Architectural memes in a universe of information.
Nikos A. Salingaros
Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Texas at San Antonio,
San Antonio, Texas 78249.
salingar@sphere.math.utsa.edu
Abstract: I describe here a symbiosis between ideas,
images, texts, and biological forms. Human culture consists of created
objects as information, which form an integral part of what we are --
i.e., an essential extension of our biological bodies into our
environment. This sensory, informational extension and mechanism for
interaction defines a universe of information. With the advent of
electronic communications, a relatively autonomous virtual world has
been created. The space of information has proved a fertile breeding
ground for the same informational entities -- called "memes" -- that
formerly inhabited only human minds and artifacts. Architectural memes
that took generations to diffuse through a restricted society can now
spread around the world almost instantly, and will eventually alter its
physical appearance. This paper aims to understand this process.
1. Introduction.
Intelligence distinguishes human beings from all other life forms. Much
of our intelligence results from (or is manifested in) our ability to
construct artifacts. A central component of the human intellect is devoted
to establishing connections, such as those between elements in a design that
leads to an artistic advance; or those between cause and effect that leads
to scientific understanding; or between ideas and applications that leads to
a technological advance. This is but a very sophisticated manner of treating
information. Human beings are the best information processors among all the
animals. Our technology and culture extend our informational abilities
artificially, magnifying them by orders of magnitude.
Our desire and ability to connect to the physical world through touch,
hearing, odor, taste, vision, and a mental understanding of physical
structure extend our conceptual mental apparatus into the external world.
Viewed in this way, artifacts are an artificial extension of our memory.
Computer memory chips and hard disks are thus merely the latest
technological manifestation of a trend that started with bone carvings and
progressed through wood, stone, and bronze sculptures, to writing, to
printed books, to the media we now have and use.
It is by developing these abilities of connection and memory that
humankind has succeeded in dominating other living forms (to the point of
eliminating a large number of them). Recognizing and recording patterns is
the key to daily survival, and may also be seen as the origin of scientific,
philosophical, and artistic developments. A recurring relationship once
established among several elements of our world acquires meaning in memory
as a pattern. This relationship can then be recorded or codified into a
scientific result. It thus becomes part of collective human knowledge, just
as our artifacts may be said to codify our collective material culture. The
pattern can guide our behavior, or the production of artifacts. The same act
of recognizing recurring relations among elements of our world anchors our
relations with it, by enabling us to describe, explain, and know it, and
thereby act and transform its physical aspects. Certain "patterns" represent
informational entities in our minds. These serve to connect (1) the world's
organization, (2) the organization of our knowledge, our artifacts and
cultural expressions, and (3) the organization of our interactions with the
world.
We now live part of our lives in a universe of information, where
information storage and its retrieval have increased dramatically. It hardly
appears that we are biologically ready to handle this explosion of capacity,
which is threatening to change our world in ways that we cannot yet
anticipate.
Starting with radio commercials and early advertising images in the
1920s, the world of electronic media has grown and enveloped us. Most people
naively think of it as a separate universe, but in fact we inhabit it just
as much as the tangible, physical world. It is more accurate to say that
human beings inhabit a hybrid world formed from the overlap or merging of
the physical universe with the universe of information.
It is necessary to ask then: what entities other than ourselves inhabit
this informational universe? Sure enough, we share the physical universe
with all biological life forms, but here is a non-biological realm. Which
entities compete with our ideas, our knowledge, our thoughts, and our
cultural products? The answer is as simple as it is disturbing: pieces of
freely propagating clusters of information. These are called "memes". They
are informational entities that are greatly simplified versions of patterns,
and which gradually replace patterns in organizing our interaction with the
world.
Since the beginnings of human communication (that is, several millennia
before the advent of new information technologies), memes arose in the
informational universe defined by communicating human minds, crossed over to
the physical universe as artifacts, then crossed back again as transmittable
images and ideas.
A realizable image, movement, or rhythm can be transmitted from one
person to another. If the information defining it can assume physical
representation as an artifact, this facilitates its transmission. Many
artifacts are utilitarian, or have a deep meaning, but a great number of
them acquire special communicative properties that aid in their diffusion.
By so doing, they add reasons for their existence that are independent of
their strict utility, and thus totally distort their intrinsic value (if
they had any in the first place). These extra qualities often help to
transmit a useless artifact: this is the mechanism whereby patterns are
replaced by memes. The cycle closes when an abstract idea's physical
representation serves to propagate that idea to other persons.
Sometimes, the connection between an idea and its representation is
unexpected and possibly bizarre. An idea can be tied to things that have no
relation whatsoever with it, but which nevertheless aid in its transmission.
Once established, however, even an absurd connection survives in our memory.
Therefore, an idea, together with its representation and the connection
between itself and its representation, form a transmissible unit. This
defines a "meme" (Dawkins, 1989; 1993; Dyens, 2001; Salingaros & Mikiten,
2002).
