Quality of Life by Design: The Science of a Structuralist Revolution

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Quality of Life by Design: The Science of a Structuralist Revolution

Introduction

In spite of modernity’s radical technological and social advances—or perhaps precisely because of them—the ancient questions of Hellenic philosophy remain relevant, even urgent. What is reliable knowledge? How do actions bring into being new structures? How can we work with others, and together as a civilization, to produce, and to sustain, a higher quality of life?

For modern design theorists, these are surprisingly dynamic questions. The old topics have certainly been informed, and transformed, by a centuries-long series of mind-boggling scientific discoveries into the structures of nature. These discoveries have also served to reveal logically inherent weaknesses within modern technology itself and its progressive capacity for breakdown and malfunction. Most disheartening, we have witnessed a series of unintended consequences and self-destructive outcomes, stemming directly from our own apparent best intentions and rational efforts. Instead of the hoped-for modernity of rational fulfillment, we are left with a “post-modernity” of geopolitical dysfunction, ecological devastation, and the grim specter of climate change. In this environment, the modern design professions seem to alternate between cynical despair and a manic faith in magical thinking.

And yet, as we shall argue here, within the logic of these scientific discoveries—particularly the more recent discoveries of organized complexity—lie the seeds of regeneration. As we begin to tease apart the secrets of living systems, we can begin to draw useful lessons indeed for the reform of our own failing technologies.

There are on offer, moreover, new ways of decomposing and analyzing the structure of our problems, the better to resolve them. As the urban scholar Jane Jacobs—a theorist we will discuss in more detail below—put it in 1961, one cannot solve a problem until one has come to think about it correctly. Thus the way we think about, say, “the kind of problem a city is,” must correspond to the structure of the problem sufficiently for us to get somewhere in its solution. If it doesn’t —if we have made categorical errors in our own thinking —we will be doomed to a series of intractable and very possibly catastrophic failures.

Thus we return inevitably to the realm of philosophy, and to the principle that “as we think, we live.” For design is a profoundly philosophical activity, at once employing teleology, epistemology, ontology, and logic. And this is a philosophy that, as we shall discuss, has been informed, and profoundly transformed, by the structural revelations of modern science—and vice versa.

Birth in a Cave

Alfred North Whitehead famously observed that the European philosophical tradition can be characterized as “a series of footnotes to Plato.” Plato’s idealism—his understanding of a static class of Forms underlying the varied appearances of form we experience—has left its deep mark on the Western intellect, and nowhere more so than in the modern design professions.

We must recognize, of course, that Plato was not the real beginning of the story, and he owed a profound debt to Pythagoras’ earlier mathematical idealism. Similarly, Plato’s legacy was transformed by Aristotle and others to follow. (As Bertrand Russell put it, Aristotle could be thought of as “Plato with common sense.”) Nonetheless, Plato undoubtedly marks a seminal moment in the history of Western, indeed perhaps human, thought. And one metaphor stands out as most seminal.

It is, of course, the Allegory of the Cave, recounted by Plato in The Republic . We are, Socrates says, like men chained to the floor of a cave, watching only the flickering, ever-changing reflections on the wall before us, cast by unseen puppeteers behind, projected from the light of a great fire. We do not see the real, unchanging objects held by the puppeteers, nor the fire—even less, the bright sun outside the cave. Thus our knowledge of the nature of the world and its objects is derived only from a series of transitory reflections—mere instances—of the real, permanent truth, which we can only uncover slowly, through a kind of “ascent” from the depths of this cave. That ascent begins when we are f reed from our chains, and are able to behold the objects of the puppeteers.

Those objects are, as students of philosophy know, Plato’s eide or Forms: the unseen but “really real” categorical structures that create the shadowy, impermanent perceptions of everyday experience. These are, we later learn, invariant and timeless mathematical and geometric structures, carrying universal aesthetic and moral implications. (It is here that Pythagoras’ earlier mathematical idealism is most keenly felt.) There is a unity to be discovered between the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Thus the allegory encapsulated Plato’s explanation of the central problem of epistemology: the variability of the world around us, the fragmentation and apparent disorder of it, and the incompleteness and even the corruption of our knowledge of it. What we encounter in the world is only a series of reflections of a deeper but no less knowable reality—but one that is precisely ordered and fundamental.

But as later philosophers noted, Plato’s idealism removed the epistemological problem to another realm, but did not get rid of it. After all, it is not clear how we will be any more able to establish the reality of the eide , and ascertain their invariability and completeness. Even if we verify their existence, might they not turn out to be just as shadowy in their own way? (As we shall discuss presently, this was very much the sort of picture that modern science would later offer.)

Plato’s student Aristotle certainly cast the situation in a very different light—though one that still owed much to his great teacher. In his hylomorphism—his theory of matter, hylo- , taking form, morphe —he was still supremely concerned to explain the fact that many objects have the same universal form—many trees all have the form of a tree, and so on. But for Aristotle, the form was not located in a transcendent or unseen realm, but inhered within the object itself, as an instance of a potential universal becoming actual—and it is this, he said, that comprises its substance.

Moreover, this was a process that could repeat at different scales: the substance at one level could become the matter at another. Thus the matter of, say, a house—its bricks—could take on the triangular form of a pediment, or the cubic form of its walls. In turn, these forms could become the constituent matter for still other forms: a house, a city, and so on.

In this rudimentary Structuralist account—which, like Plato’s, would become profoundly influential—Aristotle began to describe a logic of mereology: the way parts relate to wholes. This is a topic that we will return to as one of central importance in modernity—all the more so, as the technology of modernity greatly magnifies the number of constituents, and the complexity of their relationships.

As noted, both Plato’s and Aristotle’s accounts owe much to the earlier Pythagoras and his mathematical “music of the spheres”—his faith that precise ratios underlay the orderly structures of the cosmos, and indeed, the order of all that is good and beautiful. Thus the mathematical properties of the forms -- their proportions, their adherence to unchanging mathematical laws, and so on -- were considered fundamental. In fact the five regular solids discovered by Pythagoras and his followers are now called “Platonic solids.”

In Plato’s case, however, such geometric forms were extrinsic, part of a transcendent reality, while for Aristotle they were intrinsic, the universal structural fundamentals of substance. This shift to the structures of daily experience is widely regarded as a watershed event in the history of philosophy, and earns Aristotle the title of “the father of empiricism.” But importantly for our discussion, it was an empiricism anchored in a no less Platonic kind of “fundamentalism of form.” In both cases, the categories of form (whether seen as ideals or universals) were fundamental, aggregate constituents.

This is a view of form that, in both cases, sees a particular form as reducible to simpler forms, and ultimately, to a primary and eternal set of mathematical forms and ratios. It follows that the act of creating form is the reverse: a kind of hierarchical process of applying primary structures according to correct rules of proportion, scale, fitness and so on—which, if executed correctly, delivered the Good, the True and the Beautiful, as part of a single ordered process.

Idealism and Hylomorphism in Early Modern Theory

This essentially reductionist view of structure held powerful sway over the coming tradition of Western science and provided the mental framework to unlock a long series of astonishing secrets of nature—to say nothing of the prodigious industrial advances that ensued. But it slowly became clear that this reductionism was also, as we will discuss presently, not the entire story, and some of the minor bits left out are much more critical than we realized—a revelation that we are grappling with still today.

But in the meantime, this structural reductionism also held powerful sway over designers and architects for generations to come—and over their most influential theorists. For example, it can be seen clearly in the writings of Vitruvius in the Classical era, and his doctrine that architecture is the imitation of nature, and of its fundamental patterns—culminating in his conception of the“Vitruvian Man,” later drawn by Leonardo da Vinci: the human figure, decomposed into the square and the circle. It can also be seen clearly in Alberti’s early Renaissance classic De Re Aedificatoria , which also echoed Plato, Aristotle and Vitruvius, and described a fundamental ordering of circles, squares, and harmonic relations between them.

