Human Interaction and Evolution of Cities
A few years ago, a prospective client suggested that if I were serious about being his architect, I would have to be current with my viewing of what was then the hot new show on HBO, “True Blood.” Having no interest in vampires, I was hesitant; but the merits of the project compelled me to agree to his terms. At the same time, I was taking online courses in winemaking and was deep into the microbiology of fermentation: how the sugar within freshly pressed grape juice conspires with yeast to produce alcohol in the primary fermentation, and how adding fresh juice and corking the bottle induces a second fermentation which gives champagne its fizz. I was most fascinated with “broken fermentations,” which occur when certain bacteria, fungi, and other microbes enter the process uninvited – and wreak havoc.
As I began working on the new house project, I recorded the first few episodes of True Blood and watched when I could. At some point I had left an episode midway through, and later had to fast-forward through to get where I had left off. Seeing the sped-up version of the show, I became oddly mesmerized. The plot seemed to be made up of a succession of scenes in which, most often, two characters interacted. Some were action scenes, and some were dialogue, but the take-away was the same: the mechanics of human interaction appeared familiar. It seemed to mimic fermentation, especially of the “broken” variety, described in an Enology course reading as a “succession of microbial onslaughts.” (Luthi, 1957). And it dawned on me: “True Blood” – or any story for that matter – is exactly the same, a succession of exchanges of various types – conversations, arguments, sexual encounters, murder – that together form a story arc leading to some sort of resolution – like wine, but at a scale invisible to us: our own.
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What motivates interaction? In stories, it is a character’s internal imbalance, a desire or need with someone or something blocking it. As screenwriter Aaron Sorkin says, a story is propelled by intention and obstacle (Sorkin, 2017). But what about in nature? Late evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis argued that it starts with imbalance. She translates Kelvin’s second law of thermodynamics from physics to biology to be re-read as “Nature abhors a gradient,” applying this law to systems both living and non-living. She believed that all organisms are systems of systems in a flexible hierarchy occurring at all scales at all times time, each of which is concerned primarily with overcoming any gradient it perceives. “As natural selection filters out the many to preserve the remaining few,” she writes, “those few ever more efficiently use environmental energy to ‘purposefully’ reduce their gradients (Margulis and Sagan, 2002).”
The importance of gradients is also emphasized by microbiologist Nick Lane, who talks about the work of Mike Russell, the iconoclastic scientist currently at Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in particular his study of sea vents where he observed that “bubbling alkaline fluids into acidic oceans produced a natural proton gradient” between carbon dioxide and hydrogen that, through chemiosmosis, created organic molecules as well as ATP, and eventually proteins and DNA, the building blocks of life itself.
Lane is convinced that all life proceeds from such a gradient or imbalance; more, he contends that contrary to the conventional understanding of entropy, equilibrium is never achieved. Instead, persistent imbalance is what fuels interactions in all systems, both living and non-living. DNA, while remarkably good at replicating itself, does produce enough variation, generation by generation, to give evolution options when faced with such imbalance. Thus a species evolves, mutation by mutation, an iterative process that, like imbalance itself, never ends as each mutation is tested against the stark reality of natural selection (Lane, 2009). Addressing imbalance in this way is hardwired into the genes of all living things; but how does it work in the realm of the artificial?
When faced with imbalance manifesting as a problem (need) or opportunity (desire), we innovate. MIT business professor Eugene Fitzgerald, with colleagues Andreas Wankerl and Carl Schramm, outlines a very specific process he feels delivers innovation most efficiently. They distinguish between “incremental innovation” and “fundamental innovation,” the former more like fine-tuning an existing technology, the latter more revolutionary and therefore more disruptive. Focusing on fundamental innovation, they identify a team made up of individuals – not groups – that must be in constant interaction for a true breakthrough to occur, each individual representing three different points of view and thus bring their expertise to bear: technology, market, and implementation. The person representing technology is most often an inventor of a new product or process that addresses a perceived imbalance and who may or may not have an application for it; the person who represents the market is someone who understands what will work in the marketplace and how the technology might be embraced by the public at some point in the future; the person representing implementation is the one who knows how to connect the technology to the market, how to make the invention functional, and how to deliver it to the market.