2. Memes, or informational viruses.
In the universe of artifacts, images, and other elements of human
culture, some entities act more like viruses than higher organisms
(Salingaros, 2004). Just like in the biological case, the virus/organism
distinction is based on complexity: the virus has a markedly reduced
structural complexity. In the biological case, this is achieved by eschewing
large-scale structure and metabolism, retaining only the most rudimentary
ability of replication. For this reason, a virus has an organizational
advantage for propagating over even the smallest organisms, which have to
both replicate and metabolize. (Like airline passengers, those with only
carry-on baggage go through faster than those with many heavy suitcases).
A similar thing occurs for computer viruses, which are the simplest
pieces of replicating code: they do not perform any useful function as other
software does, and so require no complexity overhead.
The secret of memes is this: the simpler they are, the faster they can
proliferate. Simple slogans, tunes, and images have enormous mnemonic power.
In the visual world, this phenomenon has been analyzed in a discussion of
comics by Scott McCloud (1993). The progression from a complex, individual
image to an abstract, simplified image increases the image's applicability.
This secret was already discovered by early modernist architects of the
1920s. They dropped all elements that made architecture individual according
to context, reducing their buildings to simple forms and surfaces. By so
doing, they attained the standardization of architecture that was their
goal. The "international style" of cubes and rectangles made out of flat
surfaces, and using glass and steel was the result of stripping out all
complex elements. This style composed of architectural memes replaced
architectural patterns, and spread around the world with astonishing
rapidity (Salingaros & Mikiten, 2002). Removing any structural information
that made buildings adapt to individual human users, local climate,
architectural and cultural traditions, and surrounding structures created a
generic style that could be erected anywhere. The modernist movement
confused the universal with the generic.
3. An ecology of memes.
As soon as human beings began to establish a network of storage devices
for their acquired knowledge, this network became a vehicle for other,
useless entities. These are the "memes", introduced by Richard Dawkins as
pieces of information that travel from human mind to human mind (Dawkins,
1989; 1993). Memes are propagated in the collective mind of a society. A
meme could be a catchy tune; an advertising jingle; a visual image; a
religious or cult symbol; a political slogan; a chant; an idea or opinion
(either sensible, or totally unfounded) about some topic; a message tied to
an emotionally appealing issue, etc. Memes spread not because of any benefit
or advantage to us, but because they have something attractive that makes
them stick in one's mind. Memes offer seductive features to people, who then
propagate them.
Even if we cannot speak of intention in memes, we have to consider them
as acting for their own benefit. A meme's advantage lies in having more
efficient techniques of propagation. Something that is advantageous for a
meme is frequently disadvantageous for human beings. In the case of
intentionally harmful memes, such as computer viruses, their intention is
coded into their structure. One can largely explain the harmful properties
of memes by their propensity to destroy and replace other mental entities.
In the informational ecosystem of the human mind, now tremendously extended
by new information technologies, memes are simply parasites. They have but
one goal: to replicate themselves. This normally occurs by displacing other
conceptual and informational entities.
The point is a simple one: opening human minds up so as to extend our
consciousness into the outer world also opens them up to invasion by mind
viruses. One cannot have one without the other. The price we pay for our
vast intelligence is paradoxically our weakness to be influenced by cults,
advertising, and political slogans. Advertising devotes an entire commercial
industry to meme production. Most advertising memes tend to range from
benign to harmful in the long term, whereas certain memes from extremist
politics and destructive cults have proven deadly.
A meme spreads because it finds "receptor" or "attachment" sites in the
receiving organism. Everyone copies from everyone else, regardless of
whether a particular meme is harmful. Here is where the meme/virus analogy
comes in useful -- many features of meme propagation are explained by the
way biological and computer viruses act.
Since memes are entirely dependent on human beings to propagate them,
they must offer either a real or imagined benefit. The most successful memes
come with a great psychological appeal (Dawkins, 1989). Advertising memes
promise to satisfy our desire for sex, attractiveness, and power. Political
memes offer superficially plausible answers to deep economic and social
problems. Religious memes about justice in the afterlife offer some hope
during a bleak existence in an unjust reality. Putting religion aside until
the end of this section, most memes' psychological appeal is a deception.
Using a standard ploy from product advertising, biological viruses, and
computer viruses, a harmful but successful meme presents itself in an
attractive package or encapsulation.
As is well known from the world of advertising, memes compete fiercely
against each other for our attention. We choose to accept one meme over
another on the basis of its psychological appeal. Paradoxically, we tend to
misinterpret this competition as a straightforward struggle of beneficial
versus harmful informational entities (memes as well as patterns); whereas
in most cases the blatantly competing entities are different memes, which
are equally harmful to us. Genuinely beneficial memes are rather few in
number, and there is as yet no indication that beneficial memes exist in the
long term.