Indeed, the same reductionism can be seen readily from the writings of the most influential early Modernists—and in fact they took this reductionism to a remarkable extreme. Perhaps this reflected an over-confidence in the late nineteenth century, that the gifts of technological modernity, expressing the logical rigor and progressive spirit of the Enlightenment, had finally delivered on the ultimate promise of Hellenic rationality. The payoff was at hand.

Here is Le Corbusier’s critique of Gothic architecture, presenting a remarkably Aristotelian argument that, in essence, Gothicism gets its hylomorphism all wrong:

The geometrical fundamentalism of the phrase “great primary forms” is striking. But if “a cathedral is not very beautiful,” then what is beautiful, and why? For Le Corbusier, it is those structures that arise directly from the Platonic fundamentals of mathematical calculation—like American grain elevators:

This picture is in contrast to the usual opposition of Modernism to Classicism. Certainly the former emphasis on ornament and decoration was stripped away, replaced by a new minimalist celebration of the logic of the machine. But the understanding of architecture as a composition of primary forms, bound by the timeless Pythagorean laws of mathematics, is consistent throughout. Indeed, Modernism’s central narrative of the “end of history”—its faith in an arrival beyond the messiness of happenstance, delivered by logic and reason into a new age of mechanical perfection, can now be seen for the Hellenic idealism that it is. At last, we would achieve the rational ordering of our buildings, our machines, our very culture, in a glorious flowering of rational modernity.

Incompleteness, Uncertainty, and Complexity

And yet, at precisely the moment that architects were celebrating the triumph of reason in the new modernity, scientists and philosophers were busy making new discoveries that had a devastating effect upon it. These discoveries came inexorably from the further teasing out of the complex structure of things, in fields such as biology, physics, information theory and—most disheartening for logical idealists—mathematics and logic itself.

In 1912, Whitehead and his Cambridge colleague Bertrand Russell, in their classic treatise Principia Mathematica , attempted to lay out a reductionist scheme for all of logic and mathematics. Their result is widely considered to be one of the most important works of mathematical logic since Aristotle. But Kurt Gödel, in an earth-shaking 1931 paper, managed the neat trick of using the machinery of Whitehead’s and Russell’s logical scheme to disprove itself—more specifically, to prove that in spite of their intended aim, and whatever else its merits, their work is and must be logically “incomplete.” More than that, he managed to prove that any such system must be, at least to some degree, “incomplete.”

The implications, developed in further papers and in philosophical work since, were staggering. There can be no perfect blueprint of nature, no reductive model to fully explain the logical structure of things. This would seem to be a powerful blow to Platonic idealism, and no less, to Aristotelian hylomorphism.

At the same time, physicists were observing very strange behavior at the subatomic level, with powerful implications for the rest of nature’s structure. Far from assuring us, in Platonic fashion, of an unseen solid realm, experimental results seemed to point the way to ever more impermanence, endless variability, and even randomness. With each new discovery, the universe looked more and more complicated, more and more a cloud-like shower of energy particles (or were they waves?) that only temporarily coalesce into “things” or forms, and then fly off to coalesce into other things, following complex pattern-like rules. (This seemed to echo an earlier and decidedly non-Platonic theme in Hellenic thought, the dynamicism of Heraclitus.)

The lessons of biology were no less astounding, and humbling for fundamental reductionists. We ourselves turn out to be vast-trillion-member societies of semi-independent, cooperating micro-organisms, few of whom live longer than about seven years. (In fact every one of those cells contains two separate symbiotic organisms with separate genetic histories.) And while we do seem to be generated from simpler processes, the whole scheme is not at all the neat picture of an earlier age, but rather, one of coded transformations and interactions of stupendous complexity. The cells, rather than forming “top-down” according to neat divisions and assignments, seem to know how to “self-organize” into over-arching patterns that tend to resemble the primary forms of mathematics, but do not conform at all precisely. (For example, we have a sphere-like, but not precisely spherical, structure in our eyes, and a cylinder-like, but not precisely cylindrical, structure in our fingers, and so on).

Whitehead himself helped to articulate important outlines of a new “Structuralist” (or “process”) philosophy that was rooted more in the workings of processes over time—generators of endless varieties of form whose products bore the marks of this diachronic and evolutionary process. In his later work he outlined a “process philosophy” that could explain the cloud-like particulate forms of nature that were more consistent with the powerful new picture emerging from the sciences—described in books such as Process and Reality and Science and the Modern World . And he sought to explain the relation of our own ideas to these realities of process, and the dangers of confusion that lay therein, in books like Modes of Thought and Adventures of Ideas .

The Post-Modernist Debacle

Gradually, of course, these ideas seeped into everyday life—and, ultimately, our understanding of culture, the arts, and architecture. We came to see that we live in a less than rational world, where accidental political events could result in nuclear annihilation, or unintended economic forces could result in a global depression. Worse, even our own beautiful technological structures could malfunction in horrendous but unforeseen ways, and deliver not utopia, but pollution, ecological destruction, climate change, and economic decay.

A series of disastrous failures of modernist architectural and urbanist projects—insightfully critiqued by a generation of scholars like Jane Jacobs—reached a crisis point in the 1960s and 1970s. The achievements of rationality and logic had culminated in the modern technology of city-making: but it had not delivered utopia, but a persistent fragmentation, disorder and decay. There was a flaw in the neatly ordered system—and it was not merely in its surface application, but increasingly, could be seen to reside at the logical core of it. Gödel’s critique seemed to apply to the very logic of modernism: it was fatally, catastrophically, incomplete.

The ensuing counter-reaction to modernism was dubbed, of course, “postmodernism:” marked by an abandonment of the fundamentalist quest for ideals of form, and a return to the diachronic qualities of language and narrative. Architecture would now be a kind of story that a civilization tells about itself: highly symbolic, self-referential, ironic. The failure of Hellenic rationality would itself become part of the story.

The postmodernist critique of modernism was articulated particularly clearly by the architect Rem Koolhaas, in his essay, “Whatever Happened to Urbanism:”

This postmodernism in art and architecture was mirrored by a post-structuralism in philosophy, built upon an empirical and even logical suspicion of the presumed powers of knowledge and reason. It, too, had its roots deep in the story of Western philosophy. It owed a particular debt to Immanuel Kant’s earlier philosophy of Transcendental Idealism—itself a confrontation with the evident limits of knowledge.

Kant’s Transcendental Idealism can be thought of as a kind of inversion of Plato’s idealism. We do experience something roughly like Platonic forms, in a sense—in the experienced structures of words and ideas—but they are to be treated as a priori categories of mind, and not, in any sense deeper realities of the world—which, even if they existed, could never be understood except through the very same categories of mind. Thus, if we wanted to be logical, we must begin there in the realm of mind—and we must inevitably find ourselves trapped there. Ontology is forever bounded by epistemology.

The Post-structuralists went a step farther, taking as their departure point the linguistic structuralism of anthropology. But whereas Structuralists like Saussure and Levi-Strauss saw language as a malleable tool for the anchoring of an external meaning within a culturally variable structure, Post-structuralists like Derrida and Foucault dispatched with external meaning altogether, and focused instead on the relative ways in which cultures and their sub-groups construct narratives of “meaning” (or reliable knowledge, or truth) as a wholly synthetic structural process. Echoing the tension between Plato and Aristotle, they dispensed with any external concept of meaning, and (if they considered it at all) saw it as something that inhered within the structure, and the structural differences, of language itself.

