The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Nikos Salingaros. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Nikos Salingaros. He is trained and has published as a physicist and mathematician, though today he is best known as an urbanist and architectural theorist. He is known for his work on urban theory, architectural theory, complexity theory, and design philosophy.
He is a professor of mathematics, and also teaches in the architecture school at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He’s also on the architecture faculty of Universitat Di Roma III in Italy. He’s the author or co-author of several books and more than 100 papers on architecture and urban design. Welcome, Nikos.
Nikos: Jim Rutt, it’s a pleasure to be with you and to have this opportunity to talk to a scientist.
Jim: Very much looking forward to it. It’s interesting, I know a lot of things about a lot of things, but one of the things I don’t know much about is architecture. I think the only two things I’ve looked at of substance in architecture over the years is my old friend, Cormac McCarthy, the novelist, gave me a copy of Vitruvius’ 10 Books of Architecture, which was kind of fun to get a classical view. And my wife suggested I get a few years ago Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language, which turns out to be relevant to today’s conversation, which I’ve only flipped through. So that is one thing that I’m not hugely knowledgeable about, at least I wasn’t until I did the prep for this podcast. As usual, I spent many hours digging into papers and such, and now I at least have a little bit more modern perspective on architecture.
But one thing I do know is what I like and don’t like, like any person. The town where I spend a fair bit of time, Stanton, Virginia, has two post offices. One that was built in 1936 in a Colonial Revival style. Very nice, good-looking building. It works well. I know the former owner recently sold it. I’ve even looked at potentially renting space in the building. Very nice building. Then the new post office, 1970-something, one of the ugliest structures you would ever see anywhere. It also doesn’t work. It leaks. It has mold in it. It’s just unbelievable. How could it be 40-some years late we go from a nice, comfortable, good-looking building to just crapple? And that turned out that, of course, is congruent in many ways, though of course in a very Philistine amateurish fashion to some of your own views. So why don’t we start with how your training as a physicist in mathematics has helped you in your work conceptualizing your theories of architecture and urbanism?
Nikos: Yes. Well, let me begin by doubting what you said earlier, that you don’t know much about architecture. Well, there are two types of knowledge that is inherited knowledge structure of the human body and the human brain. And you as a card-carrying member of the human species have all of that embedded in you. So when confronted with a beautiful building, your body tells you, “This is something that I can relate to.” You engage with it in a positive way. If it’s a really beautiful building, you engage with it, and it’s a healing environment and you don’t need to learn anything about that. The contrary also happens. If you are confronted with an ugly building, it is ugly because it threatens the body. You have your evolved mechanisms that protect the body fire and tell you, “There’s something bad here. There’s something dangerous to watch out for.” So you have hormonal and neurological reactions, and that is interpreted by your body as ugliness to protect you. Otherwise, human beings will not have survived these things.
Now, knowing about architecture also means that you have not consciously read 100 books about architecture. But let me tell you that most books about architecture are totally useless because they try to switch your innate reactions to something that is unhealthy because it happens to be in fashion, because it happens to uphold a power structure. Messianic cult people making a lot of money by building horrible things. So with that said, you are as capable as anyone else of distinguishing between a healthily beautiful building and an ugly building that creates anxiety.
Jim: Makes sense. In fact, one of the people we have on our podcast fairly often, John Vervaeke, distinguishes four different kinds of knowing, and one of which is participatory knowing, which is how we interact with the world and how our body-mind system send us signals about what we are doing. So that would fit in nicely with your perspective.
Nikos: Yeah. You mentioned these two buildings and you kindly sent me two photos in an email, so I will describe them to the audience, even though this is only audio. The 1930s building has clear vertical pieces. The entrance walls, the windows, they are vertical, and they’re symmetrically arranged. Now, we animals live because of gravity, and we move because of gravity, so we prefer the vertical. And we animals also learn to recognize faces which have this bilateral symmetry. So we like to see this face-like symmetries and all sorts of symmetries privileging the vertical axis and we feel comfortable. So that is as far as the minimum aesthetic part is there, the old building has that. It also has very practical visual cues that the entrance is clear to see. You go up the stairs and you have the entrance. It has a nice arch on it. It facilitates the visual identification of the building. So you feel very comfortable, it’s a nice building.