As long as people fail to recognize that memes show some of the
properties of viruses, they continue to spread. Infectivity depends on the
number of copies present in the environment, both as physically-embodied
examples, and in pictures shown in magazines, books, and the media.
Proliferation is thus exponential, like a biological or computer virus,
because the rate of spreading is proportional to the current population. The
world is alarmed (by the media) to learn that HIV infection is increasing,
but people in general ignore infection with harmful memes. They misinterpret
them as benign, or as fashionably desirable, or as a sign of cultural
progress and modernity.
I have the greatest respect for Dawkins as the originator of the meme
idea. Nevertheless, he is, I believe, mistaken to classify religious ideas
strictly among the harmful memes. Religion is an organizing system of
knowledge (real and imagined) about the universe, which has proved essential
for humankind to maintain itself. It is probable that the rise of
increasingly complex religious ritual during humankind's earliest days
played a significant role in developing our mental capacity. Furthermore,
the progressive disappearance of religious practice we witness today,
coupled with new information technologies, could have contributed to the
unprecedented emergence of destructive memes in our society. We may argue
that memes, which "develop only for themselves", are vastly different from
patterns, which serve to connect us with our world, and thus to link the
physical world to the spiritual world. If people no longer have universal
aspirations, and if we are distancing ourselves from the physical conditions
of our existence, then mental models begin to develop strictly for
themselves, and end up as memes.
4. Co-evolution of memes and human beings.
Rather than looking at the process of meme creation and propagation as
one-sided, Ollivier Dyens describes it as really a two-way process (Dyens,
2001). Humans generate memes, which in turn change human society. The
process is one of co-evolution, where it is impossible to say what
influences what. That's the whole point of cultural evolution: once a
beneficial or harmful meme is adopted by a society, it helps to develop that
society for better or worse. Just as early humans' mind opened up to memes,
they, in turn, are suspected of forcing the multiplication of the brain's
processing power in order to handle the increased input.
This created a self-reinforcing loop that could have driven the human
brain to quadruple its size during our evolution.
Now, the capacity of the human brain is just as easily filled with junk
as with useful information, just as a computer hard disk can contain either
a million copies of the same image, or a doctoral thesis. This example only
underlines my insistence on the value of information not being relative, and
that there exist criteria for judging this quality. The informational
universe unfortunately contains and transmits both types of information
indiscriminately.
Dyens (2001) elegantly describes how memes require brains (not
necessarily human ones) and languages to emerge and spread. "Organic
beings and cultures are profoundly entangled in each other ... Media
environments -- more specifically, the Internet and telecommunication
networks, but also such things as the publishing, music, or film industry --
enable cultural replicators to free themselves from dependence on organic
beings. Cyberspace, for example, is an environment where replicators can
reproduce and disseminate independent of organic beings. In addition, from
an evolutionary perspective, media environments are more effective, faster,
and less brittle than organic ones." (Dyens, 2001; pages 17-18).
Part of this picture has already been adopted by one group of
evolutionary biologists, who view evolution as an ecosystem phenomenon,
rather than as an isolated process acting on an embedded organismic type. To
them, what evolves is the ecosystem and not just the individual organism.
Another part of this explanation is tied to realizing that human development
is not limited to biological -- i.e., genetic -- channels, but takes place
within a network of artifacts (see the vast literature of paleoanthropology,
which says this), neurons, and increasingly, electrical circuits.
One should not confuse memes with patterns. One reads, for example, that
birdcalls are a meme for birds. I interpret this otherwise: they are
patterns rather than memes. Bird songs are extremely useful for the birds;
and they are also very beautiful, both to them and to us. Furthermore, they
serve to connect the birds' lives (i.e. their behavior) to the physical
world. If there is indeed a co-evolution between memes and human beings, we
should not confuse that with another co-evolution, surely more fundamental,
between human beings and their patterns (as I defined in the Introduction).
It seems that this confusion exists in the literature on memes, which
indiscriminately lumps together all mental entities as "memes". In the same
way, all biological organisms are not viruses, and all organized
informational entities are not memes. Even though this article is primarily
devoted to memes, one of its goals is to point out that today, memes have
proliferated to the detriment of other informational entities.
5. Memes disguised as playful images in an informational universe.
Architectural memes depend on people and human society for their
existence. An informational virus is merely a handy description of actions
that persons willingly take to reduce organized complexity in different
media. Some individuals strongly believe in the propagation of a particular
type of structure over the earth, and they devote their energies to this
task. Most architectural movements in the twentieth century were driven by
images tied to some questionable ideology (Salingaros & Mikiten, 2002).
Alternatively, as in a political movement, persons who do not believe in the
ideology might support it nevertheless, because it provides a means of
livelihood, income, or career advancement. Some memes propagate because it
serves the interest of a group of persons to propagate them. Even if the
long-term effects on society are clearly negative, some individuals profit
in the short term.