The Post-structuralists also saw the ways that different groups use this construction process to gain political control of one another, by imposing the structural narratives by which cultural meanings are defined. Thus the task of a philosopher is now to analyze this construction, and deconstruct it into its constituents so as to expose its inner workings. We may not be able to determine the relative merits of one set of meanings over another—indeed, that would be “privileging” one group of constructors over another—but we can certainly reveal the hegemony of one group and its constructions (say, colonial powers) over the constructions of others (say, indigenous peoples).

In architecture and the arts, this philosophy expressed itself in acts of deconstruction of the narrative texts of power: exposing the constructions of power elites, so as to fuel an art of liberation. Thus we may decry the concentration of corporate power—perhaps finding it even among our own clientele, if we are architects—but we can still “deconstruct” this reality, and reveal it within our art. This kind of art may not be transcendent in any metaphysical sense—nor does it any longer claim to be. Rather, it is meant to derive an emotional power from its cathartic eloquence. If we cannot fix the world, we can at least understand its hidden structure, and celebrate its revelation.

Post-structuralism was thus a logical evolutionary step, and a useful cautionary narrative on the powers of reason. Like a good Zen koan , it served to break the spell of ideas over those who applied them too rigidly—in particular, the demonstrably specious claims of some philosophical absolutists (including some neo-Platonists) to have “got it right.” But beyond describing these limits, it did not go very far in explaining to us what is really going on with language, and its structural relation to the emerging scientific picture of nature—and in particular, the evident phenomenon of biological intelligence.

Indeed, there are fundamental logical flaws with the Post-structuralist account that leave it, at best, highly compromised in its ability to provide a useful explanation of what is going on in the structure of things—at least beyond the narrow confines of cultural creativity. In its logically purest form, its doctrine against external meaning and truth is ultimately self-contradictory, since, as Gödel showed, any account—even a self-referential one like the Post-structuralists’—must refer to an externality, with all the same logical vulnerabilities that inevitably implies. It matters not that the externality happens to be itself.

This categorical confusion leaves the Post-structuralists with the inability to form a coherent theory of even what they themselves are doing , and how it applies to any “thing”—even their own construction—beyond a kind of elaborate word-game. But the process of science requires that we posit a structural model of “what is going on”—and then test that model for conformance, revision, and refinement. Thus we are required to have a meta-model of fidelity, or what some call “the ring of truth”—which is not the same thing as absolute congruence with truth. Thus, in its essentially all-or-nothing form, the epistemological doctrine of Post-structuralism is at best severely limited in its empirical usefulness, and at worst, fundamentally irreconcilable with a coherent scientific project.

One may deny the validity of such a scientific project, of course—or, like many Post-structuralists, argue that it is merely one more constructed narrative. But that seems charmingly oblivious to the practical urgency of the situation at hand. We are rather like passengers in a car that we ourselves have made, and we are finding it unusually hard to steer. Should we now propose to stop steering altogether, because we have found error, partiality, and bias in the car’s manual? This seems at best an over-reaction, and at worst, a kind of pervasive logical confusion about the useful, if imperfect, role of language. (We will discuss this “useful imperfection” in more detail below.)

Indeed, a more coherent picture of the situation is now being conveyed by fields like neuroscience and information theory, which have brought new insights into the workings of language and the brain, and their place in the structure of nature. We suggest that this amounts to a revived Structuralist account of what is going on—bringing with it a series of profound new implications.

Structuralism Reconsidered

Albert Einstein famously remarked that “the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” The world is not an impenetrable fog, nor are we prisoners in and of our own minds. Rather, we can tease out a reliable (if always partially incomplete) account of the structure of what is really going on, to a remarkable, even astonishing, degree. It is simply the case that nature does not give up its secrets easily, and the process of teasing out what is going on is immense. But fortunately for us, this process has culminated in recent years with a breathtaking kind of consilience—and a most useful one.

Perhaps nowhere do these developments have more practical effect than in the theory of mereology. Aristotle’s understanding of hylomorphism has been greatly deepened, and in some cases turned on its head, by over two millennia of discoveries into the universal atomic and molecular structure of the world. There is no real place for fundamental essence to enter the picture, nor any need for it to: the universe is perfectly comprehensible as an endless compositional structure. But this composition is not merely additive, but, in an important sense, transformative and inter-relational. We will discuss below the profound significance of this revelation.

Similarly, it is possible to make a perfectly useful description of the structure of the brain, and its relation to various problem-solving and representative functions of the animal (that is, ourselves). We can note interesting and useful structural relationships and isomorphic properties, without respect to any metaphysical or ontological assumptions.

This “New Structuralism” (or it could be called “Symmetric Structuralism,” for reasons that will be come apparent) is distinguished from the original most notably in its emphasis on process, and the complex symmetric transformations that occur within it. As Jean Piaget, a notable figure in this school of thought, put it in 1968, “there exists no structure without a construction, abstract or genetic.” Moreover, as we shall see, the new understanding of structure can even find a structural home for value, meaning, agency, choice—those things that are thought of as exclusionary opposites of what had been assumed to be an inherently determinist structural perspective. But it is in the new structures revealed by modern science that things get very interesting indeed.

We begin with the Neuro-structuralist’s view of the human brain. What is particularly useful about this picture of things is that the structure of the brain and its activities—let us assume, the equivalent of the mind, seen from beyond our own first-person perspective—is a structure in the world like any other, and it is not necessary to posit a transcendental realm of the mind, or of ideal forms, to explain what is going on in a plausible way. Such a realm may or may not exist; it is simply unnecessary to account for it from this perspective on things.

Furthermore, the relation between this structure of the brain and that of the rest of the world can now be seen to have an important relational structure in its own right. For one thing, there is a fundamental characteristic of partial symmetry. That is, the structures of the brain do have partial isomorphic correspondences with the structures of reality. These correspondences have their origin in the transformations of structures through symmetric progressions, beginning with the most direct kinds (say, instantaneous flashes of activity corresponding to instantaneous threats in the external world) and progressing to much more speculative threats (say, evasive patterns of instinctive behavior in response to a possible threat that is more remote, such as the agitated evasions of animal herds at the mere sight of a predator).

A similar thing can be seen to be going on in a more articulated form within language, its structure, and its structural processes. Indeed, the more we understand it, the more language seems to be a form of useful “software” running on our mental hardware, and, so to speak, written in its operating code. And language, too, displays this “progressive symmetry”—from vocalizations that originally stood for the patterns of events in nature, e.g. the glissandos of expectation and curiosity, the staccatos of action) to more sophisticated symmetric verbal elements and grammars, describing progressively more complex conditions within the world (including complex philosophical discussions like this one).

Language as the Architecture of Possibility

Thus, we arrive at a notion of language as a kind of model-making activity—mirroring and modeling some part of the world that is of interest to us. But these models are not static, but in fact define the realm of our action and possibility. Moreover, in doing so, they actually generate new possibility, as a real logical feature of the structure of nature within that landscape. And in that generation are the seeds of choice, and what is generally identified as free will.

This is an important but little-appreciated point. To bring the point home, let us consider an example. X informs Y that Y can catch the bus on the other side of the street, but only when the hand on X’s watch passes between these two marks. Y then asks, “Can I catch another bus later?” “Yes,” X reports that Y can catch another one in another hour; or Y can catch another one down that street in two hours.

X and Y have both just built a dynamic model of Y’s bus-catching that is relevant and useful on that day. In constructing that model, they have defined new possibilities—and in so doing, in this exceedingly simple example, they have actually generated them.

Y has no possibility of catching a bus that Y doesn’t know is coming—or more precisely, but what is virtually the same thing, Y has infinite numbers of small random possibilities, including stumbling upon that bus at that hour; but that logical possibility is, like most others, vanishingly remote. Similarly, Y can discover a network of other possibilities that can be generated only through the dynamics of language. It is only through the power of language, the power of such mental symmetries creating systemic relationships, that X and Y have defined this particular—and, for them, novel—architecture of possibility.

