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Thursday, October 3, 2013

THE ARCHITECTURE OF EMERGENCE

Reading Comment

THE ARCHITECTURE OF EMERGENCE by Michael Weinstock


I always have been very curious about the relationship between architecture and nature. What can we really learn about nature if we think about design? . At moment I read the title of the book, I wasn't sure what does emergence means, but when I arrived to the last pages of the chapter I found Weinstock's  definition:

"...emergence is applied to the properties of a system that cannot be deduced from its components. Porperties "emerge" that are more than the  sum of the parts." 

We can found different kind of sistems in the "living" and "no living" thing. These systems are at the same moment composed by parts which are also systems and these are composed by parts that are systems too and so on. All of them are influence, not only by the relationship between parts, but also by their context. It is a long and difficult chain to comprehend but, with the advance in sciences, we are starting to understand it.
In this chapter Weinstock talks about the civilization and nature as systems with a series of organized parts. In his own words: "All the forms of nature and civilisation have an architecture, an arrangement of material in space and over time that determines their shapes, size and duration, how their come into being and their behaviour". He also refers to the "integrative levels" in nature and how they exist in diverse scale in the universe giving more complexity to the organization.

It is in this point when I ask myself if architecture as a discipline can take nature as an example of these complex system in order to create design that follow the principles of nature. I consider that we can used the parameters  of the programs to mimic the principles that we found in the systems of nature.

At moment, I'm reading another book that is related in sort kind of way to this one. The book's name is  "Architecture follows nature: biomimetic principles for innovative design" and the author is Ilaria Mazzoleni. She tries to study nature in a methodological way with the goal of understand its principles and apply them in the building design. She introduced in my vocabulary the word "biomimetics" as Winstock taught me the words "homology" and "emergence". I'm starting the book so I can't said how it ends. However I will bring it to class this week.

Sincerely, this is a subject very interesting to me but I have many questions so I will like to deepen my knowledge of it to clarify my ideas.




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