Architecture is a Verb

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.  

…

      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. 

…

      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

The Interactionist City

THE INTERACTIONIST CITY

The demolition of Ray Bradbury’s house in the Cheviot Hills section of Los Angeles in January set off a flurry of commentary over a variety of social media.  At the heart of it there seemed to be a common theme: people don’t want to see their city change.  Each time a building we love is torn down, our hearts break just a little.  How do we deal with the anxiety over the changing city?  Conventional theories of urban development do not offer a satisfying answer, nor do architectural histories, which treat the evolution of the built environment as a succession of styles tied to political or economic trends or, alternatively, to a particular lineage of architectural icons operating within the context of that city.

In the final analysis, these approaches are inherently retrospective and thus insufficient in apprehending change as it happens.   A closer, more sustained look reveals that cities evolve not in a series of large movements but in small, incremental ones – in fact, very small: it turns out that a city evolves building by building.  Each project, no matter how seemingly insignificant, changes the city just a little. Furthermore, each building is the product of a specific interaction of particular individuals, one that bears imprint of each participant, and thus a unique response to economic, social, or programmatic imbalance perceived by each of those individuals.  The city is constantly evolving, creating not so much an archive of successive architects or styles as an archive of successive interactions.  Nowhere is this phenomenon more palpable than Los Angeles – where change almost always proceeds from the bottom up – which is why it might be called the Interactionist City.

***

How do these interactions occur?  What initiates them?  In her book Acquiring Genomes late evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis echoes the translation of Lord 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.  “we must begin thinking of organisms as communities,” she writes, ”and communities are ecological entities.”  She goes on to say, “As natural selection filters out the many to preserve the remaining few, those few ever more efficiently use environmental energy to ‘purposefully’ (her quotes) reduce their gradients.”

The importance of gradients is also emphasized by Nick Lane in his book, Life Ascending. In that volume he explain the work of Mike Russell, the iconoclastic scientist currently at Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in particular his study of the sea vents in Tynagh, Ireland 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 if Russell and his colleagues are correct—and he thinks they are – 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 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.  This is something that is hardwired into the genes of all living things; but could it apply non-living systems as well?

***

In a recent article in the Science Times section of The New York Times, George Johnson wrote an article, Creation, in the Eye of the Beholder, in which he states, “the brains and hands that design civilizations artifacts are products of the same evolutionary algorithm – random generation and testing” that drives evolution itself. 

Following this logic, then everything we produce would adhere to this algorithm, even things as ephemeral as stories.  In Hollywood movies, for example, the algorithm seems embedded in the standard story structure:  protagonists begin the story with an imbalance they are unaware of; they have a particular desire for something or someone but are blocked from access to it; a crisis occurs that takes them from their ordinary world; they attempt to return to it using whatever means are at their disposal, and yet fail each time; at the midpoint, they hit an obstacle that raises the stakes for them, making their goal even more desperate; they then embark on a new course of action that seems to hold promise – until it doesn’t – and the protagonists are defeated and hit bottom; it is at their lowest point, when they have lost all hope, that they have an epiphany; their goal shifts from pursuing what they thought they wanted to what they actually need.  They prepare themselves for battle, engage in a protracted final conflict, and emerge victorious. 

So, after a long and heated succession of trials and errors, a new equilibrium is established for a protagonist – one unimaginable at the outset – and balance is restored.   Great in movies, to be sure but – going back to Nick Lane – not in real life, where true equilibrium is never achieved.

Another window into the workings of this evolutionary algorithm can be seen in the field of entrepreneurial innovation.  MIT professor Eugene Fitzgerald, with colleagues Andreas Wankerl and Carl Schramm have identified a very specific process that they feel delivers innovation most efficiently.  In their book, Inside Real Innovation, they distinguish between “incremental innovation” and “fundamental innovation,” the former is more like fine-tuning an existing technology, the latter is more revolutionary.  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 bringing 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 may or may not have an application; 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 is stressed on these three people interacting.  It is a long, often 15-year process to bring a technology to market, and that time is spent creating iteration after iteration then subjecting them to the critique of each member of the team.  Only if a product or process can survive this relentless gauntlet of judgment will it ever see the light of day.

The key point that they stress is that for the interaction to really work, each of the three team members first must respect each other; they must also have some awareness and 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 stance.  That said, the other key point is that each of the team members must have a strongly-held opinion; and that they must fight for it.

***

The creation of a building routinely undergoes a similar process: an interaction between the developer – who initiates the project due to a perceived imbalance in the market; the architect – who addresses programmatic problems through material and spatial manipulation; and the contractor – who negotiates between the aesthetic aspirations of the architect with the budget constraints of the developer.  The three participants do battle, all fighting for the best design according to their particular criteria. The building is the byproduct of this three-way conflict, and it is the accumulation of these byproducts that forms the city.