It is in this generative power that we have also identified an architecture of choice, and of agency. For the linguistic power to generate possibility has also generated the possibility of selection. We have arrived at the old philosophic value of free choice, set loose from its anchor in a deterministic structure.

But one might object, are not the structures of the language, like the structures of the world, determining the outcomes? Why is this no less a matter of “reading a script written in advance”? It is at this point that the new sciences of complexity offer us two very useful and related insights.

One is the notion that the complex interconnectivity of a system creates ambiguity and multiple potential—or, in more familiar terminology, freedom. An example may be helpful, in the familiar children’s game, Rock, Paper, Scissors. These are three interactive elements within this system. Which is superior? Rock is superior to scissors, which is superior to paper, which is superior to rock. Any two couplings are unambiguous; but the system overall is ambiguous, because of these circular (but in fact purely structural) linkages.

This kind of ambiguity created by multiple inter-linkage is precisely what distinguishes complex systems from simple ones.

But one might object, if we know the initial state of the system, why can’t we determine the next step unambiguously? If we know the current object is a rock, for example, then we also know unambiguously that the next object will be inferior if scissors, and superior if paper.

But this is the second point from the sciences of complexity: in a non-trivial complex system, it is impossible to know precisely the initial set of conditions. This is the familiar principle of sensitivity to (unknowable) initial conditions. Although it seems possible, looking in rear-view fashion, to determine a course of events based upon initial conditions, it is (probably) impossible to represent initial conditions with absolute precision. And in a deterministic analysis of behavior of any but the most trivially complex systems, absolute precision is required. But in fact, absolute precision can never be achieved.

The proof of this can be found, once again, in Kurt Gödel’s 1931 paper, and a series of follow-up papers. Not only was Principia Mathematica necessarily incomplete—that is, incapable of representing even itself with absolute precision—but any such system must be equally incomplete. We cannot distill down to an “absolute blueprint” of the initial conditions.

In essence Gödel relied upon a kind of “Epimenides’ Paradox”—showing that any such system is capable of saying, in effect, “I am lying to you now.” But this is a logically untenable state of affairs, of course: if the system is lying, then it is telling the truth; if it is telling the truth, then it is lying! The problem is that in essence we are failing to account for the regressive nature of abstractions. Every abstraction is a secondary structure, only partially symmetrical with the first. It is not possible to get an abstraction that is completely congruent with its subject. This is true even if the subject is itself.

Moreover, it would not be of much use even if it were . A typically wonderful Lewis Carroll story demonstrates this clearly on an intuitive level. In the children’s tale Sylvie and Bruno Concluded , our protagonists meet a man from another country, who tells them about his country’s efforts to greatly improve the accuracy of their maps. As the maps get more and more complete, they become as large as the regions they represent. Finally they make the ultimate map, as large as the country itself! But do they use it much?

This delightfully absurd little fable reminds us that in order to be useful, maps—abstractions, models, linguistic structures, knowledge—must be in some sense different than, and indeed, simpler than, the regions they represent. Gödel’s incompleteness is not a defect of knowledge, but an essential and highly useful characteristic of it— but it is we who are already doing the selection and the omission . As Whitehead noted, “an abstraction is nothing other than an omission of part of the truth.” (Whitehead, 1938)

Moreover, there is another major fly in the ointment of initial conditions. It is nothing other than ourselves. As the physicist Werner Heisenberg noted, first in a “hard” principle of quantum physics and later as a more general epistemological principle, we can never fully write ourselves, the observers, out of the observations. Our impenetrable subjectivity, uncertainty and ambiguity are unavoidably and a priori part of the initial conditions at any point.

It is here that the essence of our own agency lies, in our own irreducible, uncomputable, undecidable participation . Any valid scientific description of what is going on must ultimately take this situation into account, as an a priori condition. All facts are derivative of this truth: we are embedded participants.

This is not bad news; indeed, it is the best possible news. It gives us ever more choice: meaningful choice. It means that we can make useful abstractions, and abstractions of abstractions, and grand and powerful theories—and that they can be extremely useful to us, in defining, and creating, new architectures of real possibility—real, because our choices are real, and our ability to cause them to occur is real.

This also means that we must be aware of the limitations of abstractions, and their fundamental derivative nature. Furthermore, we must be aware of the dangers of their seductive accuracy (too easily confused with perfection), and the perpetual tendency to become lost in the abstractions, and fail to understand their perpetual (if often undetectable) incongruences, limitations, and derivations. We may become lost in what Wittgenstein called “the bewitchment of intelligence by means of language.” As Whitehead noted in his remarkable book Modes of Thought , we must ensure “a right adjustment of the process of abstraction.”

A Structuralist Reinterpretation of Idealism and Hylomorphism

What can we conclude now about the primary forms, going back to Plato and Pythagoras? What of proportion and harmony, and their possible echoes in the moral order of things?

It might appear that they have been destroyed for good, or at best, left as simplified constructions of language, or of the mind. But if we remember that language tends to have symmetrical correspondences with the structure of nature, we may not be so surprised to learn that oddly similar kinds of structures have returned, in a very different set of circumstances.

The new emphasis on pattern-like structures has made us aware of certain recurrent classes of structural outlines that get created as a result of certain kinds of patterning processes. A structure moving otherwise freely about a fixed length fixed at the end (relative to other structures) is limited by that length to delimit a kind of shell structure that takes on a characteristic pattern: a dome or sphere or hemisphere. A structure moving freely along the length of a tensioned cord and around it as an axis delimits a cylinder. And so on.

We need not posit a transcendent realm of such structures, other than to say that they are patterns that are consistently created by the interactive movements of other patterns—and made comprehensible by the symmetrical patterns of our own language and thinking. They are no more “independently real” than the word “sphere” is real, except as a generative possibility. But so are vast numbers of other structures. These are simply structures that we find of particular interest, because they have a particularly simple and comprehensible genesis.

Moreover, the power of modern biology and mathematics is in its ability to move along a progression of complexity to much more esoteric structures—which, nonetheless, can also be comprehended through such a process of linguistic symmetry-mapping.

A particularly fascinating (and representative) example is what is known as an attractor. If one graphs complex phenomena according to their variable constituents (e.g. position, density, or other characteristics) it is often observed to be the case that certain patterns form around particular regions of the graph, for reasons that are not always obvious. These “attractor basins” are in fact similar to the limits of a radius that describes a sphere, but they are often much more complex and esoteric versions of the same kind of phenomenon. Indeed, some of these are so complex and odd that they have been dubbed “strange attractors”—quite odd graphical shapes that nonetheless take on strongly defined patterns (swirls, toruses, etc).

It turns out that such attractors occur all over the place—and they appear to be very important characteristics of the way things work, notably in biological processes. They are in fact the structures of the characteristic patterns that form within nature as the result of complex adaptive processes.

The biologist Brian Goodwin proposed that such “structural attractors” played a key role in the formation of biological structures within evolution. A dolphin’s dorsal fin, for example, took on a characteristic but very complex shape as the result of highly complex interactions of turbulence processes in water, laminar flows and so on. The dolphin was solving the problem (or more accurately, the dolphin’s evolutionary process was solving the problem) with a characteristic geometry, that was defined as the limit of the solution, just as the radius of a string defines the limit of a sphere. The shark, evolving from an entirely different animal class some 300 million years earlier, produced the nearly identical structure—for no other reason than that the complexity of the problem defined a similar structural attractor.

Going back to Plato, was the shape of a dorsal fin a timeless form, existing in some unseen realm? No, certainly not: it was a pattern that formed for comprehensible reasons, but one that formed repeatedly and consistently. We could name that pattern, and find use in the naming (i.e. repeated instances of application, or characteristic symmetries). The pattern may not be decomposable—and yet, it was comprehensible, through this new lens of nature.

