The following is text from a talk given by Steve Sanderson as part of the Complexity Panel Discussion at SIGGRAPH 2008

As a practitioner, I’ve decided to give myself the uncomfortable task of taking an ideological position without relying upon my work to do the speaking for me. This is due to the fact that I have been invited to participate on this panel precisely because of my fervor for the very subject of my criticism… ‘drinking the kool-aid,’ as one might say. Yet I feel the stakes are high enough to risk being regarded as a heretic. I see this panel as an opportunity for one big group confession. My name is Steve, and I am a nonbeliever.

My apostasy is not without reason. Like many on this panel, I have been drawn to the gospel of architectural complexity because of what it promises to ‘do’. Yet aside from producing a devout congregation of starry-eyed students and young professionals, eager to consume the next glossy publication, flashy software technique or fashionable academic program, I’m not convinced that it actually does anything, or at least, it hasn’t done anything yet. So, counter to the positioning of this panel, I propose that complexity is neither an inevitable or particularly desirable facet of contemporary design. Yes, design is a complex undertaking, but complexity (particularly of the procedural or metaphorical variety) should never be our intended goal.

So, rather than using the next seven minutes to demonstrate my authority within the subject through a barrage of seductive imagery, I would like to strip away some of the posturing and communicate as openly as possible. I feel this is particularly urgent, as I feel my generation possesses a sense of optimism and purpose, but runs the risk of being misguided by the intellectual and practical baggage passed-down from previous generations. But, this is by no means a ‘post-critical’ hymn for the abandonment of ‘criticality,’ but rather an attempt to redirect the focus of the conversation toward what should be done. Even with the varied and difficult pressures that we face with each new project, we are in a position to lead by action, not through speculation or projection.

Many of the current academic tastemakers, Robert Somol most prominently among them, have made convincing – and I believe accurate – connections between our current obsessions with procedure and objectifiable criteria with previous generation’s cult of authenticity and legibility: best represented through Kenneth Frampton’s tectonics and Peter Eisenman’s index.  Despite the current rhetoric of evolution, adaptation and open-endedness, we’ve inherited the practice of justifying aesthetic biases through autonomous design procedures and criteria of evaluation, which result in designs that are deterministic and immutable. But unlike Somol, and others in the ‘post-critical’ camp, who have anointed a new messiah in Rem Koolhaas and his (primarily Dutch) disciples, I am unwilling to accept the only ‘projective’ practice as one that apathetically reflects the world as it exists back unto itself.    Without digressing into discussions on the role of virtue, I believe that a truly projective practice should strive to create an alternative world that is better than the one we currently inhabit.

This is where my position resonates most closely with one taken by Reinhold Martin, in response to George Baird’s summary of the current state of architectural ‘criticality’.  Martin uses the debacle of the World Trade Center design competition as the basis of an incredibly lucid and nuanced argument for the necessity of serious critique and reflection, in face of the increasing ambivalence (or ignorance, or denial) of the broader consequences of our actions.  His is a pointedly political and academic challenge, from which one could extrapolate an ethical one; but for this panel, I would like to posit a more pragmatic, but equally imperative, one: the effects of our decisions on the environment.

Along with such effusive claims as: bottom-up self-organizing systems, material behaviors, modulated environments, emergent morphologies, and heterogeneous spaces, one of the key concepts underlying much of the current complexity rhetoric is an interest in performance, and in particular environmental performance inspired by natural systems.  Commonly referred to as bionics or biomimicry within the scientific community, this approach has been rebranded as “morpho-ecological design” by some of its leading proponents within architecture.  And despite claims of the “higher-order performance capacities” of an architecture based on “multi-functional systems,” a quick browse through any of these publications should make it obvious why ‘morphology’ comes first. Ecology is simply a convenient and trendy crutch used to prop up gratuitous formal experiments.

At this point we should all be suspicious of any explicit claims of novelty or radicalism. As history has shown time-and-time again, this generally translates to simply not wanting to deal with the messy details of reality because they are either too ordinary, too trivial, not ‘our’ responsibility, or just too difficult. But if we are indeed sincere about meeting this challenge through actual solutions, and not mere speculation, we have no choice but to engage at every level.

For example, on one of our projects where environmental performance has been a key criterion, we have spent ten times the amount of time working with our client and engineers to determine scope, responsibility and liability, than on any specific aspect of performance. Early on we found ourselves working with our engineer to educate the client about the impact of their plug-load requirements, which would account for more than half of the energy consumed by the building and completely undermine any high-performing active or passive strategies that we would propose for the building. They agreed to reduce their requirement. In another situation on this project, we waited nearly two months for our engineers to deliver two specific performance criteria (solar heat gain coefficient and window-to-wall ratio) that we could use to guide the development of the building enclosure. Why? Because they had never been asked to supply this information to an architect before and they were reluctant to provide criteria that they could be held responsible for. Bear in mind that this is one of the leading engineering firms in the world working on a marquee project.

These two incredibly mundane, but powerful examples demonstrate the type of action to push environmental performance out of the studio and into the real world. Our capabilities to respond to these challenges are not determined by our abilities to simulate physical behavior, develop alternative configurations or generate complexity. They are determined by the incredibly complex social, cultural, financial, legal, and knowledge-based relationships that have developed within the building community in the past century. These relationships are governing how and to what extent architects are going to be able to direct the development of our material culture in this and the next generation; and actually realize performance based architecture.

Steve Sanderson

References:

- Robert Somol, "Green Dots 101," Hunch 11, 2007, 28-37.
- Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, "Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism," Perspecta 33: The Yale Architectural Journal, 2002, 72-77.
- Michael Speaks, “Design Intelligence and the New Economy,” Architectural Record, vol. 190, no. 1, January 2002, 72-79.
- George Baird, “’Criticality’ and its Discontents,” Harvard Design Magazine 21, Fall 2004/Winter 2005, 16-21.
- Reinhold Martin, “Critical of What? Toward a Utopian Realism,” Harvard Design Magazine 22, Spring/Summer 2005, 104-09.
- See any one of the numerous publications by the Emergent Technologies and Design program of the Architectural Association in London, including: Michael Hensel and Achim Menges, Morpho-Ecologies (London: AA Publications, 2006), Michael Hensel, Achim Menges and Michael Weinstock, “Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies,” Architectural Design, vol. 74, no. 4, July/August 2004, Michael Hensel, Achim Menges and Michael Weinstock, “Techniques and Technologies in Morphogenetic Design,” Architectural Design, vol. 76, no. 2, March/April 2006.
- Michael Hensel and Achim Menges, “Versatility and Vicissitude: Performance in Morpho-Ecological Design,” Architectural Design, vol. 78, no. 2, March/April 2008.