Thus, going back to Margulis, if 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, then the city could be seen as such an organism.  Though most urban problems seem to be large in scale and largely unaddressed, the solutions seem to come from countless interactions that are small in scale and largely invisible to those not involved. 

Sustained observation reveals the Interactionist Protocol:

IMBALANCE (1)

An imbalance is perceived by an individual, which leads to an emotional reaction.

OPINION (2)

The emotional reaction induces an opinion as to how to address the perceived imbalance. 

ACTION (3)

The opinion often sparks a course of action; if the scale of that action requires it, an interaction is initiated.

INTERACTION (4)

The interaction proceeds, pitting criteria against criteria, most often through trial and error, toward a specific goal.

RESOLUTION (5)

The imbalance is resolved to the satisfaction of the interactors.

REPEAT (6)

A new imbalance is perceived and the process is repeated, more often than not by a new set of interactors.

While the goal is always to achieve a new equilibrium by solving a specific problem, this leads without fail to new problems at various scales and along different timelines. This aligns with Nick Lane’s concept of dynamic equilibrium, where true balance remains ever elusive.  In the Interactionist City, an imbalance could be misread, an opinion off base, an action inappropriate, an interaction hijacked by charisma or money – any of which would lead to an ineffective resolution and a new imbalance.

Is there a way to devise more comprehensive solutions that diminish the effect that changes to one system have on related systems?  Is there away to reduce subsequent imbalance?  Perhaps in the future, when the promise of the digital revolution is fully realized.  But today, in the Interactionist City, imbalance is welcomed because it sparks emotional reaction, transforms opinion into action, propels heated interaction, and compels us to make better – and more human – cities.

***

In the end, the frenzy surrounding the demolition of Ray Bradbury’s house diminished considerably when it was learned that the person that bought the house was Thom Mayne of the architecture firm Morphosis.  Mayne, who is known for aggressive, iconoclastic work across the globe, was initially rumored to favor a design incongruous with the memory of Bradbury, the writer of such classics as Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles.  Instead, a spokesperson for Morphosis stated that this was to be the Mayne’s own home and that it would be set in a garden with a wall surrounding it etched with an homage to Bradbury.  The building is scheduled to start construction in 2017.

Did the media attention to this incident influence Mayne’s design?  Doubtful. Given his history of mining deep context for design inspiration, it is no wonder that Mayne’s design already intended to honor the beloved author, though perhaps not in the way that local residents had hoped.   However, it was Mayne’s rhetoric that ultimately won them over, if not through the logic of the argument, then in creating the sudden and urgent need to flee his verbal quicksand while they still could.

Which goes to show that the anxiety of the changing city does diminish over time, eventually leading to acceptance of a new status quo – that is, until someone knocks down another cherished building and starts the cycle all over again.

OBSERVATIONS

1.         Imbalance occurs at all scales and at all times.  It can be physical (hunger), relational (infidelity), social (keeping up with the Joneses), economic (a business opportunity), political (an oppressive regime), even conceptual (architectural theory), etc.  When an imbalance is perceived and an emotional reaction takes place, it is often a primal, pre-verbal response.  The imbalance can be something as small as an itchy nose or as large as the rise in student debt, but the feeling generated is the same: the imbalance perceived by an individual requires action to be resolved. 

2.         Opinion emerges formed by criteria embedded within the individual’s egosystem – itself a system of systems bringing together the entire history of an individual’s experiences, traumas, education, relationships, etc.; Those criteria are thus an incomplete and potentially flawed, and are further compromised by the influence of affinity in all its forms. 

3.         In Microcosmos, Lynn Margulis with Dorion Sagan contend that all real change in a system occurs at a scale micro to it.  Talking about forest ecology, they argue that it is in the signaling and exchange within the microbiome at the forest floor – the fungi, algae, lichen, and other microorganisms – that the shapes what we see in the macrobiome – the trees, shrubs, the insects and fauna.

Building, Planning and Zoning codes outline the physical parameters of a project and the budget dictates the limits of the scope.  This might be analogous to the physical substructure of a forest: the bedrock, the mountains, the streams.   The socio-economic conditions (as defined by the business opportunity present divided by the gathered opinions of any and all in affected area) might be akin to the weather.  We then would form the microbiome of the city.  In the end it is the role of the critical interactors in the microbiome – the makeup of which differs with every project – to take in all opinions and form a sort of “criteria soup” that digests all of them into a coherent solution.  Thus is created the genome of things in which the DnA of all participants is present in the final product.

