KNOT THEORY

Love it.. An archeo-mathematical view point of Dsankt's Urbex

mediating between messy emergence and ordered evolution

Venturi in 'learning from Las Vegas' writes that Italian architecture has the ability to mediate between the 'vitruvian and the banal', 'fine art and crude art...the contorni and the duomo, the portiere's laundry across the padrone's portone, ... See moresupercortemaggiore against the romanesque apse'. Venturi sounds dissapointed that '...naked children will never play in OUR fountains and I.M. Pei will never be happy on Route 66.'

Using Bachman's definitions of four types of emergence, I find it interesting to entertain the possibility of multple methods overlaid. Indeed, this will be inevitable as people comission different architects who consider emergence and it's effects on architectural design differently. A heteropia of emergence in action.

Venturi makes an interesting proposition... how can this be mediated, allowing for coherence in the urban milieu? If only there was a text called 'learning from Italy'...

I'm determined to read some Rossi at the suggestion of Riccardo Rizzali. I find his thoughts about monument interesting, presenting a very ordered 'type' which may also contain pointers from within a uniquely Italian context.


This mediation will probably play a significant role in my final year design.. I'm anxious to see what form it will take.

I'm also determined to read more Ruskin.

Being critical about emergence

Reading this chapter, I was able to put all the readings about emergence, complexity, evolutionary and adaptive discourses. I had been struggling for some clarity for a while.

A few months ago I wrote this article trying to lay out for myself the variety of different discourse. I had been criticised by peers when trying to converse about complexity and design, my peers finding it difficult to find consistency in the dialogue. I don't think it was necessarily my fault... it's just that the discourse suffers from a lack of criticality generally when it comes to what certain terms mean. evolution and emergence both have a variety of connotations and semiotic 'baggage' which accompanies them. THis makes critical discourse very difficult to engage in.

This article by Bachman allocates these discourses into four categories: wicked, messy, ordered and natural. ALthough this doesn't clear the discourse, it allows an alternative way of looking at the variety of materials which regard complexity and the built environment.

...Although I am sure that Christopher Alexander would take offence with being categorised as messy: it does make the dialogues of complexity a little easier to navigate.