What is compelling is how much importance the authors place on these three people interacting. It is a long, often 15-year process to bring a new technology to market, and that time is spent creating iteration after iteration of a proposed design, subjecting each to the critique of all the members of the team. Only if a product or process can survive this relentless gauntlet of judgment will it ever see the light of day. For the authors, the key to ensure that the interaction works is that each of the three team members must have some experience of the other two points of view; it is rarely a productive interaction if one member is unable to compromise due to an inability to comprehend another’s perspective. That said, it is also crucial is that each of the team members have a strongly-held opinion and that they fight for it (Fitzgerald, Wankerl, and Schramm, 2011).
The creation of a building routinely undergoes a similar process: it is often a protracted and heated interaction between the developer – who initiates the project due to a perceived imbalance in the market; the architect – who addresses programmatic issues through spatial manipulation and material choices; and the contractor – who negotiates between the aesthetic aspirations of the architect with the budget constraints of the developer.
This occurred in the project with my “True Blood” client, which, borrowing from winemaking, was a sort of architectural fermentation. The primary fermentation involved me working with the client, discussing the design of his future home, going back to the studio to develop the design based on that discussion, and then meeting with him again. Over the course of several months we ran through 72 iterations before we had a design acceptable for permitting. The secondary fermentation was working with the contractor and the client to ensure buildability at an acceptable price. As any architect knows, it is crucial for the architect to remain involved during construction; the design is in constant flux due to the inevitable disconnect between what is drawn and the reality in the field. Every detail is a battle. The client, the architect, and the contractor fight to create the best building possible, all making arguments and coming to decisions based on their particular criteria of what makes a project successful. Over the course of this project, I began to realize that this interaction was the architecture, the building merely the residue of the process.
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Theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg famously observed that electrons are only visible when they interact with something else. In fact, for him they existed only when this occured. Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist in current practice, takes this further, proposing that an electron is merely a set of jumps from one interaction to another. As one of the discoverers “Loop Quantum Gravity,” an attempt to reconcile Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity with Quantum Theory, Rovelli argues that time and space are just approximations of the true nature of reality. Limited by our senses as well as our scale, we constantly are creating stories of how the world works, which evolves as science uncovers deeper truths. And for Rovelli, current scientific thinking is pointing in one direction: that all realityis interaction (Rovelli, 2014).
Histories of architecture, from Giedion to Rossi, from Vincent Scully to Spiro Kostof, all situate the architect as the central force in shaping the city. They offer a tales describing a succession of architects, of styles, of architectural movements, etc.; however, history is necessarily retrospective. A closer, more sustained look reveals that the city changes not in a series of large movements but in small, incremental ones; in fact, very small: a city evolves building by building, the product of a specific interaction of particular individuals, a negotiation that bears imprint of each participant, and thus is a unique response to economic, social, or programmatic imbalance perceived by each of those individuals. However, despite the best of intentions, each interaction leads to another; it addresses one imbalance but produces new one, which begets a new interaction, and so on; fueled by persistent imbalance, urban equilibrium is ever achieved. The city evolves, interaction by interaction, a process whose byproducts are individual buildings – which makes the city an archive of interactions, stories embedded in the buildings they produce. Thus, architecture is not the product of interaction, it isinteraction. A building is a noun, but architecture? Architecture is a verb.
REFERENCES
Lüthi, Hans. 1957. Symbiotic problems related to bacterial deterioration of wines. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 8: 176-181.
Sorkin, Aaron. 2017. Aaron Sorkin Teaches Screenwriting. Online Course: Masterclass
Margulis, Lynn and Sagan, Dorion. 2002. Acquiring Genomes. New York: Basic Books
Lane, Nick. 2009. Life Ascending. New York: Norton
Fitzgerald, Eugene, Wankerl, Andreas, and Schramm, Carl. 2011. Inside Real Innovation. Singapore: World Scientific
Rovelli, Carlo. 2014. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. New York: Riverhead Books.
Gideon, Sigfried. 1941. Space, Time and Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Kostof, Spiro. 1985. A History of Architecture. New York: Oxford University Press
Scully, Vincent. 1969. American Architecture and Urbanism. New York: Henry Holt
Rossi, Aldo. 1982. The Architecture of the City. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press