4.         Affinity can be very attractive.  We are drawn to things like us we like people places and things that reinforce our world-view.  Is affinity is the enemy of innovation? Affinity is a positive force when is brings people together to develop a common vision; but affinity that creates hostility between groups is counterproductive in the evolution of a city.  In the Interactionist City both can occur, but the primary arena where affinity is felt is in the interactions themselves.  Aspirational affinity will pull some to agree with those they admire, while the affinity of belonging will compel some people to buckle under merely to get along.

The main obstacle to an effective interaction is that people with opposing opinions will not listen to each other and would rather defend their criteria to protect their world view.  The fact is, people feel better when they are surrounded by evidence and opinions that support their world view.  However, certainty comes from fixed criteria, which inevitably leads to stasis.

William Goldman famously said, “No one knows anything,” which is as true for successful movies as it is for companies, relationships, or cities, because when they get too cumbersome to innovate, their criteria become fixed, therefore unable to adapt, blind to a changing reality. Success mixes with affinity to create an entity that it is so large it lacks agility and is less likely to alter criteria in response to prevailing conditions.   Affinity causes these entities to misread their environment both due to – and to reinforce – their outdated criteria.  However with each subsequent iteration in the Interactionist Protocol, the extent of the misreading diminishes. 

5.         The iterative process may reduce the misreading of current conditions by entities laden with bureaucratic inertia, yet — to borrow from Inside Real Innovation – it still produces more incremental than fundamental change.  True breakthrough comes when the shift occurs, when a new criteria emerges, which starts with an individual who sees things just a little differently and who trust his or her instincts enough to survive the inevitable counter-assault of affinity.

Should the role of affinity somehow be removed from the Interactionist Protocol to facilitate the acceptance of the new criteria?  The obvious answer would be yes; but since “nobody knows anything,” it might just be the inherent imbalance of affinity that inspires the innovator with the new criteria to fight even more passionately for the cause.  Perhaps it is in this battle that the innovator is able to fine-tune the new criteria until its inevitability becomes clear to all.

6.         Of course, cities move at a much slower pace.  Even with passion, even after a breakthrough new project is completed, urban equilibrium is never achieved.  In fact, even after a building is built, it is constantly adjusted to adapt to user needs, what Lars Lerup meant by “building the unfinished.”  But even so, as a city evolves – at all scales and at all times –  the microbiome is at work, ceaselessly, remaking itself, building by building.

REFERENCES

Aldo Rossi, Architecture of the City (MIT Press, 1982)

Reyner Banham, Los Angeles, The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Penguin, 1971)

Mike Davis, City of Quartz (Verso, 1990)

Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting (Verso 1997)

Dana Cuff, The Provisional City (MIT Press, 2000)

Doug Suisman, Los Angeles Boulevard (Los Angeles Forum for Architecture & Urban Design, 1989; ORO Editions 2014)

Kazys Varnelis, Editor, The Infrastructural City (Actar, 2008)

Manuel DeLanda, A New Philospohy of Society (Bloomsbury, 2006)

Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes (Basic Books, 2002)

Nick Lane, Life Ascending (Norton, 2009)

George Johnson, Creation, in the Eye of the Beholder (The New York Times, May 20, 2014)

Clayton M. Christiansen, The Innovator’s Dilemma, (Harper Business, 2010)

Eugene Fitzgerald, Andreas Wankerl, and Carl Schramm, Inside Real Innovation (World Scientific, 2011)

Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness (Bloomsbury, 2011)

Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos (University of California Press, 1986)

Robert McKee, STORY (Harper Collins, 1997)

William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade (Warner Books, 1983)

Lars Lerup, Building the Unfinished (Sage Library of Social Research, 1977)

Imbalancing Act

Architectural Fermentation is not the only interaction that shapes our world.
Think about it: every action you do is result of a perceived imbalance, whether it be social inequity, a messy kitchen, a desire, a fear, or any number of issues, opportunities or changing conditions.  The mechanics are simple -- you sense an imbalance and almost immediately you have an opinion about it, which arises without prompting based on criteria within your egosystem and propels you to take action to address the imbalance.  When the imbalance is small, like thirst, you take action yourself; however, when the imbalance becomes too large for you as a individual to handle, you have to enlist the help of others.
This is where interaction occurs involving communication, negotiation, persuasion, and other methods of spreading your opinion about a perceived imbalance to others.  Winning others to your cause gives you power; failing to do so leads to feelings of defeat, which leads to negative opinions about yourself.  But you must not give up.  The key to the imbalancing act is to trust the intellectual or emotional response that you have when you perceive an imbalance.   Belief in the correctness of your perception makes you an effective interactionist.