Such patterns also have their counterpart in what physicists refer to as symmetry-breaking. A perfectly symmetrical universe would have no pattern at all: indeed, it would be a very dull place! But introduce a tiny break in that symmetry—a kind of grit within the oyster, so to speak—and fascinating things begin to happen. (This can be seen in a simple mathematical analogue, in the computer program called “Life”—a series of cells following rules “do nothing” until one tiny change is made in one cell—and instantly, a vast pattern is created across the screen.)

In a sense, this is a return to Plato’s idealism, and to Aristotle’s hylomorphism—but with a very different twist. We are not appealing to any fundamental set of forms that are at the decomposable root of things, but rather, we are identifying a set of recurrent patterns that can be classed according to their tendency to coalesce into relative simplicity, or into what we may term “order.” A sphere is indeed simpler than a dorsal fin—but they are both the same kind of structure within reality. They are both generated by the interactions of ultimately comprehensible structures. (Though in the case of the dorsal fin, that takes a great deal of time and effort.)

There is even an implied resolution of the age-old mystery of the “place” of mathematics. Is it, as Pythagoras suggested, a fundamental level of reality underlying all we see? This is no longer necessary: we can see the world instead as an inter-related field of isomorphic structures transforming in time. Thus the mathematical laws and categories of order are not residing in an unseen realm, but instead, are generated simpler structures that arise from the interactions of other more complex structures. They are, in effect, limit domains of generative possibility. They are symmetrical features (exhibiting partial symmetry-breaking) within the world of structure and process. They are, in a word, patterns.

But what is the ultimate reality of such a “pattern,” then, as a distinct entity with generative possibility? And what is the ultimate reality of “possibility” itself? As far as we are concerned, ultimately these are “only” abstractions within our own brains (or in our computers, or on our papers.) But these are no less “real” structures in the world . It is our participatory interest in this isomorphic relationship—and our active deletion of parts of the reality in the isomorphism, through our powers of language and thought—that crea tes its generative power.

It is in the categorical confusion between what is “real” as a structure at the level at which our biological interest (and a priori participation) is usefully concerned, and the secondary or tertiary (or beyond) levels of abstractive self-reference, that the trouble begins. The trouble is in the seductive appearance of fundamental completeness, which does not exist.

So we can finally dispense with an external, transcendent realm of Forms , and shift our understanding to that of patterns . But in a powerful echo of Aristotle, Plato, and Pythagoras, we can classify these forms, or patterns, usefully, and see them as primary orders within certain contexts (again, being careful that we understand these abstractions for what they are, and taking care not to make categorical or fundamentalist errors).

Certainly these forms are primary with respect to the composition of a dolphin’s body, say, or a shark’s. And they are primary with respect to their repetition over time, and their ontogeny within an organism. Genetically speaking, they appear to be primary with respect to certain genome or proteome sequences within embryogenesis, which express themselves in the familiar form. They appear to originate as primary patterns within these structures.

Very interesting work suggests that these genetic sequences may in fact be clusters of pattern-like genetic sequences, functioning to bud and fold and shape dorsal fin structures, not unlike the sequences of origami. For example, Newman and Bhat (2008) have proposed a pattern-based model for the genesis of the Cambrian Explosion, which seems to offer a plausible (and very intriguing) model for the hylomorphic evolution of multi-cellular form.

If we are designers making houses, we might identify a corollary. Let us describe, for example, the shape of a column. Why does it exist as it does? We can ascertain structural tensions on its base and top that call for thickening at these points. We can describe efficient shapes that call for tapering of the shafts, or stiffening using rib-like flutes. We can describe the psychological needs of human beings who are in the presence of these columns, who may find a deep and pleasing biological resonance in their tree-like structure. This description of a column can amount to a structural attractor within architecture—and indeed, we can see columns with precisely this set of characteristics in cultures around the world.

We can now turn to larger structures—let us say, a porch structure -- and consider similar questions. How does it connect the building to the public realm? What relation do people have with the street when they are within it, and simultaneously with the building? Are they able to interact with other people on the street, while having a sense of safe refuge, combined with an appealing sense of prospect? Does this add to the civic quality of the neighborhood?

And do the columns of such a porch also take on the shapes described above, which add to the psychological and structural coherence of the porch? Have we defined a structural type—a structural attractor of “porch” which has certain recurrent problem-solving value?

It becomes apparent that such recurrent patterns may have great value—if seen as such—and as elements that have components (columns, say) and that in turn combine into still larger elements (buildings, say). We need not take a rigidly hierarchical view of how such forms are composed, or pose a transcendent or fundamental class, but we can still see that there is a nested relationship between these recurrent and re-usable patterns—at least partially so. It presents us with a highly useful opportunity to make adaptive transformations of whole structures.

This Symmetric Structuralist view of nature does not diminish the capacity for meaning and value within a world of structure. On the contrary, as we will discuss in more detail below, it enriches the meaning and value of structure itself. Structure is thus not some dead shell: it is the domain where the phenomenon of life as we know it arises—and along with it, the related phenomena of quality, meaning and value.

And it appears to do so through the patterning of the interconnected wholes of structure, rather than through a simply conceived atomic assembly. The latter is a derivative abstraction. The former is, quite literally, where life happens—indeed, where we ourselves, living beings, already find ourselves immersed. Meaning is structural, and structure is meaningful. And there is much to say about how all this works, and how we may apply it to our own activities.

Christopher Alexander: Mereology in practice

It’s likely that no architect illustrates—or indeed, develops—these ideas better than the mathematician-architect Christopher Alexander. Trained in physics and mathematics at Cambridge, Alexander was granted the first PhD in architecture at Harvard, which became his first book, Notes on the Synthesis of Form . It was hailed at the time, and still is to this day, as a landmark treatise in design theory. It launched him on his life’s work in mereology, a modern exploration of the relation between parts and wholes, and the structure of wholes—and thus, “wholeness” itself, as a structurally comprehensible phenomenon.

At the time the subject was the elements of a design problem, and how they may be solved through solution configurations that he called diagrams (and later, patterns). The context was the dawning of the cybernetic age, and the manifest problem of complexity in human technology—and in nature itself. (The cybernetic pioneer Herbert Simon, at M.I.T. with Alexander as a young grad student, had two years earlier written his landmark paper on the same topic, “The Architecture of Complexity.”)

But the ultimate subject was none other than Aristotle’s hylomorphism, updated for technological modernity. Essentially Alexander asks, do parts simply “make” wholes, in some additive or compositional sense? Clearly not: the whole is somehow greater than the sum of the parts. Moreover, the whole in a sense makes the parts as much as the reverse. (This is particularly true for biological processes. We would not say that the leaves “make” the tree—on the contrary, it’s clear that through a process of differentiation, the tree makes the leaves!)

Where things get particularly sticky is in the way the parts and wholes propagate out to other parts of the environment, and come back to interact in unexpected ways—a manifestly complex affair. How can this complexity be distilled down usefully to a salient “diagram,” without losing some essential connectivity? For designers and technologists, how can we decompose this complexity—not to assume it is merely a reductive aggregation, but rather, so as to manage it effectively?

What Alexander observed was that the sets of diagrams—which as noted, he later termed “patterns”—were not perfectly nested into tree-like hierarchies. On the contrary, they contained subtle but important characteristics of “semi-lattices,” or redundant networks—a property he called “overlap.” This relatively small feature, easy to overlook, is not an accidental defect, but a critical property of natural systems—particularly living systems. Somehow, we needed to be sure our processes of diagramming and generating—our processes of using human abstractions—engaged this structural quality.

