SERIES ONE: Architectural Language Research_Part Five

NATURAL SELECTION

“The reality and reliability of the human world rests primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent that the activity by which they were produced”.

Natural selection is not purposive in the sense that human endeavor is; it has neither foresight nor intent.

Natural Selection does not cause the disparity between parents and the rest of the population – it is the disparity.

Natural Selection tends eliminate those genes that arise repeatedly by mutation and are harmful to the majority of the carriers.  In this sense, the term harmful indicates the impairment of reproduction.  Analogically natural selection would seem to infer the value of design conceptualization over the execution of the built form.  Good design presumes functional architecture.  Architects tend to (at best) promote the idea of form as an enhancement of the necessary program.  Fundamentally this view speaks of the evolution of design, construction and habitation anachronistically.

In contrast, Natural selection also tends to retain the mutations that in some way “beneficial” to their carriers. These mutations are a function of the essential and performative features of the design rather than the evocation of those features aesthetically.  Natural selection leads to specialization rather than generalization. In other words, Natural Selection operates to establish difference. Difference in a socially driven architectural paradigm operates at the user level.  People co-opt designed space and make it their one where possible.  The natural selection of architecture one might argue is the grounded in its spatial articulation of contextually derived socio-economic factors. This interpretation seeks to question the determinism in architecture where solution is prescribed and propose parameters for a user-level interface where architecture can evolve in a mutualistic fashion.

How this concerns architecture has to deal with the fundamental principles of space making and evocation of place. 

In ecological terms, ability representing the population is characterized by the immediate circumstances of the individual.  Physical adaptation reflects the ability of an individual to cope with their environment. 

Adaptive responses as expressed by an individual’s physiological changes are responses that through many generations have proven useful in allowing individuals to survive and reproduce.

This inheritance leads to a certain way of life.  Physiological adjustments made by individuals in response to abnormal environmental conditions are often useless or even harmful.  Buildings gather meaning to them by their everyday function, by their presence in an urban setting and by their form.