more McGill thoughts

I find it heartening to discover that there seems to be a growing concern with the poetics and philosophy associated with the practice of science. Both Bohm and Penrose fairly explicitly state their attempts at understanding the world around them is a metaphysical one (an admission that would have greatly disheartened Einstein. ...Godel too.) Kauffman's investigations into what constitutes life goes even further. He even relates his understanding of life back to Von Neuman and the later Wittgenstein both eventually breaking strong ties with the Positivists of the Vienna Circle that figure so highly into ...the Crisis of Modern Science.

It is also interesting that there seems to be a growing production of work as art produced by scientists out of their research. Somehow architects miss the boat. Charles Jenks' book on complexity theory and architecture is a good example of not looking very seriously at the impact of our understanding of the world we inhabit and how we design or build things in relation to that understanding. I fear much of the movement toward 'sustainable' or 'green' architecture (particularly where it relates to 'high-performance buildings') also does little to truly relate to Kauffman's explanations of why and how our biosphere is a self organizing and propagating system. (This strikes me as sad as Kauffman's attempts at getting to an understanding of what life or a biosphere is seems to support a much more interesting and diverse set of possibilities for such a system to be sustaining. I find, for example, that there are bits and pieces of the work of R&Sie architects that start to do interesting things because there is a relationship between the structure as an autonomous agent and the capability to do work.)

Within mainstream architecture (particularly as documented by the editorials and published works in Architectural for example) I find the trend toward Soft Modernism (...a term coined I think by Mike Grimshaw for "Soft Modernism - The World of the Post-Theoretical Designer (note I find the essay interesting and on point in some ways, but I tend to disagree with some of his conclusions/suggestions.)) very disconcerting. The work discussed and becoming more prevalent is a historical resurrection of a modernist style (itself an attempt at a lack of historical reference) without reference to the Positivistic basis that Perez-Gomez so effectively criticizes. In fact, every effort is made to deny any relevance to a theoretical or philosophical position. Devoid of both, it lacks any desire to become meaningful and as such is viewed as being less alienating than its predecessor with the strange justification that if we don't talk about it, it won't have any impact on us...