2.4 Transdisciplinary Research and Practice

“The greatest enterprise of the mind has always and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities. The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artefacts of scholarship”. Wilson, 1998.

The earliest recorded persons that pursed interrogations of a scientific and philosophical nature, including but not limited to the Mesopotamian Magi, did so in the absence of ‘disciplines’ per se. He whom is commonly considered to have first categorised areas of scientific enquiry, Aristotle, was himself a transdisciplinary researcher and practitioner: equal part scientist and philosopher, that being the modus operandi of The Academy, and of the other schools of Classical note, such as that of Hypatia of Alexandria. Likewise, transdisciplinarity was a hallmark of the foremost influential and significant natural philosophers of the 16th to 19th centuries, including amongst others, da Vinci, Alberti, Wren, Hooke, Newton, Goethe, Whewell, and Darwin. Goethe was amongst the first to formally acknowledge the virtues of transdisciplinary research. The original ‘STEM to STEAM’ advocate, Goethe understood how and why the migration of thinking and practice from one discipline, i.e. poetry and prose, to another, i.e. natural philosophy, and vice versa, facilitates new insights (Goethe, 2009), and in turn new paradigms, stating “The most original authors of modern times are so, not because they produce what is new, but only because they are able to say things the like of which seems never to have been said before” (Goethe, 2010, online). The essence thereof, i.e. that we need not displace the basic tenants of established scientific theories (i.e. Newtonian Laws) whereupon conceiving of new paradigms and philosophical precepts (i.e. Einsteinian Laws) was central to Goethe’s ecological interrogations, for example, his pioneering research into the process of metamorphosis in plants, and, likewise, to the schools of thought within which this thesis is conceived. This past century - be it consciously or otherwise - a steady stream of authors shared Goethe’s sentiments, including but not limited to Alfred North Whitehead, C. P. Snow, Thomas Khun, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Gregory Bateson, Edgar Morin, John Frazer, E. O. Wilson, Manuel de Landa, Michael Weinstock, and Sanford Kwinter.

Whitehead stated, “On the whole, the history of philosophy supports [Henri] Bergson’s charge that the human intellect ‘spatializes the universe’: that is to say, that it tends to ignore the fluency, and to analyse the world in terms of static categories”. (1978, p.209). Whereupon applied to post-Aristotelian western philosophy, one might argue that Bergson, and in turn Whitehead were correct in their assertion. However, broaden the spatiotemporal dimensions of ‘the universe’ and the statement’s tenability becomes debatable, or at the very least, culturally specific. For example, interrogate the precepts of Eastern philosophy and one finds that the boundaries between disciplines dissolves (Capra, 2010), and yet, within and of the foremost revered philosophical works, “even the broadest knowledge” is perceived as insufficient to “comprehend” the complex reality of the world (Tzu, 2010, p.130).

While transdisciplinarity guarantees not systemic thinking, it underpins the research and practice thereof, as evidenced in the works of the aforementioned polymaths. In Whitehead, Snow, Khun, von Bertalanffy, Bateson, Wilson, and de Landa we find advocates of the scientific and philosophical advantages of working not merely with, but within different disciplines. As inferred by Goethe, we need not move the world, but our vantage point thereto, for in straddling disciplines as fall across the sciences, arts, and humanities, that which was hidden can be revealed. Put another way, “Within the new paradigm, old terms, concepts, and experiments fall into new relationships one with the other (Khun, 2012, p.148). C. P. Snow suggested that researchers work across ‘two cultures’ [the sciences and humanities] (Snow, 1956, 1959), as did E. O. Wilson, writing of an “intellectual synthesis” enabled by the “unification of knowledge” (Wilson, 1998, p.5 and p.9), his inspiration drawn from, amongst other works, William Whewell’s ‘The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences’ (Whewell, 1840). Likewise, Buckminster Fuller inverted bifurcated research practice, by embracing not science and philosophy, but design [and] science (Fuller, 2013), and in doing so created a composite thereof. Whereas, the latter’s contemporary, Gregory Bateson, of whom the research and practice activities spanned several fields including anthropology, linguistics, semiotics, and cybernetics, expanded the systemic mental matrix yet further, to form an ‘ecology of mind’ (Bateson, 2000). Fellow founder of the “new realm of [systems] science”, Ludwig von Bertalanffy was equally alert to the imperative to integrate psychology to transdisciplinary practice (von Bertalanffy, 2015, p.xi). Whereas, Manuel de Landa emphasised how seemingly unrelated events string together to form the fabric of culture, including but not limited to the domain of linguistics (de Landa, 2000). Likewise, Edgar Morin and Kevin Kelly infuse such depth and breadth of disciplinary knowledge within their literature as to provide compelling insights that are as comprehensive as they are coherent in their understanding of the cause and effect mechanisms at play within socio-ecological systems (Morin, 1977; Kelly, 1994). Stepping forward to the present, members of MIT’s Media Lab have expounded the potentialities of a variant of transdisciplinarity, which dubbed ‘antidisciplinary’ accommodates for research activities beyond the limitations of current disciplinary frameworks, methods, and language. But, no matter the term we apply to the pursuit of research that spans several disciplines, in the act thereof we find opportunity to find “how unconscious values affect the very basis of empirical and scientific knowledge” (Bachelard, 1977, p.10).

