The Translation of Syntax

There’s a topic we should probably address before moving forwards to related things.  We have used the word entropy multiple times now in slightly differing contexts; we have also used the terms probability and complexity… there exists a framework we can use to bring all these concepts together, and even time has its place to be found alongside them.  When we think of entropy in vernacular, we think of aging or decay, but this is not a fair description of how we are using it here, we see entropy as the mechanism that gives the natural world the distinctive aesthetic it has, a pattern of potential which skirts the edge of chaos.  

The physicist Murray Gell-Mann after being awarded his Nobel Prize turned his attention to a different puzzle, he sought a framework to better understand where complexity comes from.  His measurement of complexity was revealed by the difficulty in describing something, and he proposed a conceptual model formed between two distinct poles to illustrate.  Both poles in themselves were extremely simple drivers, both easy to define, but they existed as opposites to one another, two immiscible substances where complexity emerged on a scale drawn between them, represented as an arc.  The greater the interaction between these two simple forces, the greater the emergent complexity and the harder things became to describe before sliding back down the scale into simplicity again.  Entropy is the purest expression of this idea; a framework of high probabilistic vs. low probabilistic states in opposition which can be applied almost universally across any specific particular, where for Gell-Mann, it was the interaction between these states that created an environment within which interesting things began to appear.

When we think about a practical analogy for this idea that is easily communicable, our mind turns to the familiar states of matter we all know well; we imagine the simplicity of absolute order to be akin to something frozen, very low energy, unchanging and solid, and we imagine the opposing absolute chaos to be akin to a gas, hot and unruly, constantly on the move.  Complexity for us lies between these two opposites in what logically would be described as a more fluidic state, propagating as ripples and waves, interference and destruction, constantly shifting form based on the shape of its surroundings.  This influences a lot of the references we carefully choose or languages we might adopt, being revealed in foundational ideas such as those we quoted from Heraclitus right back at the start of this journey, or even in far older imagery we might playfully bring to the table, the wellspring, the house of waters, the pool of two truths, or an earthbound ocean amongst a great heavenly sea.

This relationship between the goal of complexity and a drive toward simplicity can be problematic though. We want things to be simple, not simplistic, and those are not the same thing at all.  When you follow the above framework through to logical conclusions, what you begin to realise is that sometimes, things that may appear complex on the surface, actually turn out to be surprisingly simple, and conversely, things that might appear superficially simple, actually turn out to be far more complex, and the best answer we can give as to why that might be the case, boils down to a discussion over context.  Let us give a practical example; as precedent, we are influenced strongly by mid-century Literalism, this is a movement which appeared mostly in the arts, in sculpture and painting, and again, in the vernacular, you might know it by another name; Minimalism… but we prefer not to use this definition, it has been abused greatly, especially within architecture and design. The term does not fully capture what these artists were trying to do.

The distinction is a subtle one; Literalism (to be literal), is not simply reductivism (to reduce), that on its own becomes something else entirely, vacuous and shallow, valuing only the self-referential and obsessive image of itself.  Starting instead as a reaction against the objectifying and anti-contextual logic of the gallery space, the goal of Literalism was to strip away the symbolic, strip away the illusions in order to expose deeper truths, redefining its own language in the process to point toward things that could be said to be universal or inescapably true.  The by-product of this process was honesty, and the message each piece or painting sought to communicate became a more complex beast than the immediacy of whatever superficial form it chose to adopt, becoming instead a mechanism toward the understanding of something, not simply the obsession over a static end result.

As the language matured the works began to push further toward the site-specific, tearing down the traditional barriers that separated a form from its context. It became landscape, and building, and sculpture all at once, demanding instead a reframing of perception from its audience to focus not on the object itself, but rather beyond it, to the reality a piece found itself within… and so extreme this process became, that over time it started resembling something else entirely, something far older, bearing a disturbing similarity to processes almost empirical in intent, to arguments written down by authors such as Bacon so many years before. In application, in praxis so to speak, it carried a similar intent repeated again and again across time… its own Miltonian rebellion against the symbolic deceptions of its age.

