Mathematics and 21st Century Architecture
by Dr. Nikos A. Salingaros, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Science will play an increasingly central role in architecture. Design was always part of art, with occasional help from mathematics -- for example, the golden ratio in classical and humanistic architecture, and Corbusier's Modulor. General architectural laws developed by the brilliant architectural theorist Christopher Alexander are based on recent scientific developments. These laws have been applied to build a high school and college campus near Tokyo, and most recently, the Visitor Center of West Dean College of Arts in Sussex, England (see article in the August/September 1996 issue of Perspectives on Architecture). Alexander's work will soon be published by Oxford University Press in four volumes entitled The Nature of Order.
The mathematical laws of architecture help one to create exciting new buildings liberated from all stylistic restrictions. There are no constraints other than checking for approximate relationships between elements. One has complete freedom in the plan, the elevation, the surfaces, and the materials. Though the laws do not favor any particular style, new buildings can be designed to give the same degree of emotional and visual delight as the greatest buildings of the past. This is achieved not by copying stylistic elements, but through analyzing the forms mathematically. The laws go deeper than the level of style: they govern how structures arise from very basic components, mimicking the way that matter itself is put together.
This provides a universal grammar for architecture. It explains the role of detail, color, decoration, matching shapes, repetition of units -- i.e., the vocabulary of traditional architecture -- in achieving coherence. Mathematics tells you when something works, when it doesn't work, and why, independent of style. As inheritors of the Modernist Style, we throw out Baroque decoration and wildly curvilinear forms, yet they do work in the proper context. We are now witnessing a reappearance of traditional elements in post-modern architecture, yet those quotations of the past often don't fit. De-constructionist buildings purposely approach chaos, but can this process be controlled? The proposed method answers the most pressing design questions of relevance to today's architecture.