Architectural Fermentation and the Evolution of Cities

One of the most heartbreaking things about living in Los Angeles is how routinely architectural gems are demolished without warning.  In April of this year, the Architects Newspaper reported that the Brentwood home of William Krisel, the iconic mid-century architect of as many as 40,000 dwelling units across Southern California, was being razed.  This would be a huge story almost anywhere except for the fact that it happens so often here, people have be come inured to it.  Perhaps LA is just too vast, with too many potential travesties for anyone to keep track of, let alone care about; still the end result is that the city is diminished in a small but real way each time this happens.

How do we deal with the anxiety over the changing city?  Thinking about it through the lens of Urban Successionism was a good start for me: viewing the city as formed through a natural process – but instead of evolving as a forest does in response to changes in ecological conditions, the city adapts to a shifting economic environment, growing in bursts of development, characterized by the architectural styles popular at the time, with all the stages of succession in ecosystems: the arrival of propagates, a sequence of dominant species, the fugitive equilibria, as well as the traumas and how the systems react to them.  Just as a forest contains within it a record of its growth and development, a city takes shape as an archive of successive economies. 

Considering the city in this way at first did bring some relief to my anxiety, but it did not cure it completely – urban successionism misses the fine grain of what happens between economic expansions, between those styles that define an era.  In Los Angeles, for instance, it does not account for the work of Schindler or Neutra, or the great textile-block houses of Frank Lloyd Wright or his son Lloyd Wright, or even the more recent work of Eric Owen Moss, Morphosis or Frank Gehry, all of whom are important, even canonical, to architects, yet have scant representation across the built landscape of the Southland.

Urban Successionism is inherently retrospective and thus insufficient in apprehending the evolution of a city as it happens.   A closer, more sustained look reveals that cities evolve not in a series of large movements but in small, incremental ones –in fact, very small: it turns out that a city evolves building by building.  Each project, no matter how seemingly insignificant, changes the city just a little. Furthermore, each building is 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.

I call this process Architectural Fermentation. 

***

The term came as a sort of epiphany following the convergence of three events: I was beginning the construction phase on a house in the Silverlake neighborhood in Los Angeles with an engaged client who started the project with an unusual request: if I wanted to be his architect I had to watch the HBO series True Blood.  At the same time I was taking an online winemaking class through UC Davis. I was reading about stuck fermentations – what happens when things don’t go quite as planned – when I came upon a phrase credited to noted oenoligist Hans Lüthi who, in his 1957 article, Symbiotic problems related to bacterial deterioration of wines, described all fermentation – good and bad – as a “succession of microbial onslaughts.” 

So there I was, fast-forwarding through part of a True Blood episode I had already seen, when it hit me:  sped up, the scenes appeared to be similar to what Lüthi described – a succession of interactions between two or more agents that together formed a story arc and resulting in some sort of resolution at the end of each show.   Like making wine, but at a scale virtually invisible to us: our own. 

That’s when I began to look more closely at the process behind my Silverlake project: how the interaction between the client and the architect could be thought of as the primary fermentation, the product of which – after 72 iterations in this case – was the design; which was then filtered through the building department; which was followed by the interaction of the client and contractor through construction, AKA the secondary fermentation; which was followed by the punch list and final sign-off from the building department before the structure could be occupied.  With a little creative license, the process seemed to mirror that of making a bottle of wine. 

***

Emboldened by this epiphany I turned to science to back me up.  As one might imagine, there is nothing on architectural fermentation; but there is plenty of literature on the evolution of systems. 

Jumping off from Hans Lüthi’s observation on microbial activity, I turned to the late evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis who, in her book Acquiring Genomes echoes the translation of Lord Kelvin’s second law of thermodynamics from physics to biology to be reread as “Nature abhors a gradient.”  She applies this law to systems both living and non-living, at all scales, even to the point of talking about the myth of the individual, 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.  “we must begin thinking of organisms as communities,” she writes, ”and communities are ecological entities.”  She goes on to say, “As natural selection filters out the many to preserve the remaining few, those few ever more efficiently use environmental energy to ‘purposefully’ (her quotes) reduce their gradients.”

The importance of gradients is also emphasized by Nick Lane in his book, Life Ascending. In that volume he explain the work of Mike Russell, the iconoclastic scientist currently at Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in particular his study of the sea vents in Tynagh, Ireland.  The argument is long and complicated, but seems to boil down to this: “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 if Russell and his colleagues are correct—and he thinks they are – 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 imbalance.  Thus a species evolves one mutation at a time, an iterative process that, like imbalance itself, is never ending.  But does this apply non-living systems as well?