Within popular contemporary culture, the term “intelligence” is commonly used in the absence of recognition that perceptions thereof vary from one community to another, one time to another, and one species to another. Most recently, the matter has become much evident in press and media articles that speak to “artificial intelligence” as if there is but one interpretation of the term. We also see the issue manifest whereupon authors attempt to quantify animal intelligence through the lens of human intelligence (Berger, 1982; De Waal, 2016). While, various are the theories of the workings of the human mind, a sizeable swathe of the foremost influential transdisciplinary researchers concluded that psychology plays a fundamental role in how an individual perceives of the world and of the events that take place therein (Aristotle, 1991; Plato, 2009; Kant, 2007; Hegel, 1807; Jung, 2017; Bachelard, 1997; Heisenberg, 2000; Toffler, 1970; Guattari, 2000; Postrel, 1998). Thus, while transdisciplinary research and practice, to quote Sir Francis Bacon, prevents not against such “vanities in studies” as may be labelled distempers (Simpson, n.d), in acknowledging there to be not one, but several perspectives, one creates an environment in which falsehoods are more, not less likely to be revealed, hence helps not hinders any effort to bring validity to research endeavours.

Many are the ways in which one might perceive of architecture and urban design, of which one is the physical manifestation of thought: the many buildings and structures of the world as record of the ontological outlook of their creators, and in turn, of the cultures of which they were/are a part. Reductionism has its uses, of which manifold are the examples referenced throughout this thesis. For example, reductionism underpinned scientific advances that made it possible to extrapolate data of which the aggregation enabled Lavoisier to discover the role of oxygen in combustion, thus to pave the way for the swathe of scientific disciplines as are under discussion. Equally, reductionism has its limits, of which expressions in contemporary architecture and urban design are so manifold as to be innumerable. However, in the context of this thesis a couple of pertinent examples are, firstly, the linearity with which architectural and urban design history is commonly presented, wherein, as in other fields, such as technology, progress is framed as following a temporally linear trajectory (i.e. the notion that with every passing decade researchers and practitioners produce ever more ‘advanced’ works). But, peruse annuals of architectural and urban design history and one finds not an exponential expansion of ideas, but a seemingly perpetual migration between ontological opposites.

Look to the many ancient vernacular architectures of the East, and one finds umpteen concepts that, in some instances, for a period of decades, centuries, or even millennia, fell out of fashion, to then rise from their ontological ashes. For example, in the pagoda we find a structure that embodies the very essence of adaptability and of environmental awareness, in that, whereupon an earthquake strikes, its design enables the dissipation of energy, thus the retention of structural integrity. While some posit the concept of ‘living with water’, or more specifically, be it seasonally or permanently, living atop it, Proto-Austronesian linguistic reconstructions, together with archaeological finds, point to the origin of stilted architecture dating to the Neolithic (Blust, 1976; Waterson, 2009). Whereupon a Proto-Austronesian had followed a compass bearing from East to West and some 15° or so upwards, they would have witnessed contemporaries as were equally adept at designing buildings and urban infrastructure that accommodated for water-laden topographies: the Mesopotamians. The city was birthed not in a state of environment stasis, but in and of “a tension between forces”, the evidence thereof inscribed not merely into clay tablets, but into the architecture the peoples of the age left behind (Leick, 2002, p.20). Had our Proto-Austronesian retraced his or her steps, at some, as yet unknown point between the Neolithic and now, they would have found their descendants adapting stilted architectures by means of making them transportable: the original ‘pop-up’ buildings, of which the bamboo structures though strong, are so light as can be picked up and moved as/where their owners require, be that to follow employment opportunities or the avoidance of natural hazards. Ask our Proto-Austronesian to tack [7] through time to the present day, and he or she would find yet further examples of spatiotemporally entangled architectural concepts that are simultaneously ancient and ‘current’. For example, Indian vernacular architectures that feature passive cooling, resource harvesting, flood mitigation measures, such as raised doorways, and structural adaptability [i.e. floors added or extended, and removed as/when their owners required]. These, and other features make evident that, be it mitigating the heat island effect or flooding, water shortages or variances in the use and/or number of inhabitants, H.sapiens are no strangers to transdisciplinary approaches in architectural and urban design.

