The Christopher Alexander viewpoint

The UC Berkeley professor has just published The Nature of Order, a 2,000-page tome on what's wrong with modern architecture. It turns out that it's the architects:

Blame the architects, he says, who are shills for a bankrupt modern society, "very much as if we were the advance-men, the ad-men, paid to make a series of unworkable social forms palatable to people by making something inherently bad seem glamorous." Twentieth-century architecture, he adds, has been "a mass psychosis of unprecedented dimension," "a form of architecture which is against life, insane, image-ridden, hollow." (He told Peter Eisenman, in a 1982 debate, that highfalutin architects were "fucking up the whole profession of architecture.")

Without having read Alexander's book, on reading the article excerpted above in the Village Voice (link below), it seems to me that his diagnosis is remarkably similar to the one I'm trying to communicate with MYO. Basically, surrounding people with geometric forms will never make them as happy as natural forms would.

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Organic Up-and-Comers

Okay - that headline sounds slightly pornographic, but there you go. A small article by Susan S. Szenasy in New York magazine Metropolis talks about a keynote speech she'll be giving at the Interior Design Educators Council (IDEC) International Conference, in Scottsdale, Arizona. She plans to discuss:

...the algorithmic work of Greg Lynn, Hernan Diaz Alonso, and our newest Next Generation winner, Virginia San Fratello--architects rethinking materials and forms at an almost molecular scale, reshaping buildings, interiors, and objects with the aid of mathematical formulas. These inventive new forms challenge every idea we have about the look and feel of our built environments, as well as how we build them. San Fratello's water- and heat-storing walls have flowing, twisting facades that go beyond our understanding of "organic." They look like a whole new species.

There's a photo of the three works which is worth enlarging. Even though mathematics and organicity might appear to be contradictory, the results achieved by these young designers would suggest otherwise.

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Did the Arabs invent organic design?

A fascinating article in Middle-Eastern newspaper ITP Business charts the Arabic influence in modern design and looks at its implementation in several luxury hotels in the United Arab Emirates.

The four basic components of Islamic design (calligraphy, plant designs, geometric patterns and figural representation) are still prevalent in Arabic design today. Calligraphy was used to transmit text in decorative form. Plant designs adorn a vast number of buildings, manuscripts, objects, and textiles — these patterns and motifs were drawn from traditions of Byzantine culture in the eastern Mediterranean and Sasanian Iran. Geometric ornamentation has reached a pinnacle in the Islamic world. Beautifully complicated patterns are constructed from just four basic shapes — circles and interlaced circles, squares or four-sided polygons; the star pattern, and multisided polygons. Despite being resisted in religious art and architecture (Muslims believe that the creation of living forms is unique to God only) figural representation has also flourished in Islamic cultures. Figural motifs are found on the surface decoration of objects, or architecture, as part of the woven or applied patterns of textiles, and in sculptural form.

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