Now I’m scrolling down to see the 1970s post office. It undid deliberately all of this. It is horizontal in design. There’s a huge blank block that’s horizontal. That is unnatural. We feel that it’s something menacing because our revolution does not have a visual prototype in our brain to interpret this. So we are constantly struggling to say, “What is this? Is this something that’s going to eat us? Is this something unnatural?” Yes, it is unnatural, so it creates anxiety. There is nothing there. There’s a huge blank facade. So we’re in vain constantly trying to find some symmetry, some face-like characteristics. There’s nothing there. So it just keeps creating the stress.
Furthermore, the entrance is the killer. This is just like one giant concrete rectangle that’s raised off the ground. And the entrance is a slit, a dark slit that you have to go underneath. Well, any child will say, “I’m afraid.” This creates fear because this is dark slit you have to go in to enter. It’s like a giant mouth of some monster. That’s the entrance of the new post office. No wonder you hate it. Your body’s telling you, “Stay away from this,” but your mind is telling you, “I have to go in to send a registered letter.” So you force yourself to approach and enter this menacing thing, and it creates stress every time.
Jim: Also an interesting data point is another reason not to go to the new one is the employees are not happy at all. They’re crabby and mean, and it’s just a very unhappy culture, while at the old post office, which is still open maybe 20 hours a week, the people are jolly and friendly and all is well. So I suspect that’s not a coincidence.
Nikos: It’s not a coincidence at all. Studies over the last five years show that the interior environment affects people’s emotion and mood and irritability. Because if you are in an uncomfortable environment, then you are constantly stressed and you’re going to snap at the customer who comes and asks for stamps or something. And so I don’t know what the interior looks like, but I’m willing to bet you $5 that the interior of this new building is just as ugly and inhuman as the exterior, because that’s a style. Style is sort of minimalistic industrial, paying no attention to human reaction. Whereas in the ’30s, the old post office, I don’t know what the inside looks like, but in the ’30s, architects who created the post office with a very nice-looking exterior also took care of the interior. They have nice spaces, nice materials, nice surfaces, nice lighting coming from traditional windows with symmetries and with mullions and mountings. So I’m willing to bet that the interior is what creates the unhappiness of the workers. And more than that, these poor workers, after a few years, may get serious illnesses.
Jim: Yeah, I wouldn’t doubt it. In the new building in particular, it leaks. It’s got flat roof that doesn’t shed water well, so it leaks. It’s had reputation for having mold in it, et cetera. And you’re right about the interiors. The interior of the new one is just as ugly and plain as you could imagine. Cheap, suspended ceiling, nondescript, hard counters, vinyl flooring. It’s like… While, the old one, walls are wood, very nice color schemes, very nice woodwork around the doors and the windows. It has real plastered ceilings. I mean, it is a very nice building. As I said, I actually looked at potentially renting some office space once in there and came close, but ended up going somewhere else. And so you indeed are correct that the old one is nice on the inside as well as the out and the new one is ugly both inside and outside.
A quick question, how in the world did the profession of architecture go so wrong that in 40 years… 40 years in aviation, we went from planes that barely flew to jet engines and rockets to the moon literally. And yet in 40 years of architecture, we went from a handsome functional building to something that scares adults and children and makes the employees sick. How did that happen?
Nikos: There are two parallel explanations, and I will give a brief outline of both of them. The first one is backward evolution. When some fish live in caves, after a few generations, they lose their eyes, they lose their sight because they don’t need light in the cave, there is no light in the cave. And so that’s backward evolution. If you don’t use something, you lose it. So you have gone backward in evolution because the eyes is a phenomenally wonderful instrument of information-gathering. Architecture has undergone a backward evolution.