Although we should be careful not to overextend the viral analogy, there
is one further insight to be gained from it. Biological viruses have an
inert, crystalline form in which they can survive in a hostile environment
for a long time. The biological virus becomes active only in an aqueous
medium, in which it seeks a particular organic structure whose deconstructed
material it will use to make copies of itself. There is something analogous
happening in the architectural world. The archival forms of an architectural
meme include a building, its photograph, or a design generated on a
computer. The image's active form, however, inhabits human brains, and
commandeers their attached bodies to create copies of the image.
Architectural images inhabit both the physical world and the attached
world of information at the same time. This environment comprises the
following interlinked components:
(1) The human sensory system, especially the eye, which inputs
information into the brain.
(2) The brain, which processes and stores that information as neural
circuits.
(3) Various communications media such as the Internet, newspapers,
television, books, and magazines that transmit information to the human
eye.
(4) Structural information encoded in buildings.
(5) Media for information storage such as computer hard discs, the
world-wide web, books, magazines, etc. encoding visual and textual
information.
In this respect, information and communications technologies are
instrumental in spreading architectural memes worldwide.
Computer-Aided Design (CAD) programs have become an essential component
in the universe of information. That is because a virtual building is
trivially easy to represent on a computer screen, as compared to actually
erecting a physical structure. One might characterize the electronic world
of virtual design as a laboratory in which new architectural memes are bred,
before being unleashed into the outside world. In an interesting case of
co-evolution, popular Computer-Aided Design software has now adapted itself
to facilitate the representation of alien forms, by making it easier to
generate them, while at the same time making it more difficult to design
traditional structures containing coherent complexity on different scales
(which is one characteristic of living structure).
In a virtual laboratory setting, one might have no idea of the
destructive power of a particular architectural meme being developed, which
becomes evident only after the design acquires physical embodiment as a
building. An image very rarely provides the same sensory feedback as the
eventual full-scale structure. Virtual design is very much "a game" pursued
in the supposed quest of architectural innovation. (I explain elsewhere why
this justification is a myth (Salingaros & Mikiten, 2002)). Since students
and architects see computer-generated images much more than they complete
actual buildings, this is a very effective method of transmitting
unrealizable structures to their brain.
This way of working has actually turned into a brilliant coup, since
those translucent images of unbuilt projects are so ambiguous as to be
readable in many different ways. The viewer can inject his or her own
conception into the ambiguous image, and so develop a liking for it. Small
images on a screen can look "nice", "cute", or "exciting", thus creating a
positive emotional attachment with the viewer. Many architectural
commissions are won this way. The same cannot be said of the finished
building, however, which does not possess any degree of ambiguity -- a flaw
architects try to counteract by using a lot of glass and reflective
surfaces.
Architectural memes make an emotional promise: they attract our attention
because of their novelty. Forms that depart from our inherited idea of what
a building ought to look like offer us surprise. At the same time, the
complete separation of forms from real human needs helps to create a new
link to a supposed innovation. We are sold the myth that whoever appreciates
those memes (or, perhaps, whoever pretends to appreciate them) is a
sophisticated, up-to-date individual. If such forms provoke anxiety, all the
better, since this is a well-known method in advertising: provoke visceral
emotions -- it doesn't matter which emotions -- to better fix an image into
our subconscious.
Generating alien forms on a computer thus becomes an innocent game
because it is divorced from the physiological and psychological consequences
those full-size built forms will have on human beings. In very much the same
way, a teenager can enjoy slaughtering virtual persons in a computer game;
whereas real-life combat or terrorism takes a genuinely hardened character.
Virtual reality provides a great training-ground for the real thing, not
only because it sharpens skills, but especially because it fools the trainee
into thinking it is all just a game.
6. Images that define an alien universe.
Even a cursory examination of currently popular architectural books and
magazines reveals an alien universe of images, so radically detached from
the real world of life and human beings. As I outlined earlier, however,
this virtual universe is merging into the other, real one, so that one can
no longer make this distinction. It is most definitely not a preference
between two different ways of architectural expression -- say, blobs on a
computer screen versus traditional buildings drawn on paper -- having
equivalent aesthetic validity. Rather, I wish to distinguish between
architectural patterns that benefit human life, and destructive memes that
subjugate the physical world to a virtual one.
In the majority of architecture schools today, memes are realized as
approved models; design examples offered as good ideas to copy; and
computer-generated designs. Academic architects conform to those memes in
the belief that they are being "original". Those architects tend to live in
an isolated world of images, not necessarily having anything to do with
buildings. Their creative output can nowadays be judged strictly via a
virtual portfolio. Architectural competitions and prizes are awarded on the
basis of virtual designs, and so on.
