little, however, to disguise the ultimately wilful nature of this cerebral architect's highly abstract compositions and forms, which invariably negate whatever worthy cross-disciplinary exercise might otherwise have been involved.

Promoted as an exercise in self-similar patterns inspired by complexity theory, Eisenman's social housing at Kochstrasse for the Berlin IBA is as vapid an exercise in facadism as any Post-Modern architect's. In the Rebstockpark residential scheme near Frankfurt more elaborate methods are employed with similar arbitrary results. An orthogonal web laid over the site is contorted in several dimensions, and the resulting warped lines allowed to slice through and distort an otherwise conventional medium-rise development. The effect on the individual blocks is akin to that of an earthquake, rending asunder whatever original order guided their design. It is no coincidence therefore that most of Eisenman's schemes, models or drawings are illustrated from an elevated viewpoint. Like the Rebstockpark scheme, the eccentric folds of the Columbus Convention Centre in Ohio can only be fully appreciated from the air, where they resemble the product of a gargantuan shredding machine.

Inflated symbolic agendas

Notably, the level of organisational complexity sought by these architects invariably relates to a much larger world context than that actually called for in the building programme. Often, as with Frank Gehry's work, the metaphor of the 'building as a city' is invoked by way of explanation. One of the more plain spoken protagonists of a decentred architecture, Gehry's early works in Los Angeles were partly a contextual response to the discontinuous physical pattern of that city, and partly an outcome of his own artistic inclinations towards complex and quirky compositions.

The problems involved in overloading small building programmes with inflated symbolic agendas were nevertheless already apparent in Gehry's house designs of the 1980s, where every room is treated as a distinct formal entity, separate and radically different from any other space, to the point where any sense of domestic scale or meaning is completely lost. In his most recent projects, Gehry's artistic and sculptural motivations override all other considerations in an unfettered celebration of free form applied irrespective of place or purpose. It is hard, for example, to see what, aside from the fact that one design features Gehry's famous fish motif and the other does not, distinguishes the formal mishmash of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao from the equally convoluted Lewis residence in Cleveland, Ohio, designed in collaboration with Philip Johnson.

The prevailing anthropocentric attitude towards nature - at best treated, as at La Villette, as just another compositional element, or at worst, as with Zaha Hadid's Peak Club project for Hong Kong, denied altogether - is equally revealing of the movement's underlying priorities and contradictions. For the Peak Club, Hadid proposed clearing and remoulding the sloping, vegetation-shrouded site on the crest of Peak mountain to better suit her abstract, horizontal composition. The main area was to be dug out down to the rock and the excavated granite rebuilt as artificial cliffs and polished to form a more sculptural, abstract setting. Mercifully unbuilt, the competition-winning project would have left a permanent open wound on Hong Kong's famous landmark.

Sham images

One way or another, whether by suspending conscious design control, applying complicated transformational techniques or simply ignoring conventions of scale or purpose, all these architects attempt to replicate larger real-world complexities by spurious means. Though the methods employed are purposefully arbitrary they are assumed by their users to impart a legitimacy to their designs that more rational methods would not. Yet the resultant architecture has little to do with the complexities of the real world, especially those of real cities, which arise out of more mundane but genuinely complex processes of decision making. Sim City, the popular computer simulation game, provides a good illustration of these processes. Using computer techniques originally developed by AI researchers, Sim City accurately reproduces the complexities of urban growth. Cellular automata simulate myriad conflicting agents, each one of which may involve basically simple decisions but when multiplied and combined with numerous other agents produces complex outcomes. Bill Erickson explains: '(The game) highlights the fact that designing cities is as much to do with tempting and coercing as it is with planning and that the form of cities derives as much from localised independent actions as it does from grand plans'.

In Sim City, as in the real world, complexity originates in simple events. What is missing in the projects described above are the multiple independent decisions, conflicts and dialogues between different individuals and interest groups which underly real-life growth and development. The use of techniques like superimposition, also favoured by Rem Koolhaas, Jeffrey Kipnis and many others, does nothing to hide the essentially exclusive nature of their designers' approach, which is as much determined by professional ideology as any logocentric practice's. Hailed by Charles Jencks as 'a kind of ultimate democratic method', superimposition is nothing of the sort, and opens up the design process not one iota to any circle or value outside the architects' own. Nor do the method or the designs originate in any self-generated pattern of human activity. Rather, they point to a deep malaise in architecture. Unable to give up their elite status and prima donna ways, or to accept the loss of whatever influence their profession once exercised over urban form, these architects disguise their narrowing concerns by contriving sham images of complexity. Instead of genuine human development or dialogue, what we get is a poor substitute, usually dressed up in obscure language to resist detection. Rather than the open design process which has been claimed for the movement, we get increasing mystification and self-obsession.