Now, the second explanation, which goes hand in hand with this, is that a Messianic cult took over architecture in the 1930s and especially after the Second World War and imposed its own very inhuman vision of what architecture of the future ought to look like. And everything was ugly and horrible and inhuman, but it looked new. So they were selling this as a vision of the future because it looked new, and it looked new because it created anxiety. So this was the path to success. And the clients were wealthy individuals, governments, corporations who bought into this visual imagery. This was the Tomorrowland of Walt Disney, things look futuristic. So that’s the vision of the future. Nobody bothers to check if it’s good for humans or not.
Jim: And of course, during that period, there were many, many, many examples and some better, some worse, but overall, the planned cities, Brasilia being an example, where Brazil built a new capital deep in the jungle that everybody hates. Again, in this modern aesthetic. And then around the new created cities, as I understand it, never been there, there’s now much more organic, normal kinds of development, and that’s where people who have a choice actually choose to live.
Nikos: Jim, you’re not entirely correct. Brasilia was built in the ’50s. Most normal people hate it, but the architects just love it. The architects have never admitted that this was a mistake. So if you have a course on urban planning, you will see the paradigmatic example of the modern city Brasilia. None of the studies that show that it’s a horrible environment to be in, that you cannot walk from one building to another, that it’s totally soulless, lifeless. You already know that the real life occurs in the suburbs, and most of those are slums outside the official Brasilia. You never see that in the magazines.
Jim: What I’ve heard is from people who actually live there and who’ve told me that, that I’ve met.
Nikos: Yes.
Jim: So who were the culprits? What are some of the names and the movements that moved from more classical architecture to this modernism, and then even on to postmodernism?
Nikos: I even hate to say the names because saying the names is giving notoriety. It’s like a mass murderer, usually he, it’s usually a male, in order to achieve notoriety in the evening news. So I don’t want give these people more publicity.
Jim: Even better.
Nikos: There was just a handful of architects who were collaborating with fascist and communist regimes in the ’20s and ’40s, who just had the monomaniacal desire to destroy living geometry. So let’s go back to the post offices. If any reader reads some of the articles of my colleagues and myself, they will see that living geometry is what the body reacts to in a positive way, and violations of living geometry create anxiety. So the older post office that we discussed has living geometry both inside and outside. The newer post office intentionally violates living geometry, both inside and outside, and that explains why it feels hostile to the user.
So we had this generation of architects who imposed non-living geometry for their own projects and, moreover, convinced the power brokers around the world to destroy and replace buildings that had living geometry. And this is the crime of the 20th century really. Among other great crimes of the 20th century, there is an architectural and urban crime that Jane Jacobs wrote about, the wanton destruction and replacement of wonderful urban fabric with wonderful healing architecture on the human scale containing living geometry, and it’s the replacement by inhuman structures.
Now, why did this occur? Because certain real estate speculators with very deep pockets made enormous amounts of profit. How do they make enormous amounts of profit? By being corrupt and using the government to just take over some perfectly good districts of cities and then bulldozing them and building this new construction. So building new construction makes the builder and the real estate speculator a lot of money, and that’s a driving force.
Jim: It almost happened to Stanton, Virginia where these post offices came from. There was a small amount of urban renewal, so-called. It was basically in some commercial quasi-industrial areas, and it started to approach the old downtown. They were going to tear down the old downtown, which is beautiful. Some of it dates from 1780, a lot of it dates from before the Civil War. But fortunately, a group of people got together and started the historical society and lobbied hard and saved the old downtown. As you say, the real estate development interests want to just level it and build all new. It would’ve been a nightmare.
