Situating the thesis, Part 2

As I have shifting my thesis topic from wave~particle duality to a both~and condition (moving away from the scientific phenomenon) I have found my research still expanding into quantum science and the related. One such source is Charles Jencks, "Architecture of the Jumping Universe." I have used other resources by Jencks in situating my thesis within an architectural discourse. This source further expands what I have been also ready read.

Jencks is seeking an architecture that reflects the new world view. This is similar to Venturi's argument that architecture should reflect the complexity and contradiction that exists in the world and that other disciplines have chosen to recognize. "We inhabit a self-organizing universe that is open-ended." There is a balance between order and chaos (duality.) Jencks uses this idea to support nonlinear architecture through the use of fractals, wave-forms, folded forms, and strategies of superposition. They provide both a simplicity and complexity. Jencks mentions Venturi's approach as a "complexity collage of pre-existing, well-known solutions that manipulates classicism." Nonlinear architecture allows a feedback in the system.


Jencks is essentially working with one duality, order versus chaos. The both~and condition for this duality is complexity. Jencks describes how a higher intelligent system is one that has found the balance between order and chaos. The examples he gives are a beating heart, the brain, Hamlet, and poetry. All these elements are hard to truly duplicate using artificial means. Elements that are purely ordered or chaotic can be easily mimicked and derived artificially (through computation.) Jencks describes this concept further in diagram:

Cosmic Axiology - a formal measure of simplicity, complexity and complication

Charles Jencks, "Architecture of a Jumping Universe"

He critiques modern architecture by asking the rhetorical question, "how many ways can you decipher the typical 'dumb box' found in every downtown area of a city, the modern curtain-walled office of glass and steel?"

Jencks does talk briefly of waves. "Wave motion is so crucial and omnipresent in nature." Every subatomic particle is both a wave and a particle (same with light.) He continues, "every object and human being is composed of this bipolar unity, double entity."

My reaction:
My ears always perk up when I read something that may provide more insight in how the wave~particle duality that started my thesis has been incorporated into architecture. Jencks is usually the source that gets the closest for me. This time he discusses more about just waves in general and how they can be used through interference, twisting and patterning. We both see the importance of basic (or not so basic) scientific phenomena being incorporated into the built world. His one project of twisting waves for the design of a gate that "demonstrates solid/void, black/white, and foreground/background" is closest to what my moire was trying to achieve. He is using waves to form relationships of several dualities.

 Soliton Gates, Charles Jencks