TOWARD AN ARCHITECTURE OF DIALOGUE

Open approach

It is questionable how long the architectural profession can sustain the deceits and delusions of these architectural dinosaurs in the wide open, participatory world of the Internet. At one extreme, Friedman and Negroponte's radical vision of a computer-based, democratised architecture of non-architects offers a drastic alternative. It would be tragic, however, if the creative talents of architects were to be lost altogether because of an inability to drop ingrained habits of their class. Other architects like Ralph Erskine, Giancarlo De Carlo, Lucien Kroll and even Charles Moore in his early Californian projects have chosen a genuinely more open and inclusive approach, and encouraged an active dialogue with the users of their residential schemes and other buildings. In the same spirit, the diverse forms of Ivo Waldhor's housing development in Malmo reflect the genuine complexity of full tenant participation in the design process. For single authored designs, Alvar Aalto's heterotropic planning techniques offer an enduring model of how architects can respond to the conflicting demands of complex programmes without resort to random gimickry. Significantly, all of the foregoing designers include a sensitivity to regional difference as an essential part of their approach. The so-called High-Tech school of architects (most designers so tagged never accepted that limited description) have also opened up the profession in their own way by crossing class-ridden professional boundaries to create a collaborative, craft-based architecture rooted in the industries and skills which produce their buildings. The intelligent building concept, which the same architects helped develop, has also contributed substantially to a renewed Modern architecture, responsive both to nature and to its human users. Lately, as with Future Systems' Ark for the Earth Centre project at Doncaster or Ken Yeang's office tower in Kuala Lumpur, buildings have taken on the character as well as the operational capacities of the green machines they are. More Bio-Tech than High-Tech, they suggest their designers are well tuned to both the visible and invisible complexities of the age.

Local space, global mind

Japanese space concepts, which are fundamentally different from the logocentric Western concepts Tschumi et al seek to escape, may provide other valuable lessons. In the Western tradition of geometrically defined space, the designer assumes a more or less passive observer, able to grasp the entire space concept from a static viewpoint. The designer's vision is total and complete in itself; the observer merely partakes of what has been wholly predetermined by someone else. By contrast, the Japanese tradition of movement space assumes a mobile observer and constantly changing viewpoint. In place of a single, unitary view, Sukiya Style houses and gardens offer a series of sequential experiences whose spatial relations are invariably obscured by discontinuous or intervening events. The observer knows where he has been, but not where he is going. Japanese architecture offers up an incomplete world inviting participation. It exists as much in the observer's mind as it does in the designer's, whose work is meaningless without the other's involvement. All this, it may be noted, is achieved in building terms by the use of a basically simple rectangular module, the tatami, used in a loose and irregular fashion. Neither does Japanese architecture pretend to be all things to all men, nor succumb under the weight of its own intricate cosmology. Each building or garden offers a highly localised experience, so that the universal and particular co-exist in subtle and complementary relations appropriate to the scale of the design.

Though Western Modernists were influenced by Japanese architecture, the decentric quality of Japanese space was lost on most of them, including Frank Lloyd Wright, who imposed his own hierarchical compositions and values, negating whatever qualities of openness he strove for. Hans Scharoun recaptured the idea of movement space for postwar Modernism, producing a series of complex sequential spaces which can only be appreciated by passing through them. Preferring non-orthogonal geometries, he also showed they needed just as much, if not more discipline and restraint as conventional forms. At the Berlin Philharmonie, Scharoun achieved in three dimensions what the Japanese had only achieved in a horizontal plane, creating a stunning space in the entrance foyer best experienced when full of strolling concert-goers.

Where Scharoun's spaces represent a conceptual shift from West to East, Tadao Ando's work represents an equivalent shift from East to West. While Ando's handling of movement space and his sensitivity to nature derive from local traditions, his recent compositions strongly resemble those of Russian Constructivists and Suprematists of the 1930s. Like Chernikhov, Leonidov or Malevich, Ando favours simple shapes arranged in a free fashion. The resultant complexity and dynamic quality in his work arises from the tension between the purity and simplicity of the rectangular and circular forms of the different elements, and their free juxtaposition and intersections, which often disrupt the simpler order. However, unlike most Constructivists, and certainly unlike most so-called Deconstructivists, Ando restricts the number of distinct elements and controls their fragmentation in accord with the scale of his programme, and not least with the landscape, to which everything in his architecture answers.

Like the best work of other modern regionalists, Ando's architecture simultaneously reflects both the local space of nature and the global mind of human culture, of which the Internet and cyberspace are now a fast growing part. We have yet to see what kind of architectural dialogue might be produced out of a conjunction of all the technological, social and cultural developments described here. But for the time being, Ando's simple shapes arranged in complex relations provide an appropriate metaphor for the changing world we now inhabit, and for the evolutionary processes which have made it the way it is.