Literalism points outwards, not inwards, that is the clearest distinction we can make, it cannot exist without a context in which to ground it, and via this deliberate relationship creates for itself it’s own arc of complexity, the simplicity of the object vs. the simplicity of the chaos which surrounds it, the point vs. a cosine circle of infinite states, where any meaning we might wish to convey sits somewhere between, within a more complex interpretive envelope. As a language it seeks to be honest about what it reveals and we value this greatly, find it to be relevant within our wider discussions, but this search for an honest aesthetic through near empirical rigour is not the only path we can take to achieve this goal; a parallel path can also be found within the Japanese philosophy of Wabi Sabi.

Where Literalism arrives through a process of analytical reduction, Wabi Sabi reaches a similar destination by embracing the natural world’s own logic, celebrating its own interpretation of entropic complexity by finding beauty in impermanence and imperfection. In short, it introduces the concept of time, but time as a language is a topic best left to a future post, there are implications to this idea which need more space than we have here to unfold into, so in it’s absence we would direct your attention instead to some other brief observations of Wabi Sabi we find relevant. There is a practical streak we enjoy here; the idea of valuing what we already have, of repairing something broken not merely to fix it but to celebrate its history (as in the process of Kintsugi) is a deeply relevant gesture in an otherwise throwaway society; and the focus on natural materials, on restraint, we see as a practical, lower-energy approach to living that offers much of value within the wider arguments we’ve already talked through. Most of the work our practice completes is a far stretch from the super modern literalist images we might show you in our gallery, most of it is actually to historic and listed buildings, and we see no contradiction in that. It appeals to the Wabi Sabi side of us to protect and repair, and there is an honest humility in that process which is an important component of who we choose to be as Architects.

Where we diverge from Wabi Sabi is in the observation that whilst the language is highly considered and evolved, the underpinning foundation upon which it builds itself leans more toward the instinctive than measured.  All representations are in some way symbolic, you cannot fully escape that, but not all symbols are the same, some are more useful than others.  Whilst we’d agree Wabi Sabi does indeed speak outwardly, it does not specifically do so with the tools necessary to more deeply interrogate the references it ties itself to, often skirting close, but never quite reaching that same intent.  In our mind, the ability to measure (even if you choose not to) is important. It is a foundational skill handed from one generation to the next and was the key ‘big idea’ we wanted you to take away from the underground housing project we tabled previously, that measuring something (even if only as experiential representation) is important because without it we can have no objective measure of reality to share between us, this is the criticism we level at current architectural discourse.  When we imagine a world where those mechanisms have been stripped away, we imagine an environment in which we’d have little awareness of wider climate changes at all, or biodiversity loss, or sea ice change, or inequality, or any of the other slow gradual changes that have occurred over the past few decades.  This deeply concerns us… it sounds disturbingly close to a kind of new dark age that Bacon worked so hard to push us away from, and we’re not fully convinced that would be an appropriate direction to lead people given the challenges we face.  If our wider argument is over one of probabilities, and our intent is to find ways to ‘tilt the scales’ in our favour, finding ways to distribute these tools as widely as possible seems a far more contextually appropriate strategy than pretending they simply don’t exist.

This is an idea we’re still playing with and are unsure of how best to implement it.  On the surface, it implies we should be pulling apart the ideas of Wabi Sabi to isolate out the parts we don’t want and rebuild the parts we do on top of a new foundation.  To illustrate one such possible approach we could table the Zero One concept project you’ll find in the gallery.  Here we chose to directly take the work of Newton [The Rotation of Fluids from Principia, another quiet liquid reference], and rebuild it as a three dimensional form, trying to find ways to overlap as many subtle meanings as possible whilst also keeping the overall form simple.  There are nods to calculus, to pi, to two fundamental states, a ground [literally] and a positive, ascent and descent, spatial transformation and rotation, all unified by the ideas we’ve been speaking about above, i.e. the arc of complexity…  but the result we find surprisingly serene, quite gentle in its ripples and implied reflections.  We don’t like that it stands isolated from any real context, that doesn’t seem to fit, but otherwise it very much does seem to capture many of the things we are trying to weave together in the fusing of these differing languages, and -at some level- it appeals to us to use ideas that are hundreds of years old taken from one of our greatest minds in such a way.  There is a timeless universal quality to these things, underpinned by quiet geometry and making statements which hint at wider truths to find should you wish to look for them.

