5.1.3 Entering the Eye of a Thomian Urban Storm: Systems and the City

“What passes for fundamental concepts in ecology is as mist before the fury of the storm – in this case, a full, nonlinear storm”. Schaffer, 1991.

Reyner Banham spoke to an architectural dichotomy in which the city of conservation, “the structural solution”, resided in polarity to the city of combustion, “the power-operated solution”: one either built with wood, or one burnt it (Banham, 1984, p.19). He recognised that “pre-technological” peoples build not “substantial structures”, instead inhabiting “a space whose external boundaries are vague, adjustable according to functional need, and rarely regular” (Ibidem, p. 20). However, while the dichotomous construct applies to the architectures of societies that source their building materials locally, [i.e. South-East Asian vernacular architectures aligned to Proto-Austronesian traditions] it applies not to the City of London, which instead constitutes a splicing of conservation and combustion, and in both instances, the materials as underpin the action thereof are sourced from afar. We might think of the city as the candle in the analogy as follows:

“whereas individually the flame is an open system as energy and the candle a closed system, together they constitute something else, multiple and ambiguous, where the candle can appear as the energy reserve of the flame system.” Morin, 1977.

Metaphorically, Morin’s flame to candle construct sees the city’s materiality reduced to its lowest common denominator, to energy, or more specifically to metabolic exchanges and their spatiotemporal dimensions: the city as an open thermodynamic system. As observed by Luis Fernandez-Galiano, “wood is potentially as much a construction material as a combustible substance”, the relationship between the one and the other commutable and interchangeable (Fernandez-Galiano, 2000, p. 17), as evidenced in the Great Fire. In contrast, while mineral-based architectures preserve some of the energy as was required for their creation [i.e. in the mining, transport, and processing of their materiality] they nonetheless require yet further energy consumption [i.e. heating and lightening], for, as discussed by Stephen Cairns and Jane Jacobs, they enter states of “decay, obsolescence, disaster, ruin, and demolition” in the absence thereof (Cairns and Jacobs, 2014, p.232).

While Fernandez-Galiano interrogated not the theoretical nor practical challenge of accommodating for fire as spreads within and across the materiality of a building or a city, he nonetheless re-opened a dialogue which, in the aftermath of Banham’s passing in the late 1980s, had been all but abandoned. Bringing context thereto, while many have been the discussions of ‘design for deconstruction’, the context of the discussions has shifted over time.

Citing the systems thinking pioneer Sir Geoffrey Vickers VC, “There are many situations in which to be systematically late, is to be systematically wrong”, Cedric Price discussed the virtues of adding “doubt, delight, and change as design criteria”, the italics added by this author by means of emphasising that Cedrician Thinking, as one might dub it, embraced not rejected the “unexpected” (Price, 1996, p27). A man whose mind delved the depths of innumerable disciplines, Price perceived of architecture beyond the “soul-destroying static fixes” as persist in populating the paradigm to which most late 20th and early 21st century architects subscribe (Cairns and Jacobs, 2014, p. 41). Acknowledging architecture to be “slow” whereupon the “time-factor” is accommodated for (Ibidem), Price advocated for ‘anticipatory design’, that resides not in a world of assumptions and of acquisition, but of “mobility, flexibility, adaption”, “planned obsolescence” and “letting go of the architectural artefact” (Ibidem). Therein, “we”, the Global North, and increasingly Global South, may be “living in a material world” (Brown and Rans, 1984), but, as Price acknowledged, we do so not indefinitely, for the parameters of the systems upon which our world is built revolve not around such aspirations. But, for all the systemic literacy as expressed in Price’s many, often times collaborative, theoretical works, such scope of understanding is often absent from the design for deconstruction constructs created in the aftermath thereof, this being a matter as was partly addressed by Cairns and Jacobs in the closing chapter of their “memento mori for architecture” (2014, p. 232). Whereas Cedrician Thinking evolved in an arena of expertise which, be it through explorations theoretical and/or practical, had developed an appreciation of the tension between chaos and order, and for the creative potentialities therein, a sizeable swathe of that which has followed speaks to the banality of bullet points born of the misplaced belief that complexity can be, and should be, controlled. Citing yet further pertinent observations on the part of Cairns and Jacobs, valiant though their intentions, such are the vagaries of Braungart and McDonough’s cradle-to-cradle paradigm that while intended to accommodate for complexities of “cosmological” proportions (Ibidem, p. 228) it provides not clarity with regard to the technicalities thereof, thus leaving it wide-open to interpretation. Casting their appropriately critical eyes to the design for deconstruction proposition of Schmidt-Bleek, Cairns and Jacobs acknowledge that, like that of Braungart and McDonough, while speaking to the ecological, its parameters are predominantly set within the confines of the anthropogenic: the commodification of the natural world. Within and of these paradigms ecological processes are reduced to acts of procurement: planetary systems, so say, beholden to human wants and needs, and at the mercy of management practices, including but not limited to, “accounting” (Ibidem, p. 229).

Recalibrating the lens through which systems are viewed from that of Braungart and McDonough, and Schmidt-Bleek, to that of Price and his collaborative peers, disorder resumes its relevance, such that ecologies are understood in states of emergence not equilibrium, dynamism not stasis (sensu Postrel, 1998): buildings not ‘dying’, but evolving, their systemic parameters adjusting as socio-ecological shifts occur, therein travelling the space-time continuum ad infinitum. Add the element of fire and, to cite Morin, “[René] Thomian catastrophe takes place in society, in which the disintegration of old forms and the gestation of new forms constitutes one and the same banged up, antagonistic, and uncertain process” (Morin, 1977, p.89).

Thinking not at the scale of the City, but of the planet, and to how it may be possible to reconcile the growing gap between construction material supply and demand, and to do so within the boundaries (Rockstrom et al, 2009) as might enable “harmony” between anthropogenic, ecological, and other Earth systems (Brundtland, 1987, online), the imperative to explore new architectural and urban design paradigmatic possibilities becomes starkly evident.

>Continue to Chapter 5.1.4 here.

The thesis is also available in PDF format, downloadable in several parts on Academia and Researchgate.

Note that figures have been removed from the digital version hosted on this site, but are included in the PDFs available at the links above.

Citation: Sterry, M. L., (2018) Panarchistic Architecture: Building Wildland-Urban Interface Resilience to Wildfire through Design Thinking, Practice and Building Codes Modelled on Ecological Systems Theory. PhD Thesis, Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research [AVATAR] group, University of Greenwich, London.