Feature

“The surprise is that underneath at the basis, the creations are from a similar ground or substrate of concepts. Nothing to do with architecture, unless architecture is everything to do with organisation.” – Cecil Balmond *

“Structure is the architects mother tongue; the architect is a poet who thinks and speaks in structure.” – Auguste Perret.

The clear structural project of the Centre Pompidou (1977) by Piano, Rogers and Franchini, as well as engineers Edmund Happold (who would later found Buro Happold) and Peter Rice, in many ways commenced the second era of modernist experiments celebrating structural engineering as a form of architectural expression. The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in 1978 and The Hong Kong Shanghai Bank in 1985 by Sir Norman Foster followed close behind, as did a host of others, foregrounding the strong machinic rationalisation of rhythm and steel, a logic of modules, grids and serialised production.

Warren Weaver, however, is not a name typically associated with architecture and structural engineering, yet well before Pompidou, he was articulating a mathematical and spatial reorganisation after mechanisation and the serial purity of the early moderns, which has in many ways recast the logic of space itself.
Warren Weaver wrote a paper in 1948 titled Science and Complexity, as the director of the Division of Natural Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation, New York, having worked with the Applied Mathematics Panel at the US Office of Scientific Research and Development. The paper was published in American Scientist (36:536, 1948) and set out his understanding of the problems that would engage the scientific community at large for the last half of the modern century. Critically, he charted a trajectory that was moving from problems of “Simplicity” – those problems that the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wrestled with in the physical sciences, resulting in the discovery of the variables “which bought us the telephone and the radio, the automobile and the airplane” – to problems of “Disorganized Complexity”, that scientific period of 20th century development where statistics and probability governed the development of information theory, graph theory and so on. Finally, however, Weaver identified a period of exploration that lay ahead and that would pre-occupy the sciences for decades, effecting all the disciplines, from biology to physics, and re-drawing the map of relations that make up the world we knew. This era he believed would be characterised by the problems of “Organised Complexity”.

Weaver wrote this paper sitting in an office just next to the urbanist Jane Jacobs, as she was writing The Death and Life of Great American Cities, later published in 1961. Jacobs at that time was formulating her rejection of modernist planning principals of the city and developing her own image of the city as a complex organic organisation of subtle local interconnections and their emergent urban effects. That their thinking aligned was not coincidental. Weaver’s effect on her thinking was direct, and especially pronounced in the last chapter of her book, “The kind of problem a city is”. In this chapter Jacobs speculates on the organisational complexity of a city, and how we might go about understanding this complexity and putting it into action. New forms of organisation that order matter in space by balancing myriad complex interactions provided the foundation for a type of rationality of a different order to the mechanical inspiration of Gropius, Mies and Corbusier.

Computing machinery, code breakers, radar systems, and fully established mass production systems gave image to the rationality of the serialised underpinning of the early modern era caught so well by Siegfried Gideon in 1948. But the theories of a new complexity being written down in 1949 by the likes of Weaver were not irrational, so much as a different order of rationalisation that bridged both natural geometries, mathematics and ultimately computational logic.

Nearly 60 years later, we are still grappling with the implications of Weaver’s vision in both philosophical as well as technical terms. Yet it is precisely this mathematics of organised complexity, that Jacobs sought to bring directly to urbanism, that also made visible a whole world of natural structures and organisations that we had been blind to before. What Weaver revealed was what Cecil Balmond, the man behind Arup’s Advanced Geometry group and guru mystic engineer, calls deep structure, “that peculiar balance again of the irregular within the determinate.” ** Coupled with information theory, cybernetics, graph theory and later complexity theory itself, a whole platform for understanding the organisation of our world was rewritten over the last 50 years which has lead more and less directly to the renewed fascination with natural geometries and their intersection with algorithmic processes that are redefining the possibilities of structure and architecture today.