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In a recent article in the Science Times section of The New York Times, George Johnson wrote an article, Creation, in the Eye of the Beholder, in which he states, “the brains and hands that design civilizations artifacts are products of the same evolutionary algorithm – random generation and testing” that drives evolution itself.

This is algorithm is especially evident in the field of entrepreneurial innovation.  In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christiansen talks at great length about how successful companies inevitably outgrow their capacity to adapt to the market and thus become vulnerable to “disruptive technologies” that almost always deliver a less expensive product that targets a market need more simply and precisely.  So, just as in natural systems, evolution of the man-made operates through survival of the fittest.

But how do these disruptive technologies come about?  What is the process through which they are developed?  MIT professor Eugene Fitzgerald, with colleagues Andreas Wankerl and Carl Schramm outline a very specific process that they feel delivers innovation most efficiently.  In their book, Inside Real Innovation, they distinguish between “incremental innovation” and “fundamental innovation,” the former being more adaptive and the latter being more revolutionary.  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 may or may not have an application; 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 is stressed on these three people interacting.  It is a long, often 15-year process to bring a technology to market, and that time is spent creating iteration after iteration then subjecting them to the critique of each member of the team.  Only if a product or process can survive this relentless gauntlet of judgment will it ever see the light of day.

The key they stress is that for the interaction to really work, each of the three team members must have some experience of the other two points of view.  It can never be a productive interaction if one member is unable to compromise due to an inability to comprehend what the others are saying.  That said, the other key is that all of the team members have strongly-held opinions and that they must fight for them.

Would the same sort of interaction work for architecture?  What if every building project underwent a prolonged and heated interaction between the architect – who understands the technological side; the developer – who initiates the project due to a perceived imbalance in the market; and the contractor – who understands how to implement the architect’s ideas and deliver the building to the developer?  Wouldn’t that create better buildings?  Let the opinions fly if it improves cities just a little bit!  Instead, most buildings are the byproduct of stuck fermentations caused by a lack understanding, communication – and respect – between these three team members. 

***

Simply knowing that a city evolves one project at a time through this complex interaction does not really relieve the anxiety of the changing city or guarantee that a corner of town will be improved by a particular project.  However, one would hope that having this knowledge would motivate all participants make any project the best it can possibly be.  But the imbalance we perceive as architects and urban designers may not be the imbalance perceived by contractors or developers; they still are compelled to address their own concerns.  Thus, it is incumbent upon us to own the imbalances we see, to have a clear opinion of how to fix them, and to fight to the bitter end to ensure we prevail.

Innovation through Architecture

With so much attention on growing our economy through entrepreneurial innovation, I decided to explore how people of influence - venture capitalists seeking start-ups, for instance - define innovation.

This Fall I enrolled in a MOOC (massive open online course) run by edX called "Innovation and Commercialization" and taught through MITx with two MIT professors in their business school.  At first it was difficult to understand though incredibly fascinating, exploring the fundamental mechanics of the innovation process.  But as time passed, it dawned on me:  I already knew this stuff.  This is what we as architects do on every single project.

The mechanics are based on the iterative process - that the innovator has an idea, which is then fine tuned through a very specific and precise dynamic, iteration upon iteration, until the final product is realized.  For the MITx professors, it came down to three parties in the iterative process: technology - the bright idea; the market - how can we sell it?; and implementation - how do we make it happen.  According to the MITx guys, the iterative process begins with one of these which is then tested against the others, fine tuned, and then tested again.

If it begins with technology, it's perhaps some sort of scientific idea that is breakthrough, but whose market or implementation possibilities are sketchy; or an idea generated by the market for which the technology and the implementation have not not been developed; or by an implementation technique that is discovered, but has no market or technology to take advantage of it.  It is in the interaction of individual people from each of these sectors through which an effective innovation can be evolved.

But isn't this architecture?  You have the architect who has what he feels is an innovative idea; you have the client/developer who has identified a particular business opportunity; and you have the contractor who understands how to get a project built.   

But as we know by looking around our cities, it's not any interaction of these three players that produces something interesting; the MITx professors also say that what makes any innovation really work is when each of the interactors has some knowledge of the other two sectors.  Only then can the aggregate ramifications of changes suggested by all sectors be grasped, thus making progress possible.

In architecture this simply means that the best buildings occur when an architect has some awareness of budgeting and construction methods; when a client/developer has some sense of what makes good design as well of the limits of his contractor; and when a contractor is able to comprehend the architect's intent as much as he is able to adhere to the client developer's budget and schedule.

The question is, if the innovative process is ingrained within us, why aren't there more architects becoming entrepreneurial innovators?