The new paradigm in architecture

Headnote

Charles Jencks suggests culture is transforming itself from the simple certainties of Modernism to a much more complex interpretation of reality based on biology, mathematics and cosmology. Architecture is responding.

A change of heart, a new vision for architecture? If there really is a new paradigm in architecture then it will reflect changes in science, religion and politics and it doesn't take a clairvoyant to see that George Bush & Junta (as Gore Vidal calls them) are very much locked into a medieval world view (if that isn't an insult to the Gothic). No, the reigning disciplines are struggling with primitive orientations and will continue to do so until one catastrophe or another (global, ecological?) forces them to shift gears, there is no widespread cultural movement under way. Nevertheless, one can discern the beginnings of a shift in architecture that relates to a deep transformation going on in the sciences and in time, I believe, this will permeate all other areas of life. The new sciences of complexity - fractals, nonlinear dynamics, the new cosmology, self-organizing systems - have brought about the change in perspective. We have moved from a mechanistic view of the universe to one that is self-organizing at all levels, from the atom to the galaxy. Illuminated by the computer, this new world view is paralleled by changes now occurring in architecture.

Several key buildings show its promise - those by Americans Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, and Daniel Libeskind. There is also a vast amount of other work on the edge of the new paradigm by the Dutch architects Rem Koolhaas, Ben van Berkel and MVRDV, or other Europeans like Santiago Calatrava and Coop Himmelblau, or those who have moved on from High-Tech in England, such as Norman Foster. These architects, as well as those that flirted with Deconstruction - Hadid, Moss, and Morphosis - look set to take on the philosophy. In Australia, ARM (Ashton Raggatt MacDougall) has been mining the territory for many years and another group, LAB, is completing a seminal work of the new movement, Melbourne's Federation Square. Soon there will be enough buildings to see if all this is more than a fashion, or change of style, but it certainly is the latter.

The emergent grammar...