Within this world of images, everything architectural is reduced to
visual representations. Nowadays, architectural training consists in large
part of substituting this artificial universe for the real world. From their
first days in architecture school, students are told that their instinctive
notions of traditional beauty, natural structure, coherence, and balance are
outdated, and that in order to become architects, they must adopt formal,
iconic criteria. Many architects and students have been taught to discredit
their own sensory equipment, and interpret the world according to a
contradictory viewpoint. Those conditioned persons can no longer interpret
what they see and touch, but function according to an alternative stored
worldview.
Whenever a building is erected according to a set of eerie images, it is
a material realization of the virtual, alien universe. This criticism has
nothing to do with computer technology itself, which can be used either way
by its human programmers. The same technology, appropriately applied, could
help us to generate adaptive, humanistic buildings. Computer-Aided Design
programs currently under development incorporate fractal rules and will try
to automatically generate an optimal degree of design complexity.
Alien buildings impact humankind because they conflict with -- and
replace -- traditional architecture. They also make it impossible to build
new, innovative buildings that comprise living architectural structure.
Visible examples do far more damage to civilization than the obvious one
inflicted upon the built environment, however. Alien images penetrate into
our conscience, and thus profoundly influence our world view. The
ideological memes of simplistic, broken forms have acquired physical
vehicles (e.g. buildings; visual and electronic media) that make possible
their transmission to the minds of the population at large. One could make
the analogy with the HIV virus, which is suspected of originating in a small
group of apes residing deep in the central African forest. By crossing over
into the human population with its international travel routes, HIV has
successfully spread over the entire globe. It found a vast new population of
hosts and more efficient methods of transmission.
Alien buildings embody a physical randomness that is the antithesis of
nature's organized complexity. The danger is that such buildings are now
registering subconsciously, to be used as mental templates for understanding
and creating complex physical order. One's worldview is stored in the
brain's permanent memory, which is being corrupted by alien images of a
sleek, transparent, and broken architecture. It follows that these images
will influence everything we design -- undoing all our achievements in
understanding complex systems and how our world works.
7. Circumventing our immune system.
Any virus -- and a meme is no exception -- uses packaging or surface
configurations permitting the virus to attach to a host and inject its DNA.
In the case of an architectural meme, this includes the appearance of
aesthetic and social progress and the promise of prestige and career success
for the transmitter. A virus has the ability to change its packaging so as
to circumvent defenses. Because of a continuous mutation to avoid being
eliminated by the natural immune system, viruses are not automatically
recognized as damaging intruders. We have evolved our immune system to
protect us. A virus cannot make headway unless it also develops
sophisticated strategies to fool our immune system. Informational viruses
suppress the human immune system through ideologies of expertise and
progress.
For example, the initial attraction of Modernist architecture in the
1920s was its claim of "a liberation from the oppressive hegemony of
Traditional Architecture" (and, by implication, from all tradition). But
then, when people actually moved into modernist apartment houses, they
realized that the promised liberation was a myth, and the apartments were
cheaply built, unrelentingly dull, difficult to heat, low-ceilinged, and had
awkwardly placed windows and impossibly cramped kitchens.
The meme's encapsulation was then changed to: "the modern architecture is
hygienic and promotes better health". That was enough to last for a while,
until people realized that this, too, was a piece of propaganda. It was then
the turn of: "the modern architecture represents the latest engineering
results applied to buildings". The industrial materials promoted, however,
were more expensive and less durable than traditional materials. But there
was a fetish with the new (in the 1920s) industrial materials, while mass
production fit ideologically with both Marxist and Nazi efforts at
industrialization (Salingaros & Mikiten, 2002).
These encapsulations have been extremely successful, and continue to be
employed by today's architectural memes. Some more recent meme
encapsulations include slogans such as: "free curves liberate us from the
restrictive architecture of cubes and right angles"; and "contemporary
mathematics of chaos and fractals decrees that we should build broken
forms". The latter is, of course, pure nonsense, but both meme
encapsulations help to promote contemporary building styles.
And yet, buildings that do not adapt to their human users; that ignore
local traditions; and that refuse to use local materials turn out to be
excessively costly, alien to local culture, and often dysfunctional
(Salingaros, 2004). Their only reason for existence is to realize an
architectural meme. Those memes are so deeply imbedded in the emotional
portion of our brain that it is extremely difficult to get rid of them.
Suggesting to architects that these are meme encapsulations that represent
clever deceptions creates panic; the whole concept of modernity and social
progress suddenly appears to be at stake. This reaction is a testament to
the effectiveness of the memes' encapsulation.
8. Some architectural memes.
The undeniable success of twentieth-century architectural movements poses
difficult explanatory problems. Starting from early modernism, architectural
memes have been extraordinarily successful, winning over a determined group
of followers. Nowadays, the deconstructivist movement and its ethereal,
blob-like successors are in vogue in the architectural world. I have argued
elsewhere that modernism and its postmodernist mutations (which include
deconstructivism) are opposed to what is naturally preferred by people
(Salingaros, 2004). That makes the reasons for those styles' success even
more mysterious.
