| The problem with
Charles Jencks is that he is too old to recognize the new paradigm
as anything more than a new opportunity to recount the buildings
of his personal favourite architects.
The paradigm shift he is looking for in the grammar of a handful
of landmark buildings will forever elude him: the new paradigm
is not formal, it is purely relational.
Mr Jencks had been onto something ever since his Architecture
of a Jumping Universe, where he sought the first effects of the
sciences of the 20th century on architecture. Unfortunately, now
as then, he insists on looking for the formalistic applications
of the metaphors of say, quantum theory’s particle-wave
duality, and misses the point totally: when I was researching
my own book Quantum City, I was excited to discover the title,
but immediately disappointed by his insistence that a world made
up of quantum waves meant a world made up of wavy stone patterns
or wavy metalwork on his garage gate…
In his article ‘the New Paradigm in Architecture’,
he gives us more of the same; there is a new paradigm somewhere,
obviously not with the Bush Junta, and there are a series of new
buildings that look to him ‘different’, hence there
must be a new paradigm in architecture. Yet he fails to put his
finger on it. Why? Because most of the examples he is looking
at have nothing to do with a paradigm shift: they merely represent
a greater permissiveness of form.
A paradigm shift is a major change in the worldview, and that
is historically the result of a shift in the belief system or
in the knowledge base of a particular culture, that seems to occur
a couple of generations after a major scientific (or philosophical)
discovery. It is the time it takes the generations who are taught
the new knowledge since their childhood as a matter of fact, to
grow up into decision making positions. They are the generations
whose very lives would have been shaped by the culture created
by the application of the new knowledge.
The generation that represents the paradigm shift of quantum theory’s
second age -the practical applications and experiments (lasers,
TV, computers, non-locality, the Hubble telescope…) that
permitted the development of the genome project, fractals, chaos
theory, internet, self-organisation, and emergence theory, is
not Libeskind’s or Eisenmann’s. It is the “thumb-generation”,
the Playstation and text messaging generation.
For that generation, the ‘fractal’ patterns of Federation
Square or the tilted windows of the Jewish Museum are nothing
special. They might even think they are boring in their self-consciousness.
The video games they play daily subject them to architectures
a hundred times more overwhelming to their senses, and I do not
know what architecture their generation will end up building.
In the meantime, the current generation of architects in their
thirties and forties sits at a threshold between two worlds: one
that keeps jumping with excitement at any new building form that
doesn’t look like a shoe box and another that is born to
be jaded by form.
This gives us, the current generation, a difficult responsibility,
but an exciting challenge: our role is to see the paradigm shift
through, to ease it through, and translate between our precursors
and our successors.
I believe the key to this role as an interface lies in recognizing
the shift in the knowledge base itself: the new sciences have
shifted from a mechanical, Cartesian worldview, to an organic,
quantum one. The main difference is in the recognition of the
limits of objectivism and the rehabilitation of subjectivism –
and subjectivity – even within the realm of the hard sciences.
It is a shift from a world of cogs and atoms to one of potentiality
waves and interactive randomness: a shift from form to relationship.
The new paradigm will not play itself in architecture building
by building. As much as Mr Jencks would like to call the new blobs
a shift away from Cartesianism in Mr Foster’s repertoire,
the Swiss Re remains as Cartesian in its thinking as any Miesian
building. The Cartesian paradigm is one of repetition, rationalisation,
mechanisation, and objectivism. Seeing it as a gherkin or a phallus
is no different from earlier generations seeing shoeboxes or tombstones
in the first parallelepiped skyscrapers.
The new paradigm will show up in urban design, it will emerge
at the level of the city, at the level of the interaction between
people. After all, the science of emergence, like the science
of self-regulation, only works in the presence of a vast multitude
of interactive elements. This is why LAB’s Federation Square
is a success: it is the urban space it generates that expresses
the language of the new paradigm, not its mosaicised, whimsical
façades. Bilbao wasn’t Gehry’s first sculptural-waveform
building, witness the total pointlessness of his American Centre
in Paris. But his Guggenheim is so potent thanks to its relationship
to the city, and the extraordinarily eloquent upgrade it did to
Bilbao’s image.
The relationship between our worldview (our paradigm) and our
cities is not a new matter. From Babylon to the Cité Radieuse,
our cities have always been the physical translation of our worldviews.
What is exciting this time around is that, for the first time
in three hundred years, our scientific paradigm itself is organic
once again. Yet as practicing professionals and theorists we are
still using the language and worldview of the old mechanical paradigm.
We should learn, as architects and urbanologists of the Threshold
generation, to understand, teach and apply the relational language
of the quantum paradigm. Only then will our cities take on the
form that synchronizes best with the vision of our children. It
is our role, it is our responsibility.
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