Thursday, February 05, 2004

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.
Philip Johnson

All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.
Philip Johnson
Thus, the task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.
- Erwin Schr�dinger 1887-1961
Kauffman, Stuart
Life emerged, I suggest, not simple, but complex and whole, and has remained complex and whole ever since?not because of a mysterious �lan vital, but thanks to the simple, profound transformation of dead molecules into an organization by which each molecule's formation is catalyzed by some other molecule in the organization. The secret of life, the wellspring of reproduction, is not to be found in the beauty of Watson-Crick pairing, but in the achievement of collective catalytic closure. So, in another sense, life?complex, whole, emergent?is simple after all, a natural outgrowth of the world in which we live.

Stuart Kauffman At Home in the Universe, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp 47-48. Available from Amazon.com

Kauffman, Stuart
If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all.

Stuart Kauffman At Home in the Universe, Oxford University Press, 1995, p 112. Available from Amazon.com

Kauffman, Stuart


Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... Here, each term is the sum of the previous two terms. The phenomenon is well known and called phyllotaxis. Many are the efforts of biologists to understand why pinecones, sunflowers, and many other plants exhibit this remarkable pattern. Organisms do the strangest things, but all these odd things need not reflect selection or historical accident. Some of the best efforts to understand phyllotaxis appeal to a form of self-organization. Paul Green, at Stanford, has argued persuasively that the Fibonacci series is just what one would expects as the simplest self-repeating pattern that can be generated by the particular growth processes in the growing tips of the tissues that form sunflowers, pinecones, and so forth. Like a snowflake and its sixfold symmetry, the pinecone and its phyllotaxis may be part of order for free


Stuart Kauffman At Home in the Universe, Oxford University Press, 1995, p 151. (1) Available from Amazon.com

Bacon, Francis
The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy (science); for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and disgested. Therefore, from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never been made), much may be hoped.

Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Liberal Arts Press, Inc., New York, p 93. (5) Available from Amazon.com

Monday, February 02, 2004

review complexity according to architecture theorists
venturi (of course)
jencks
special review for jencks's Le Corbu interpretation of Ronchamp
sum
review complexity according to complexity scientists
waldrop definition
wikipedia interestingly elaborate version
generated complexity according to holland
complexity and modelling according to cillier
sum
review conceptions use
mention salingaros attempt here
argues complex system assumption
use jasss goldspink's model
use jasss gershenson's model
sum
the model
why voronoi
why "brownian" agent
discussion