Shift the compass yet again, such that one arrives in the midst of Renaissance Italy, and one finds polymaths da Vinci and Alberti delivering an old Masters class in transdisciplinarity, the former applying insights from his observations of the hydrology of river systems to tackling, amongst other issues, Milan’s sewage infrastructure problems [8]. The latter, inspired by a conversation with the former, pioneering encryption technology [9], as would not merely enable Alberti and his peers to protect their own ideas, but made a considerable contribution to the development of cryptanalysis. However, while many were the transdicplineers as followed, architecture and urban design practice nonetheless became widely sliced, diced, and distributed into distinct disciplinary specialisms.

Evidencing that architectural and urban design ideas, and their application, align not to a scala naturae [great chain of being], in which developments unfold as if atop an automated factory production line, by the mid 20th century systems thinking was, one again, disrupting disciplinary boundaries. Today, many are the architectural and urban design researchers and practitioners of whom the works simultaneously straddle the sciences, arts, and humanities. However, one particular individual of whom the words succinctly sum up the value of transdisciplinarity within architectural and urban design practice is Sanford Kwinter, who, in his essay ‘The Computational Fallacy’ (Kwinter, 2011, pp. 212 – 213) stated,

“mechanical matter intelligence took on an almost religious status (as electronics is certainly achieving today) to the point of annihilating archaic matter intelligence from public and social memory... No computer on earth can match the processing power of even the most simple natural system, be it of water molecules on a warm rock, a rudimentary enzyme system, or the movement of leaves in the wind”.

Reverting to the archaic: interrogate the predominate schools of thought, therein of action, during the pre-Aristotelian era, and one finds not a state of philosophical stasis, nor, more generally of exponential growth and development of ideas, and in turn of movements, but of migration between points of [philosophical] polarity, which, relating again to Kwinter’s essay, stems from the fact that “the way in which a society organises its systems of intuition – its sciences, its philosophy, and its technics – is in every manner a political one” (Ibidem, p. 212). Imprudent would it be to ignore this matter, given that the United States is currently under the governance of an administration that denies the validity of the outputs of its foremost scientific institutions, NASA and NOAA included, and, in consequence thereof has systemically removed scientific terminology, papers, and other data from government websites (Worth, 2017). Nonetheless, the transdisciplinary thinkers of the present find themselves amidst socio-political developments not dissimilar to their pre-Aristotelian antecedents. For instance, under the patronage of the Ptolemaic dynasty, the foundations of the “Temple of the Muses” [the inaugural ‘musaeum’] were laid. The foremost centre of scholarship and science of the ancient world, upon completion the complex housed facilities including laboratories, observatories, botanical gardens, zoological specimens, and a library furbished with the foremost significant published works from across the expansive territory that had been conquered under the rule of Alexander the Great (Haughton, 2011). However, the legacy thereof is but ashes, with some, but not all scholarly fingers pointing to Julius Caesar as the culprit. Whether the Library of Alexandria fell victim to ‘book burning’, or otherwise, that knowledge, including the sole copies of innumerable classical works, as collectively, Homer and his contemporaries would have conceived a consequence of the ‘theft of fire’ [i.e. the gleaning of what they would construe to be ‘Athenian’ insight and expertise] was raised to the ground, is testament to the stochasticity of ideas and of information, and of the values and of the beliefs that stem therefrom. Thus, philosophy itself is subject to process, beholden to external forces, which push and pull between political, social, economic, and environmental extremes.

Footnotes

[7] Tack is sailing term used to describe a manoeuvre that turns the bow toward the wind, therein changes a vessel’s course.

[8] In reference to Da Vinci’s Ideal City, which is documented in sheet 36, 39, and 47 of his manuscripts (www.museoscienza.org).

[9] The most accomplished cryptographer in 15th century Europe, Alberti harnessed Arabic knowledge of frequency analysis to pioneer supercipherment in the form of the cipher disc, which described in his De Cifris treatise of 1467 enables cryptographers to decrypt polyalphabetic ciphers in multiple languages.

Read Literature Review in full 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.