Where else do we diverge from Wabi Sabi?  We are deeply uncomfortable with the idea that we can simply adopt a language wholesale from somewhere else (Japan in this case) without consequence.  Our cultures are fundamentally different, we even structure our languages differently, and probably nowhere is this difference more readily observed than in how we manipulate space:  The Japanese have a spatial language built around the use of the floor whereas in the West we have a spatial language built around the use of the wall… it’s an observation we often play with.

We like complex planes; they are an important foundational concept in understanding the world around us. Sitting as the interpretive gateway between three wider quantitative languages -even some imaginary ones- they carry the potential to translate the immediate specific geometry of architecture into explorations of far more complex ideas.  We use them a great deal, a motif if you will, but would ask that you step back and look at these gestures in a slightly different way.  They are not simply stylistic decisions as perhaps a choice over what type of wallpaper to use, they are instead deeply intertwined with this idea of overlapping functional states (entropy as discussed previously) where the broad idea is to create tools that prescribe less and imply more, becoming both complex and simple at the same time.  Instead of giving you -as a quick example- ‘a shelf’ to inhabit as a design solution, we prefer instead to give you the potential for all possible shelf positions at the same time, which is to see design not as a static object but rather in a state of superposition for want of a better term.  Simply slot in or over whatever component or form you wish to inhabit and change it everyday should the preference take you…  draw pictures with it, count things on it, do nothing at all…  whatever feels appropriate to your needs.  Design when it becomes too focused on a single end goal runs the risk of becoming deeply prescriptive, glacially tied to one interpretation of how the world should be.  It might provide a more superficially stable state and we’d agree the compositions can be quite beautiful, but they are also quantitatively less useful, less adaptive to changing needs, and as this wider idea of change over time is something we are trying to embody, it makes sense for us to adopt a different approach to reveal it.

We see playing with gestures like this as pushing the other way from simply ‘the frozen object’, becoming fuzzier, less defined, and providing us a route past the implicit contradiction of wanting buildings to become more fluid without literally making them from fluids (an idea that does not make for happy Structural Engineers).  This is not simply about creating the ‘representation of fluidity’ in a superficially ‘wavey’ way, instead these gestures celebrate being almost the total inverse, not ‘appearing’ fluidic at all, but ‘being’ fluidic in function, that is the target we aim for. The message is not intended to be about what something is, but rather about what it does, that is the shift in perspective they require; they are mechanisms to embody actual change, not abstract representations of change, and by doing so reveal themselves to be small microcosms of the wider macroscopic site scale logics we often try to reach toward, operating over multiple scales at once almost like a fractal. How do we make spaces more adaptable is a question we find highly contextually relevant, and there’s a strange kind of freedom hidden away behind that idea also, in the idea of impermanence and agency in how our environment is organised. These ideas we feel carry an important message, though admittedly, in an implicit way that is easy to misinterpret.

Does such a collection of deeply nuanced concepts carry any merit in the world we now inhabit? In a more authoritarian, anti-science, post-truth world of deliberate illusion and shadow?…  we’d argue that they do, they are palette specifically chosen to do exactly that. As we’ve said before, none of the forces we are seeing are new sliding as they are down the scale into far simpler states of being, and what we’re hoping for by this point with these final few brief observations is that we’ve now given you enough of a framework to start seeing how a sweeping collection of maddeningly disparate parts and images are beginning to coalesce together into a more satisfying whole, all woven carefully to form a grounded contextually relevant argument.  The method within the madness so to speak. Next we need to speak about how all this is applied, and what real world impacts it has on the buildings we design, and we also need to talk about the language of time... that should be mildly interesting.

…to be continued.