Nikos: I’m not a politician, but let me say this for your audience. First, the real estate speculators buy the local government by funding their election campaign. Then the local government officials impose eminent domain to just confiscate historic urban fabric, which is living geometry. It’s just gorgeous. And you have no choice if the government does it. It’s no different in the United States as it would be in North Korea or any dictatorship. And then the bulldozers come in, they bulldoze it, and then the real estate speculators, I refuse to call them developers because they don’t develop anything, they destroy things for the most part, they move in and they build inhuman buildings. They make a lot of money. The builders make a lot of money. That’s the racket, that’s the way it works.
Jim: Very, very bad. Well, let’s move from these practical examples, which are very good to ground our discussion, back a little bit to theory because a lot of your work is theory. One concept that came up several times in the papers and monographs that I read is biophilic design. What do you mean by that?
Nikos: Biophilia was invented by psychologists and biologists, and it means an intrinsic love of living forms and living organisms. So there are two things here that are essentially related. One is the love of living things that you feel next to another person whom you love, that’s biophilia. When you are petting your dog or cat, that’s biophilia. But also when you’re standing next to a flower or a tree or a bush, you love that because you feel very natural and you feel in tune with that. There are exceptions of course. If you are looking at the scorpion, it’s alive, but it’s dangerous for you, so you have been programmed to avoid it. Same for a snake or a shark when you’re swimming. All of that is built into the human brain and the human body for an attraction. So it’s the love of biology.
However, what’s built into the human brain is not some mysterious force. It is an analysis of the geometrical characteristics. So when we are in front of a wonderful statue by Michelangelo, we attach to it by biophilia because we connect the same way and we feel this beauty in us. A painting of, say, Leonardo da Vinci, the Mona Lisa, is not my favorite painting, but it’s a beautiful painting. You relate to it as you would a beautiful lady. Even better, the Botticelli’s Venus, who doesn’t love the Venus? You establish an emotional gut-level attachment, positive attachment through biophilia. But now I’m telling you, it’s not a plant or an animal, but it extends to the geometry. It extends to a painting, and it extends to buildings. The buildings have this living geometry which has certain mathematical characteristics, which we have written hundreds of pages on how to find these mathematical characteristics. And it is the geometry that attaches you to the object and to the space and to the walls of a building.
Jim: I’m going to mention this, again, shows another area where I’m not very knowledgeable, but I have my opinions, I also hate a lot of modern art for similar reasons. In fact, I tell the story that when we go to New York City every year or 2, 3, one of the things we always do is spend several hours at the Met, this beautiful museum, the beautiful artifacts of the world. And then just to annoy myself, I always go to the modern art wing at the end. And I must say, whenever I walk into there, I feel like I wish I had a flamethrower and a bag of hand grenades, because it’s like an affront to 4,000 years of human effort to create beauty, to instead create this stuff. I suspect these two things are correlated in some fashion, this modern architecture and this modern art.
Nikos: Well, you just define modern art, not all of it, but most of it, as an affront to 4,000 years of creation. Because art originally is an expression of the human being starting from 100,000 years ago to create in matter something artificial that gives you a positive feeling. It gives you feedback that is healing. So that is art. Much of modern art does not give you a positive feeling. It gives you a negative feeling. It’s not art. This is a huge scam in which, again, a different group of corrupt people have made millions and millions and millions, gallery owners, art critics. It’s all garbage. It used to be sort of you-can-take-it-or-leave-it pieces of junk, but in the last few decades, it has become actually repellent. That exposure to it is damaging for you. It can only go in that direction. It tries to do the maximum harm to the human senses when you experience it. So if I were you, I would avoid exposing yourself because it’s damaging to your health.
Jim: Yeah, five minutes is enough. It’s like a purgative. It’s like taking castor oil. It just reminds me that I hate it. I would never spend more than five minutes there. Let’s return back to biophilic design a little bit. Another thing you write about a fair bit is the need for human scale and proportions. I remember vaguely from my Vitruvius he talks a fair bit about human ratios, the length of this and that, et cetera. When you say human scale, what do you mean?
