Living Forms and Self-organized Reality

To portray the new architecture with a great deal of dynamism with a never-ending fecundity of forms coming to life, the architectural language must be adapted and developed further. A form coming to life requires certain measures being taken, which can be compared to the measure of cosmogenesis. Aesthetics, in the end, is the result of a creative process, but to compare it with cosmic processes, we have to advocate for its ever-changing DNA, the inherent structure, just like when a galaxy is born. We are used to creativity that is linked to the presence, and therefore inevitably linked to the past and the future. We picture future scenarios of the upcoming form and the continuity it is going to react to considering past events and the pre-existing, earlier born forms. A product of such a creative process is usually understood and admired within a smaller context, and therefore it can be identified as a linear process.

Fractal Model. When thinking about urban life and the forms that live in the city, on a large scale, there are new patterns that emerge for us to be seen. Such an organism, a living organism consisting of many living forms is a dynamic, pulsating entity. Birth, life and death of forms happen simultaneously. They emerge like fractals. Look at the city, a structured blob — blinking, flickering, quivering. By zooming out we begin to understand the truth of their structured bodies, whose life and death depend on constant renewal, growth and shrinkage. The mechanistic models of modernist cities attempted to impose the process of linearity even on a large scale, but with the fractal model in mind, it did not last long before the truth was revealed.

The fractal language does not hide. It permeates everything, the landscape, the skies and all forms. The algorithmic multiplication recreating similarity is the functional rationale of urban organisms, generated and approved by what has been and will be through the process of becoming. The language of forms is therefore much more unified than random, for they are self-similar reconstructions of the environment.

Folds, Waves and Undulations. Another language besides the fractal language is based on folds, waves and undulations. By analogy, this is derived from the wave motion that is the foundation of the quantum world. Drawing an analogy from Superstrings, also minuscule vibrating units of substance that are at the bottom of our vibrational universe. A part of dynamism are the twists and warps of the matter that illuminate the possibility of dramatic changes that can influence the form. Such forms assembled create non-linear architecture (as an effect of non-linear dynamics known from complexity science). This new language is an expression of growth of undulating movements generating aesthetic forms out of fractured planes, wave-forms, twists and folds. An aesthetic language overcoming schematic rigidity.

To conceive curves and dynamic structures just as easily as the angular ones, we can use a warped grid. With that we can grow a pattern of non-linearity in wave-forms, which expands and shrinks suddenly and depending on operational feedback. Such architecture is opposed to the mechanistic (still mainstream) views that reflect the lifestyle of the urban homo economics that is subjected to rigid daily urban routines.

So we seek architecture of living forms that reflect the new worldview and the truth that we inhabit a self-organizing, dynamic universe that is non-linear and open-ended. Every organism and being in it is a component of the whole, also self-organizing and dynamic creature with a great degree of freedom and ability to reorganize the way they operate (live) according to the feedback. And that is valid for both — the animate and the non-animate forms. There is no doubt that everything is dependent on subtle self-organizing rhythms, yet they are too delicate and require a repeated balancing maintenance to avoid too much order and too much chaos — and each has an organization called a ’strange attractor’ (see here and here). It can be a delicate act to balance chaos and order, the self-similar rhythms and arrhythmia, just like healthy complexity and quivering fibrillation.

So architects, designers, engineers, study patterns everywhere — they show the aesthetics of life.