Distinct families of architectural memes began to be created by
architects starting at the beginning of the twentieth century. All of these
informational viruses share common characteristics, yet by now define a
broad range of visually different styles. It would be useful to have a
taxonomy of architectural memes available, showing how one strain evolved
from another, and also noting which meme crossed over from another
discipline such as philosophy or politics into architecture (analogous to
biological viruses transferring from animals to humans).
It is not the aim of this essay, however, to systematically classify the
known architectural memes. Some obvious examples can be described as
follows:
(1) The largest scale is dominant, with no visible differentiations on
any lower scale. This meme generates smooth, "pure" forms, with either plane
or curved surfaces.
(2) Empty modules that, when joined together, show no substructure. This
is the ancestral meme for plate-glass walls, reflective metal sheets, and
flat, prefabricated concrete panels.
(3) No proper boundaries. Walls just end in a sharp edge. No wide
differentiation frames a structural element. Columns end abruptly instead of
having a differentiating capital.
(4) Contradict the rectangular forms of traditional architecture (which,
however, is often very relaxed), and also its rounded forms, whose curvature
arises out of the geometry. Normally, tectonic needs are expressed in terms
of arches and vaults, by a curvature that is tied to symmetry and to the
rectangularity of the rest of the building. In traditional architecture, we
find superimposed on forms that may be rectangular on the largest scale,
smaller curved scales that facilitate human actions and sensibilities. Many
borders are frequently curved. There are three different methods of opposing
this geometry:
(i) Strict rectangular edges and corners, with an unnecessary precision,
eliminating all curvature.
(ii) Edges and corners are made as sharp and obtrusive as possible,
using acute angles.
(iii) Rounded edges and corners that avoid any straight lines. The
overall building form must look like a free-flowing sculpture.
Obviously, these three means of opposing the geometry attached to
traditional architecture contradict each other, but what they have in
common, which is also their goal, is to depart from a normal, unforced
tectonic geometry. Sometimes, they are all used together, applied to
different sections of a contemporary building.
These are just a few of the very powerful visual memes that have been
evolving since the early 1920s. The point I wish to make is that there is
absolutely no practical or even aesthetic reason to adopt any one of them,
and many architects have argued that they degrade the life and structural
qualities of a building.
The memes described here come from political ideology, and have nothing
whatsoever to do with satisfying people's (or architectural) needs. For
example, the meme for curtain walls is linked to freedom. Modernist texts of
the 1920s talk about how to liberate the human spirit by using glass as a
construction material. A manifestly false idea "transparency = liberation"
has nevertheless very attractive iconic and ideological properties.
Considering the times in which it was born, this meme relied on very strong
social forces. After it was adopted by society, it became a central credo of
contemporary architecture, even as its initial (phoney) justification was
forgotten.
Another meme is responsible for eliminating all ornament from
architecture. It is also deeply-rooted in modernist ideology. Dating from
1908, this meme propagates the identification "empty surfaces = intellectual
progress". Its roots are to be found in a confused jumble of ideas about
industrial production and the role of artisan handcrafts in an ideally
egalitarian society. This meme has acquired an enormous dominance because of
the negative but catchy slogan: "ornament = crime". Today, nobody thinks
that this statement has any truth in it, but it is too late, since this meme
has long ago been incorporated into the collective architectural
subconscience.
It is easy to see how these architectural memes have found an ideal new
ecosystem in the universe of information. For example, computer-aided
designs of buildings on a computer screen show only the largest scales. The
software itself works by filling within fixed edges as smoothly as possible,
and so naturally generates smooth surfaces. Columns and walls are
mathematically simplest to extend linearly until they come up against
another structure. The simplest drawing algorithms, therefore, support the
first three architectural memes listed here. The memes listed in (4) compete
with each other in the universe of information, representing extreme
departures in opposite directions away from normal tectonic forms that arise
from using traditional building materials.
As long as one builds with natural materials, which are ultimately
fragile or available in modules of small size, one is forced to adopt a
particular geometry so that the building doesn't fall down. The structure
is, in part, a solution to the problems of erecting a building against the
gravitational force and physical stresses. This naturally imposes a
restricted vocabulary of forms. The nature of the materials defines a
spectrum of possible structures: walls of a roughly rectangular geometry;
vaults; columns; arches, etc. A column's capital and base are necessary for
tectonic reasons when one builds with traditional materials.
Modernist and postmodernist architecture is a reaction to the geometrical
restrictions of traditional buildings. At the same time, many contemporary
buildings in a traditional style are in fact memes -- because they are
expressed with industrial materials that do not define that vocabulary of
forms. They are images that are entirely independent of tectonic forces.
What interests us in this article, however, is the expression of images that
have no reason for being other than their opposition to traditional forms:
visual memes motivated by an anti-traditionalist ideology.