The consequences of failing to do so could be seen when looking at structures like cities—as Alexander showed in his classic 1965 paper “A City is Not a Tree.” He showed that cities also display this critical property of overlap, or “semi-lattice structure”. But planned cities often lack the property—which, Alexander argued, accounts for their higher rates of failure and dysfunction. He did so through a brilliant set of simple examples and analyses of catastrophic failures of modern “planned” cities—thereby providing a comprehensible structural explanation for a critical modern failure. The paper was widely hailed as a landmark, but its core message was sadly ignored by most urban designers.

But this insight had important implications for design at many levels—and an important implication for Platonic idealism. One could “nearly decompose” a design problem (to use Herbert Simon’s apt phrase) to useful effect, but one could never go so far as to reduce the problem to a purely elemental scheme without losing some essential vital attributes of the system. As Gödel showed, there can be no perfect blueprint of reality.

Further work on patterns

Alexander then asked the next question: how can we create a design tool or method that explicitly incorporates these overlaps, and generates these network-like attributes? His answer was what he called a “pattern language”—a structure of design elements that has hierarchical properties, but also network properties and the potential for overlap and ambiguity. The reference to language is more than an analogy since languages also have the same combination of hierarchy-like overall form with the capacity for overlap, networks of meaning, and even intentional ambiguity. Indeed, this is what marks the distinction between a mere list of facts, or grammatical statement of the ordinary, and the power of literature or poetry. But something like this happens in ordinary circumstances too, Alexander argued, in the creation of ordinary environments and the ordering of ordinary events of human life.

This kind of ordering, he argued, did proceed routinely in human affairs as a matter of instinct. But in our modern (and neo-Hellenic) effort to be rational, we could too easily strip away this complex level of order, and leave ourselves greatly impoverished. Moreover, we could experience potentially catastrophic failures in our designs, no matter how well-intended, resulting in an increasingly unsustainable condition for technology and for civilization. Alexander’s design theory was beginning to take on the outlines of a critique of technological modernity itself.

His book A Pattern Language (1978) described a series of design patterns that could be combined in more robust, overlapping ways, and it was meant for amateur users as well as professional architects. (Indeed, to some extent Alexander consciously bypassed the profession of architects, which did not endear him to many of them.) Alexander also published The Timeless Way of Building around the same time, framing the broader theoretical argument for patterns, and for the evolution of a more life-like technology.

Both books proved hugely influential, and often beyond the realm of architecture. One of the most surprising was the world of computer software engineering, where “design patterns” have now become ubiquitous—to be found in most games, in the Apple Mac operating system, in iPhones, and in the logic of Wiki and Wikipedia. (This is a fascinating story that deserves more discussion; for those interested, there is an account in Mehaffy, “Horizons of Pattern Languages,” In Patterns, Pattern Languages and Sustainability: Symposium Proceedings, University of Oregon Foundation, May 2010).

Mereology, Wholeness and Quality

But Alexander wanted to go deeper—into the workings of life itself, and its processes of creating form. What could we learn from the new scientific insights into these processes? What could we learn about how living systems achieve complexity, sustainability, even great beauty—doing so with prodigious quantities and at prodigious scales, through the marvelous working s of self-organization? What are the implications for modern human technology? The new insights of science were offering tantalizing new clues.

Alexander spent the next twenty-five years pursuing these questions—both by synthesizing the work of others and by pursuing his own phenomenological work—and he came up with several key conclusions.

First, living systems do not use anything like a “little blueprint” or set of Platonic forms. Rather, they use coded processes to generate form, and these function rather like step-wise recipes. Though these processes can become dizzyingly complex in their iterative compounding, at heart they are relatively simple algorithms and can be understood in a fully rational way.

But second, these processes are transformational, and cannot be “run in reverse” in most cases (except as a simplifying abstraction, which inevitably loses important parts of the story). The transformations introduce progressive differentiation through the breaking of the symmetrical states that existed previously (e.g. a round egg splits and becomes a linear structure). And as this process unfolds, all of the parts are, to varying degrees, mutually adapting to one another—including parts that are not within the same originating cluster. This creates (to often small but important degrees) the quality of “overlap,” and the network of inter-connections that is characteristic of complex systems.

Crucially, it is rarely the case (and in a sense, never the case) that a whole is simply a collection of wholly independent parts, arranged in some kind of desirable composition. Rather, the parts are to some important extent part of a previous whole, and their progression to the new whole is not a mere re-assembly but a kind of transformation, that preserves at least a part of the previous structure.

This was Alexander’s concept of what he termed “structure-preserving transformations,” a process that creates differentiations and new structures, but that in an important sense, also preserves the structure of the whole that came before.

The process can be seen clearly in embryogenesis, where the whole organism is going through a continuous transformation that preserves the whole, but also articulates new structures (Figure One). And the process is clearly coded according to simple chemical operations at the molecular scale—but operations that quickly become vastly complex and interactive at larger scales.

Life-like Structure Beyond Life

One can also see the same kind of process in non-living systems, for example, the simple process of a small droplet of milk striking a thin sheet of milk (Figure Two). At any step of the process, there is a coherent whole with coherent parts (which look strikingly like the articulation of arms and hands in embryogenesis). At each step, there is a comprehensible dynamic operating to transform those wholes and parts—at its heart, a relatively simple dynamic. But at each step, the wholes differentiate and articulate in new and often very surprising ways, giving rise to astonishing variety—even in a simple example like the milk drop.

Again, there is a progressive differentiation, following a symmetry-breaking. There is a mutual interaction of all of the milk particles, with various forces they exert upon one another (most notably, the forces of surface tension). These forces can overlap across distinct regions, so that the motion of one droplet can pull on its neighbor through the surface tension of its arm. All of these generative processes result in distinct structural patterns, and can be identified as such. A “genetic recipe” could be created for generating just such a structure, and by varying the patterns of the initial setup (the thickness of the milk plane, say) one could vary the patterns that result.

Indeed, Alexander noted that such morphogenetic processes often give rise to the same characteristic sets geometries, whether in biology or in other natural systems: strong centers, boundaries, alternating repetition, levels of scale, local symmetries, and so on. These in turn can be tied to the detailed mechanics of the transformations, and the transformations of sets of “centers” or localized fields. This was a hylomorphism taken to a much more articulated level of description.

For Alexander, it was clear from new biological research that the processes that give rise to life are themselves natural, and can also produce structures that have equally life-like characteristics. More astounding, he concluded from this, and from his own empirical examples, that we can assess “degrees of life” in a given structure, including a human environment and, moreover, that this is no mere analogy, but a factual description of the characteristics of a given structure. (This is a controversial idea in some quarters, but seen from a new Structuralist lens, it need not be: life is a kind of structural process, and it can and does occur in “precursor” forms.)

At an urban scale, a very similar kind of process could be seen at work. The gradual transformation of the Piazza San Marco in Venice, for example (Figure Three), could be seen to involve the same kind of transformation of wholes, the same kinds of articulations of new centers and the same kinds of differentiations of space into more articulated sub-spaces.

Philosophical Implications: The Place of Value and the Place of the Quantitative

For Alexander, the Structuralist, value can now be understood as the structure of what is living and thriving, and what promotes and enhances that structure. In this sense, what is valuable can be thought of as a kind of structural fitness to the a priori problem of living and thriving.

This will vary between individuals who are in competition, perhaps; they may certainly experience different value in the same outcome if it happens to benefit one but not the other, say, if a young woman chooses between two male suitors. (This example shows how Alexander can perfectly well accommodate diversity while retaining a sharable definition of value, countering a persistent claim of some critics, of a pathetic fallacy or, worse, a “value foundationalism.”) But, nonetheless, this value can be understood rationally as a kind of structure (in the example, the structure of courtship and family). And where individuals are cooperating, it can most certainly be shared.

