INVERSE POWER-LAW SCALING AS A UNIVERSAL LAW IN ARCHITECTURE
Authors: Nikos A. Salingaros and Bruce J. West
Subjects: fractals, inverse-power laws
Summary:
Human artifacts, ranging from small objects all the way up to large buildings, display a variety and range of subdivisions. Repeating structural and design elements of the same size will define a particular scale. It turns out that most pleasing objects and designs obey an inverse power law distribution: the product of the relative multiplicity of a substructure pi with its size, xi , is a constant. This means that the logarithmic plot of pi versus xi has a slope of -m , where typically 1 < m < 2, which is a widely observed relationship in both natural and man-made systems. Departures from this law apparently result in structures being perceived as incoherent, unfriendly, and even alien. This is verified by measuring examples from all cultures, and all periods of history.
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