9. Monsters and robots.
In a few science-fiction films, an extraterrestrial alien or virus
invades a human's memory, replacing it with copies of itself, or with
instructions to produce copies of the alien. In contemporary society, our
own technologies are playing the same invasive role of replacing our neural
memory banks within our brains. As Dyens states: "Machines control our
memories, they own the fundamental materials that shape us, and they manage
the structures that generate human meaning and perspective." (Dyens,
2001; page 38).
Ironically, humankind has feared the possibility of intelligent,
emotionless robots running amok. The danger is instead realized from within
our own species, from humans merging with the universe of information. It is
not mechanical robots that we have to fear, but human beings conditioned to
act as intelligent robots (the opposite to the dumb, mobile robots we are
now building). Throughout history, human beings have been indoctrinated
through psychological conditioning so as to block their primary sensory
brain circuits, leaving only the higher-level circuits operational. Those
persons are only partially connected to their environment. By intentionally
blocking their lower-level circuits in the intelligence hierarchy, we have
created unemotional human machines operating with the intellectual capacity
to destroy.
Individuals whose memory has been replaced by memes can be effective in
unpleasant or dangerous tasks. They are indeed examples of the ideological
"modern man", produced for industrial purposes. Such persons can be directed
to erect and inhabit discomforting structures: something any human being
with keenly-developed feelings finds emotionally and physiologically
difficult. Programmed individuals have no qualms about destroying living
structure in nature, and that present in what other human beings have
painstakingly produced before them.
Normally, those objects, creations, and built environments are
emotionally nourishing to our senses, so much so that it is painful to
eliminate them. Cultural memory encompasses artifacts harboring an organized
complexity that is very close to both biological and inanimate natural
structures. Persons who are not otherwise programmed by visual memes feel an
intimate rapport with such artifacts and with nature. Victims of
brainwashing provoked by the media, however, -- human beings conditioned to
follow industrial and postindustrial fashions without reflection -- are
largely detached from this complexity. They are thus ideal occupants for
towers of apartments or offices that are the twisted skyscrapers in the
latest architectural style.
The "modern man" continues to play an active role in transforming our
world. He is in part the product of a co-evolution between human beings and
memes of the postindustrial culture. For those of us who might not like what
humankind is evolving towards, we need to understand this process before
attempting to influence it.
10. Knowledge versus information.
Human intelligence is dependent upon evolutionary development of the
brain/sensory system. The brain and sensory systems co-evolved in a
hierarchy of layers. The older (lower) layers act to give an instantaneous
response to stimuli in the environment. Input and output get more and more
sophisticated with additional layers, with more computing power being
expended to interpret stimuli, and more processing before output. Finally,
we acquired the conscious processing and analysis of thoughts that
distinguish human beings from other animals. This layering corresponds
pretty well to what we know as the anatomical layers of the evolved brain.
The higher levels are either missing in the lower animals, or they are
present in significantly lesser quantities, showing a remarkable growth and
development in humans.
The complexity of modern life produces huge amounts of information that
we must somehow deal with. Actual mastery of the material relevant to
building becomes very difficult. Immediate availability through computer
networks of everything anyone's ever said or done on any topic whatever
exacerbates the problem. We have a plethora of information, and become ever
more dependent on "experts" who select which of this information we should
be exposed to; because it is physically impossible for us to wade through
all of it. The situation, therefore, is ultimately no different than in ages
when information was not freely available, and an authority controlled the
information to be released. The only difference now is that, once
individuals locate the right sort of information, the situation can be
reversed almost overnight, and the control of the "experts" thrown out.
Central to my thesis is the recognition that culture evolves in a
positive direction by organizing complex information that connects us to the
real universe. Increasing the number of connections among informational
entities leads to greater complexity, and thus it becomes necessary to
organize that complexity into a comprehensible (hierarchical) system. The
opposite process, usually leading to retrogression, consists of losing both
complexity and organization -- losing information that has been
painstakingly gathered and organized as human knowledge, or losing the
connective structure that makes it accessible.
The majority of memes are harmful because they replace the complexity of
the universe and the relations we establish with our world, with a false,
disconnected reality. Memes carry very few connections, and those they do
have are meaningless, which moreover prevents the creation of true
connections necessary to our understanding of the world. While it is true
that memes always coexist with knowledge, they represent a useless wiring of
the network forming our knowledge base.
This fundamental problem was already addressed by the architect
Christopher Alexander. He tried to identify true architectural knowledge in
recognizing patterns that recur throughout the history of humanity and all
over the planet (Alexander et. al., 1977). These patterns organize
our treatment of built space and our relationship to it. Alexander decided
to make explicit knowledge that up to that time had been only implicit, and
to do this in a way that would prevent the propagation of crazy notions
about architecture. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, unfounded
ideas have governed the construction of buildings and cities (which I have
described in this article as an invasion by harmful memes). In explaining
this stock of architectural knowledge, Alexander chose to also describe the
specific manner in which information is organized: a "pattern language" is a
hierarchical informational structure (Salingaros, 2000) composed of
relatively autonomous patterns connected as follows: (1) to each other on
different hierarchical levels; (2) to the physical and biological world as
well as to patterns of living appropriate to distinct human civilizations;
and (3) to the totality of human knowledge, empirical, scientific, and
metaphysical.