But what is valuable is not exactly the same thing as what is qualitative. I may value or not value redness, but in either case I experience it as a quality. So what is this quality? What accounts for the qualitative dimension of things?

We know that in the case of redness, there is a wave pattern in the light energy emitting from a source, in the range of about 650 millionths of a meter from one wave peak to the next. If we change that frequency, the light consistently stops being red. (If we shrink the wave peaks to about 460 millionths of a meter, the light becomes “blue.”) In a sense this is “all there is” to redness, but in another sense, it is only the beginning of what redness truly is.

For we can now begin to see that redness is a complex, emergent, but ultimately non-mysterious property, from the whole structural system that comprises me, my brain, my eye, the light source, the “red” object and its tendency to absorb non-red colors, and so on. The quality of redness can really only be explained as a property of the whole system. It follows that to try to decompose the system into a set of simple parts is to miss the essential dynamics of the system—and its small but important connections to external components, too.

Moreover, we miss the capacity of the system to produce what we experience as “meaning,” as the following example will illustrate. In a condition where some structural element of the system is not working in the same way—for those who have a very complex change in the color-processing structure of their brains as a result of a stroke, say—“redness” is not present. One could say, “Oh yes, ‘red’ is present, you just don’t perceive it.” But that is not actually true. What you have come to call ‘red” as an abstraction is still present, —but not the emergent property of redness. This would be a little like saying, “Oh yes, the color “gruengepled” also exists at 5 millionths of a meter, you just don’t perceive it, nor does anyone else.” This would not be false so much as it would simply be meaningless. We are simply not interested in this structure, because it does not comprise a salient whole that is related to our experience. We do not call it a color, and if we describe it at all, it is for much more secondary reasons (e.g. We discover some property in the laboratory, far from ordinary experience, in which case we might name the frequency for its discoverer, but we would be very unlikely to describe it as anything so salient as a “color.”).

Again, to describe it as a color would be, quite literally, meaningless. And yet, we now see that describing redness as a color is certainly, by contrast, meaningful. And thus Alexander brings us back to a comprehensible Structuralist theory of meaning.

What is meaningful to us is very close to what “matters” to us as living structures, that is, what we encounter and consider important as organisms, in our a priori participation in the world (notwithstanding our ability to discern a partly decomposable structure to these phenomena). Indeed, “matter” is nothing other than what “matters to us,” what is the matter, what is in the way, what is “material” to us. The abstractions we use are all secondary, and forever derivative of this a priori condition.

As Whitehead argued coherently and persuasively, it is this sense of importance that is the logical antecedent of what we regard as “fact.” (Whitehead 1938:18) And it is a kind of trick of the mind, or more precisely, an abstraction, to suppose the reverse is true. Abstractions are, of course, highly useful, but as abstraction, this is (again as Whitehead so effectively pointed out) an omission of part of the truth. (Whitehead 1938:123, 138)

Again, there is surely a comprehensible biological basis to all this. Going back to the example of redness, there may be (and surely are) other structural phenomena going on, of which we may be unaware (for example, the way certain perceptual processes work, the shifts in color perception with certain adjacencies, and so on). But the important point is, we are able to take in all these (comprehensible but complex) structural conditions, and experience an emergent quality. This is very likely closely associated with the need for living systems to make rapid determinations of large fields of stimuli.

Thus I can very quickly perceive the redness of a fire raging near me, at the same time that I can perceive a blue sky in the other direction that offers escape. I can no less quickly smell the alarming smell of burning wood, which must go through a series of highly complex and subtle processes on the way to my brain. Indeed I routinely make exceedingly complex (in fact vastly complex) syntheses of what is going on structurally, and experience these complex inputs as qualitative feelings. I can then act as an organism in a way that is most likely to preserve and enhance my own structure.

Thus we also have a new Structuralist theory of quality, and of feeling, rooted not only in biological needs, but in the complex structure of biological wholes. I may feel well or ill, happy or sad, based upon vast numbers of complex internal and external inputs, structurally transformed. But my feeling and the quality of the things I perceive, are not simple atomic states, but vast fields of wholes, whose structure is vastly intricate, rich, and varied.

Moreover, based upon my definition of choices through the agency of thinking and language and its vast transformational powers, I can then take actions to alter them and do so with my fellows, thereby creating the very dynamic of culture and of life. But I must do so with skill and care, so as not to make categorical errors or misuse the capacity of abstraction to tease out these useful structural insights.

If I do this with care, I find that the structures I make have a biological suitability to them that is extremely gratifying to me. I find their aesthetic character to be beautiful. I find that they gratify important biological and cultural needs which are, to varying degrees, both innate and malleable.

Again, this is easily seen as a natural structure at heart, though it is astonishingly vast. But this structural essence in no way reduces what it is to feel or to experience these powerful structural processes of life. It only means that we can also come to know these processes, in our capacity to “see,” isomorphically, their essentially structural, and at the same time interconnected and (to us as organisms) meaningful aspects.

An example from music can make the point very well. I find Bach’s Prelude Number 1 from “The Well-Tempered Clavier” to be quite beautiful, and indeed I can find a particular passage with a key-changing A flat note particularly beautiful. But if I pull that A flat out of the song, it has no power by itself whatsoever. It is not an independent element that can be added to others to produce a simple cumulative effect;, rather, its power comes from its place in a field of relationships. The symmetry of these relationships to parts of my own brain and to the parts of my life is deeply pleasing and beautiful.

This one small example engages the Pythagorean ratios of the musical vibrations; the physics of hearing; the high level of neuroprocessing in my brain; the evolutionary function of my perception of sound; the cultural tempering of my perception of music (including the tempering of the scale, itself a profound structural innovation); the structuring of my own appreciation for music and for this piece in particular; and so on. In just this example, we begin to see the vast complexity of even the most ordinary everyday experience.

The universe is thus shot through with meaning, and it is shot through with structure. It is alive, and at the same time, it is structural. There is no conflict.

We will discuss the implications for designers in more detail below. But one implication is dramatic: characteristics of the built environment do carry relative value for individuals—and that value can, to varying degrees, be shared. Beauty (and good, and truth) is not so much in the eye of the beholder, as it is in the complex structural resonance between an individual and the world around. This is a comprehensible state of affairs. And it has implications for designers.

Jane Jacobs: The Kind of Problem Design Is

We close with a brief examination of another remarkable polymath with a notable Structuralist line of thinking, the urban scholar Jane Jacobs. Her seminal urban work was published in 1961, around the time Alexander was developing his PhD thesis, and titled The Death and Life of Great American Cities . Like Alexander, Jacobs wanted to know how our design processes were going wrong and destroying the life and quality of modern cities. Like Alexander, she cautioned against the modern planners’ technocratic habit to impose a reductive scheme on cities in top-down fashion. And like Alexander, she did not simply bemoan the state of affairs, but gave a lucid and detailed account of the structure of what was really going on—and what could be done about it.

In the last marvelous chapter of her book, she gave an account of the development of modern complexity science (expressing a debt to Dr. Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation), an account that is still a landmark in the field. Like Alexander, she described the mereology of many variables acting together, and the importance of understanding their web-like interconnections, beyond the simple connection of a few variables or the average behavior of many variables. This was where living systems seemed to operate, in the realm that she described as “organized complexity.”

Like Alexander, she too applied the analogy of living systems—or perhaps for her, too, it was more than an analogy—to the “life” of cities. We needed to look for the subtle ways that variables of an urban system interacted, and we needed to respect the subtle and “unaverage” factors that might be accounting for much more than we might assume. (There are parallels with Alexander’s “overlap” here.) We must understand “the kind of problem a city is,” in its "organized complexity," as a kind of biological problem

One of Jacobs’ most important contributions was in the field of economics. We must come to understand that economics is a dynamic system, she says, like any natural system (argued most powerfully in her book The Nature of Economies ): but like any such system, the feedback within the system can become disrupted, or provide false signals. Thus our culture can experience perverse incentives, and behave irrationally. What seems sane and rational can in fact be a kind of noise from the echo chambers of specialists.

