Ideas

"People used to say that just as the 20th century had been the century of physics, the 21st

century  would be the century of biology...  We would gradually move into a world whose

prevailing paradigm was one of complexity, and whose techniques sought the co-adapted

harmony of hundreds or thousands of variables.  This would, inevitably, involve new

technique, new vision, new models of thought, and new models of action.  I believe that

such a transformation is starting to occur... To be well, we must set our sights on such a future."

- Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order

Along with many other scholars and scientists, I believe that humanity in our time is, as Buck-minster Fuller put it, in its "final exams" - and we haven't studied enough yet...  If we want our world to thrive in the future, it is incumbent upon all of us to work together, as scholars, as citizens, as professionals and as consumers, to find effective reforms of our unsustainable technologies and patterns of living. 

In so doing we may well discover more satisfying patterns of living...    After all, our enjoyment - our experience of beauty - is a deeply evolved instinct, intimately co-related to our survival and prosperity.  Living well, in other words, has its subjective and objective aspects.

But it is symptomatic of the deeper challenges of our time that we see these things as separate, and we experience beauty and pleasure too often as meaningless additives to "commodities" in a disconnected mechanical system.  That is the disease of abstraction - a particularly serious malady of our time.

But I do believe that a new and more intelligent set of ideas and practices is coming to the fore -- built around the new understanding of nature coming from today's biological sciences.  These new ideas and practices point the way to a more humane alternative to the damaging practices of current technologies - an alternative that can perhaps preserve the basis of prosperity, while redefining and humanizing it, and making it much less wasteful. Though this is a dangerous time, it is an exciting and promising one too.

These new ideas force us to re-think our attitudes to some very old and in some cases timeless ideas as well.  They help us to see that we have built our expectations around a technological "modernity" that is a dangerous illusion, because it ignores and even destroys vital patterns of time, scale and nature.   It is one of many ironies that this idea of "modernity" is really not very modern at all.  It is, more accurately, an obsolete image, a consumer fantasy.  And it is an abstraction that is, quite simply, destroying the world.  We had better find ourselves a new kind of modernity.   

Architecture and the patterns of human settlement are fundamental aspects of the problem.  We cannot address all of our challenges purely with settlement form;  but we cannot address our challenges without addressing settlement form either - or, importantly, the process of its creation.  I believe this is a deeply integrated aspect of the current crisis, and one I have dedicated my own career to try to investigate and move forward in some small measure.   

In that effort, I have written a number of papers and contributed to books on architecture, philosophy and the challenges of the human future, alone or in collaboration with a range of other reform-minded architects and authors, including Christopher Alexander, Andres Duany, Nikos Salingaros, Brian Hanson, Lucien Steil and others.  I have also hosted a number of conferences and master classes on related topics at The Prince's Foundation in London, serving as its first Director of Education, with RIBA President George Ferguson, pioneer of postmodernist theory Charles Jencks, Islamic scholar and philosopher/architect Keith Critchlow, Space Syntax theorist Bill Hillier; and with Alexander, Duany, Hanson, Salingaros and a number of leading UK agencies and organisations active in sustainable development and the required reforms of planning and architecture.  Proceedings of these fascinating and important discussions are archived and may be published in the near future. 

The proceedings of one notable conference are now available. "New Science, New Urbanism, New Architecture" features timely discussions by RIBA President George Ferguson, Space Syntax pioneer Bill Hillier, Postmodernist critic Charles Jencks, Biologist Brian Goodwin, Physicist Philip Ball, and many others.  Click here for the proceedings.  Click here for a report on the conference in Planetizen Web Journal.   

Several individual essays are available at Katarxis3.com, including Meaning and the Structure of Things, The New Modernity, Codes and the Architecture of Life, and a review of Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order.  That journal also has interviews with Alexander and with Andres Duany. 

I have also contributed to essays with other authors, notably the mathematician Nikos Salingaros.  Our joint papers appear at his website and in his book, Anti-architecture and Deconstruction.  Our joint essay with Brian Hanson, Lucien Steil and Nikos Salingaros forms the introduction to Katarxis3.

I have several books in development. Notes on an Incomplete Architecture, discusses new ideas of mathematics and geometry applied to architecture, and their intriguing implications.  The link is to a draft copy presented at the Congress for the New Urbanism 2000 Conference, The Politics of Place, which I helped to organise.  Comments are greatly appreciated.

I have also contributed essays and extended comments to the Pro-urb listserv on urban issues, and to the Tradarch listserv on architectural issues.  Both listservs maintain searchable archives by a fascinating collection of authors, including architects, planners, philosophers, sociologists, engineers, historians, government employees, and others dedicated to effective reforms in planning and architecture.   I am also a member of the Euro-Urb listserv of the Council for European Urbanism; contact them for details.  Lastly, there is an essay on modernism on the excellent INTBAU website, the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism. 

All of these listservs bring together a fascinating group of practitioners and writers from around the world, working together to explore issues of sustainable urbanism and architecture.  We hope you will join our growing collaborative network.

I will post additional written works soon, and otherwise add to this site.  I welcome your comments or inquiries.   Thanks again for your interest.