Each pattern is presented as a process of resolving a recurring
architectural problem: the relationship between a certain context, the
forces that recur in this context, and a spatial configuration that permits
these forces to resolve themselves (Alexander, 1979). This allows designers,
builders, and inhabitants to discuss collectively what can serve as
architectural patterns and models. Altogether, this method gives rise to
results that constitute genuine architectural knowledge.
The tool of pattern languages has been enthusiastically adopted by the
Computer Science community to handle the structure and production of
increasingly complex software (Gabriel, 1996). These practitioners define,
in addition to patterns, the concept of an "antipattern", which is a false
solution that is nevertheless reutilized. An antipattern possesses formal
characteristics that trick whoever adopts it into thinking that it is the
result of a logical development. There is in fact no difference between an
antipattern and a meme.
Knowledge is fragile and much less prolific than raw information,
depending as it does on discovery and confirmation. By contrast,
informational junk can be generated in any context, and in any quantity.
Traditional stores of knowledge represent customary wisdom. I am referring,
in particular, to knowledge and beliefs that are not scientifically
verifiable, yet are in fact necessary for the proper working of human
society, and even to maintain scientific knowledge. Belief systems cannot be
justified in the way science can be justified; they rely on informal
connections, practices, and understandings.
There is value as opposed to information in the highest of human
creations. Bach's Saint Matthew Passion is worth far more to
civilization than two hours of television soap operas interspersed with
commercials. I know that postmodern philosophers have tried to argue the
opposite, but I believe they are terribly mistaken. Ultimately, we will have
to appeal to the value of information so as to distinguish between memes
(beneficial and harmful) and true knowledge.
11. Conclusion.
Human beings can recognize intuitively elements of their world and the
connections that unite them to it. Sensory and mental connections occur
almost instantly. This innate ability enabled us to survive and evolve. More
advanced problem solving, however, entails a stepwise process that
establishes a sequence of transformations from the problem to its solution.
The alternative to intelligent design is unreasoned matching to some given
visual or mnemonic prototype -- a meme.
In that case, there is no transformation nor adaptation to the criteria
of the problem. A standard solution is given by visual memes, which are
thereby imposed on the situation. The method is now one of substitution
instead of resolution. Memes replace the constraints of the problem
by visual images. That requires no intellectual effort; only the acceptance
of an image provided by somebody for whatever reason. By replacing the
sequence of adaptive design steps, one is in fact suppressing in part the
mechanisms for intelligent thought in general. This can lead people to live
in a false reality; such as is accomplished by psychological conditioning.
One's internal worldview can be replaced entirely by a set of memes.
These will then define an alternative, alien universe for that particular
individual. As our society is living more and more in the universe of
information, the dangers of altering one's internal reality multiply with
the number of memes around us. Whereas in the past, one would normally worry
only about particularly virulent cults, advertising, and political
campaigns, today we are immersed in a virtual universe of memes that can
very easily substitute for the physical universe. It's like an alternative
religion. In this essay, I tried to point out some features of this
interdependence, and to focus on the dangers posed by architectural memes
freely propagating in the universe of information.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: Many thanks to Ollivier Dyens, David Miet, and
Terry Mikiten for their advice.
REFERENCES:
Christopher Alexander (1979), The Timeless Way of Building (Oxford
University Press, New York).
Christopher Alexander, S. Ishikawa, M. Silverstein, M. Jacobson, I.
Fiksdahl-King, and S. Angel (1977), A Pattern Language (Oxford
University Press, New York).
Richard Dawkins (1989), The Selfish Gene (New Edition) (Oxford
University Press, Oxford), Chapter 11.
Richard Dawkins (1993), "Viruses of the Mind", in: B. Dahlbom, Ed.,
Dennett and His Critics (Blackwell, Oxford), pp. 13-27.
Ollivier Dyens (2001), Metal and Flesh (MIT Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts).
Richard Gabriel (1996), Patterns of Software (Oxford University
Press, New York).
Scott McCloud (1993), Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
(Harper Perennial, New York).
Nikos Salingaros (2000), "The Structure of Pattern Languages",
Architectural Research Quarterly Vol. 4, pages 149-161.
Nikos Salingaros (2004), Anti-architecture and Deconstruction
(Umbau-Verlag, Solingen).
Nikos A. Salingaros & Terry M. Mikiten (2002), "Darwinian Processes and
Memes in Architecture: A Memetic Theory of Modernism", Journal of
Memetics -- Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission Vol. 6,
approximately 15 pages. Reprinted in: DATUTOP Journal of Architectural
Theory Vol. 23 (2002), pages 117-139.
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