Jacobs was a powerful critic of modern planners, who seemed intent upon achieving a rational order by purifying the “messiness” of urban systems—a conception of planning she scathingly referred to as “decontaminated sortings.” This was an echo of Alexander’s critique of the modern treatment of cities as mathematical “trees” —and the failure to understand the overlap and complexity within their structures. Instead, Jacobs argued for mixing of uses, and for much greater diversity within a given neighborhood.

Jacobs was no less withering toward architects, and particularly those who, like Le Corbusier, sought to replace the complex intrinsic order of the city with an extrinsic, purely visual order from above. A city is not a work of art, she argued, and must not be treated as so much canvas on which to express one’s compositional imagination. This was a confusion that substituted real cities with simplified images of them.

In a sense, Jacobs was sounding a final rejection of the modernists’ form of Platonic idealism, which had culminated in a particularly destructive kind of “geometrical fundamentalism.” But she was no hand-wringing, laissez-faire Post-structuralist. She argued convincingly—and highly influentially—for a new approach to cities, using patient inductive methods and tools, and an inter-disciplinary approach that respected what already existed and what was already working. It distrusted simplified theories of order that masqueraded as real order and relied instead on keen observation of local differentiation and complexity. It was a pragmatic recipe that combined design with programming, sociology with economics, and theory with common sense.

Quality of Life: A New Pragmatism, a New Structuralism

Alexander and Jacobs both represent a point of view that sees the now catastrophic failings of modernity as fully repairable—if we learn the structural lessons on hand. They both seek to learn those lessons from biological process and from the burgeoning new sciences of complexity. They both see the inevitable qualitative aspects of the problem and its diagnosis. They both see the creation of cities and buildings as a largely emergent and self-organizing process—but one in which human valuation, and human design, play a profound role.

But “design” here is not the combinatorial hylomorphism of Aristotle, nor the abstract mathematical idealism of Plato. Rather, it is more a discipline that must make transformational steps in the inter-relation of patterns to one another—be they patterns in space or patterns in ideas. And of course, it is more accurate now to say that there is no fundamental difference between the two: the world can now be seen to contain a web of patterns that have the capacity to mirror each other in certain useful, language-like aspects. These patterns are to be found throughout the built environment, in our brains, and in other parts of the world. It is a pattern universe.

Alexander and Jacobs are but two of the most prominent of a larger number who are taking forward these insights in different disciplines, and to different degrees. Among these, the growing field of evidence-based design is well worth mentioning. It began in the patient healthcare environment, and gradually spread out into other environments where there is evidence of health impacts. (For example, so-called “obesogenic” suburban environments, where lack of exercise and dependence on drive-through cuisine are contributing to alarming rises in rates of obesity in the USA and, to a lesser extent, other countries.)

There can be dangers in trying to couple evidence too mechanically to design: if this discussion has shown anything, it is that such a combinatorial mereology does not work. But we can begin to see that by using inductive processes, provisional patterns, and then adaptive refinements, an empirical, evidence-based approach can be highly fruitful.

One of the most surprising new discoveries in the field of environmental design is in the health impacts of various aesthetic characteristics. Many researchers have noticed that certain characteristics in the built environment consistently produce beneficial health effects, while others do not. For example, Ulrich (1984) showed that patients with a view of a natural scene recovered from surgery more quickly and successfully than those who had a view of a blank wall. Other natural features, like plants, water, sunlit scenes, and the like had similar effects, so much so that there is now a major effort to retrofit hospitals with gardens and other such amenities.

This discovery of the importance of natural structures in the human environment—what has come to be termed “biophilia”—seems a promising avenue for future research. It seems very likely that there is an evolved preference for such structures. More than that, as Alexander’s work suggests, it may be that such structures offer denser, richer structural wholes, which meet our needs as human beings within our environments.

Nor is this likely to be purely a matter of visual scenery. Indeed, some research shows that the effect from purely visual scenes fades rapidly. It seems more likely that the strongest effect comes from our ability to move through environments, interact with people, view prospects, seek refuge, frame views, experience filters of sight and sound that we find the richest experiences in the built environment.

This finding suggests that while the perception of users is critical to their well-being, the usual architects’ emphasis on the composition of buildings as objects or urbanists’ treatment of cityscapes as visual scenes, is highly incomplete. We must focus much more on the system of connections and the layers and filters between the zones of connection—that is, on the sequences of possible experiences—if we are to have the most robust, thriving kind of environments. Again, the logic of such sequences is a language-like structure.

This finding also has another important implication. Built environment professionals must regard themselves as having a deep, even Hippocratic responsibility for the health of their users. They are not mere engineers of transportation networks, or artist-architects of visual or sculptural compositions. They are a kind of physician to the built environment.

Conclusion

How can we sum up these scientific and philosophical lessons for designers? I would suggest that they point us toward a profound reformation of the methodologies of design—methodologies that will be less like the creative processes of artists, and more like the diagnostic processes of physicians. (It is important to note that the artist’s creativity is certainly not eliminated, but is re-integrated into a larger process.) Or, to use another useful metaphor, our design approach might be less like that of a carpenter (planning and blueprinting a structure, then milling, cutting, assembling, etc) than that of a gardener (planting seeds, watering, pruning, weeding, building trellises, etc.) As Jacobs and Alexander remind us, we must plan for the unplanned, and design for emergence. And there is indeed a rational discipline for doing so.

Broadly speaking, we might describe the steps in such a design process as follows:



The last point is worth dwelling upon. For several generations we have taken a largely reductionist, tabula rasa approach to design, imagining that we can “start from scratch” and “use our imagination” to use elemental structures to compose wonderful, functional, effective designs. But we can now see this for the dangerous fallacy that it is. We can see that we have relied too heavily upon only one of the principal strategies of design synthesis—that of reduction and re-combination—and we have failed to understand the power of induction and differentiation.

There is another, related danger of the modern fundamentalist method. It is in the inherent danger of abstractions, to lure us away from the discipline of rigorous adaptivity, and into the enchanting realm of pure abstract synthesis. Alfred North Whitehead touched on this theme often, and nowhere better than when he noted, in his 1938 book Modes of Thought :

Or, we might add, it is distinguished by abstractions that provide their own derivative aesthetic qualities, dangerously disconnected from the immediate realities of place and life.

There are many other implications awaiting further development. We summarize several of the most notable here:



This discussion is by necessity the briefest overview of a vast and burgeoning subject. But we hope it does suggest the progress that awaits, and the many avenues that are available for further development. This is surely an exciting frontier.

Moreover, as we hope this discussion has shown, we now stand at a critical kind of culmination, and, we can hope, the beginning of a new chapter, of a very long historical dialogue on mereology, hylomorphism, and idealism. In a sense, we have not strayed far from Hellenic culture—and indeed, in modernity we find that we have returned to our own philosophical origins, where, in the words of T.S. Eliot, we “know the place for the first time.” We have come back to Plato’s idealism, in the patterns and the structural attractors of modernity; and we have come back to Aristotle’s hylomorphism, in modern complexity science, and in Alexander’s structure-preserving transformations. And yet, we have also taken important steps to transcend them and to resolve age-old apparent paradoxes between matter and value, and form and life. If this is true, then it may free us from the prison of our former ideas, and place us on the edge of a veritable renaissance of structural and qualitative possibility, within our technology, and within our culture. May that much-needed renaissance begin.

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