Architecture of the Jumping Tectonism

As I alluded to in my last article, I am interested in finding ways out of the formal dead end brought about by modernity. The Corbusian five points manifesto, criticised by so many architectural theorists, was clearly the product of a short lived euphoria at the promises of technological change rather than the outcome of any rational or 'functional' considerations.?

Those tired of such rigid recipes and the uniform monotony they brought about from the dynamited Pruitt-Igoe complex to Nyemeyer's Brasilia, Soviet 'Socialist Realism' and everything in between, found a brief respite from all this in the discovery of complexity sciences and their creative potential in architecture. This approach has been best popularised in Charles Jencks's book 'Architecture of the Jumping Universe', which I absolutely loved as a student and fresh architecture graduate. The book presents complexity sciences such as emergence, non-linearity, fractals, strange attractors and other complex systems in terms that are simple enough for the non-mathematician to understand. Every scientific notion is then followed by examples of its application in the field of architecture; from Libeskind or Gehry's punk application of self-similarity to the more subtle parametric architecture of Peter Eisenman, the deconstructivism of Tschumi and Himmelb(l)au or Koolhas's ways of building organic depth and complexity into his urban designs.

The book is largely a polemic against the International Style. Its lure, however, lies in its attempt to promote a progressive metaphysics in which everything in the Universe is interconnected, and the 'jumps' of matter from one stage to another (energy to matter, inorganic to organic, organic to life forms, life forms to human intelligence etc) follow the same recognisable patterns best described by complexity science. The shape of a coastal landform produced by erosion is fractal, but so are ferns and broccoli. Phyllotaxis can be discovered in sunflowers as well as in entire galaxies. Spontaneous order followed by chaos leads to shifts in complexity, leading to a new order at an even higher level. The small 'g' non-teleological god of emergence is building the Universe bottom-up, and as architects we have the privilege of mimicking its patterns and participate in its leaps. As someone who was starving after some sort of participation metaphysics, these words were music to my ears.

The progressive implications of these hypothetical 'cosmic leaps' became fully obvious in the book, when it attempted to categorise all human culture - from ancient times, through classicism up until 20th century modernity - as linear and deterministic, i.e. fundamentally narrow minded and unnatural. Unlike the newly discovered Messianic cult of 'complexity science' that promised to finally reintegrate us into the Cosmic order of qualitative jumps.

In 2012 I was fully immersed in this worldview and I remember participating in a contest for religious architecture (Spiritual.d 2012) with an entry that was Jencksian par excellence. I quote from the written part of our project:

'The traditional views over sacred places were shaped by similar ancient cosmological views. Most ancient civilizations pictured the Universe as composed of three layers: Earth (a flat orthogonal surface), Heavens (concentric metal domes) and the underground regions (subterranean rivers). All these layers were connected by sacred places – vertical axes symbolized by columns, trees, mountains etc. The up–down dichotomy as well as orthogonality were natural consequences of these traditional worldviews. Temples, sanctuaries, churches, cities and gardens – they were all built in this language; verticality was always used to evoke God, while orthogonality symbolised Earth’s systematization, starting from the sacred place (e.g. garden of Eden).

This cosmological view changed dramatically with the Galilean revolution; the Earth was no longer seen as the absolute centre; the Universe itself started to be seen as a vast space, instead of a layered pie. Later discoveries, such as Einstein’s General Relativity theory, brought new concepts, such as space-time continuum, curved space and so on. The Universe itself had a beginning, according to G. Lemaitre’s theory. The latest shift in our understanding of the world was brought in by the Chaos Theories, which discovered new types of structures such as fractals, strange attractors, emergent structures, waves and twists, nonlinearity etc.

We’re no longer bound to orthogonality or the up-down dichotomy. Instead of seeking God above, in Heaven, we seek him beyond, outside the boundaries of the Universe. Instead of living in a determined world, we find ourselves living in a chaotic, self-organizing and constantly changing Universe.

Our proposal aims to reflect this new worldview – it starts like a trail in space-time: a path which evokes the shifts in our Universe’s history: the appearance of energy from a single spot, the appearance of matter, which curves space-time continuum (the path starts to fold and even split into two at some point, evoking catastrophe theory), the appearance of life (the interior space of the chapels) and the emerging of consciousness (the main gathering area).

The spiritual space is split into two sections: a circular area for multicultural meditation and prayer (Christian, Muslim and Buddhist prayer rooms) and a round central hall, destined for religious and scientific conferences, debates, lectures etc. The prayer rooms open consecutively from the circular trail which surrounds the central hall, featuring different worldviews (different interior environments) over the same reality (same exterior perspective: the island and the lake). The central hall was thought like a static view of the Universe – no up-down dichotomy (like in traditional churches or mosques), no orthogonality, no central element: visitors enter in through the spiral stair below and find themselves totally disoriented in an imperfect sphere (parametric deformations applied). The lights and wood finishings evoke constant rotation, as in the night sky. The stair could be seen as a metaphor of information (DNA) which generates material shapes.

Instead of seeking transcendence up above, we now seek it beyond the borders of the Universe – the prayer rooms which extend beyond the central hall’s boundaries."

I decided to quote the entire written part of our contest entry only because it is a great summary of Jencks's ideas and our design looks very similar to the way he himself applied these notions in his 'gardens of cosmic speculation'.

Although not many architects articulate this postmodern vision in such a clear way, I would say it has gained enough momentum to offer the only alternative to the ubiquitous international style. You see it in Zaha Hadid's projects and her successor, Patrick Schumacher, who has taken time to theorise and define the style as 'tectonism'. The Delft School of Architecture in the Netherlands teaches Parametricism and many of its graduates will attempt to produce Tectonist designs in their own practices.?

In the next article I will provide a few observations and a measured, constructive critique of the movement which will hopefully help Tectonist architects to see its blind spots and, hopefully, overcome them within their own parametric tradition.