Nikos: Well, let me say, the Vitruvius is not the most up-to-date reference. I will not advise people to spend too much time reading Vitruvius. Instead, go and find Christopher Alexander’s books and read them.
So, now to the human scale, the human scale is something at around five to six feet, so a doorway. You have to relate to the human scale, and then you have the sizes of the human body, pieces of the human body, the arm, the width of the arm, the length of the fingers, the width of the fingers, the size of the head. We are cutely aware of objects that are built around us. And I mean not furniture, I mean the actual walls of a building and the facades of a building where we can identify with the human scale. This is where that new post office fails. There’s nothing there on the human scale.
There’s only the cubic hole for the entrance, so that’s it. But the rest of the building is just one giant blank facade. I’m looking at the picture now, it seems to be four meters high by 15 meters wide. There’s nothing there in the human scale. And inside, I’m sure you will not find anything this size of the human arm, the size of the human hand, the thickness of a human finger. Where do you find these? In very old-fashioned trim and decoration. All that has been banned by the dominant architectural culture. It’s just not allowed.
But we know from James Gibson’s work on affordances that the human mind immediately looks for affordances that we can grasp. Grasp means, say, one inch, two inches that you can grasp with your hand. Even if you don’t reach up to the window and grasp it, you feel secure if you see these. This is the ornament and all the moldings of the old architecture. They were not there just for a whim. They were there because it gives you psychological comfort that you can grasp them. This is affordance. James Gibson came much, much later to give a scientific basis for this, but those moldings are there for a psychological purpose.
Jim: Yeah, Gibson is an extremely interesting writer. I’ve read his works very carefully, particularly on visual perception and how visual perception works with our conscious cognition, et cetera. He’s a writer I would strongly recommend to people who are interested in architecture or human cognition or both. You also talk about proportion. In fact, you’ve done fairly lengthy papers on the mathematics of architecture and in particularly the continuing relevance, which has been going on for thousands of years, the Fibonacci series and the Golden mean. Why don’t you tell us about that a little bit?
Nikos: Well, that can get pretty complicated because there is a big mistake in the popular literature about those matters. Fibonacci sequence occurs when you grow something and you have something that grows by jumps. It’s essentially an exponential type of growth, and we see that in the growth of plants and how a vine curls around and you can count the Fibonacci numbers. When we look at the design and want to have all the range of scales, human scales, from the size of the body, to the length of an arm, to the size of the arm, to the size of the hand, and to the size of the fingers, et cetera, we can look at the alternate sequence or the Fibonacci sequence because I explained in my papers those numbers are pretty good approximation of the scale that you need.
Now, in the common literature, however, the golden ratio is expressed as a rectangle. That turns out to have no relevance to anything, because we can have a building that’s very beautiful, that can have a rectangle of any aspect ratio really. And at the same time, we can have a very ugly building that’s perfectly a golden rectangle. So the golden rectangle does not mean anything. It is the Fibonacci sequence that helps to create the scaling. So these are the range of scales that we need to see when we experience a building.
Jim: Could you give an example? Because again, people point to the Parthenon as a building that was on the golden mean side or very close to it. It was a nice building probably for other reasons. So when you talk about the Fibonacci series as applied to architecture, what do you mean? Give an example.
Nikos: Yeah, I mean that when we design a room, let’s look at the Fibonacci sequence and divide everything starting from the height of the room. So you divide by consecutive Fibonacci numbers. You divide the height of the room into one third. Is there something that’s one third the height of the room? Well, maybe the window. Now, you subdivide that. Is there anything else? Well, one-third the width or the height of the window, in traditional architecture, yes, the panes are divided with mountings, so you have something one-third the size of the window. In modern architecture, since the 1930s, no, there’s nothing smaller than the size of the window, and there’s nothing smaller than that. In traditional architecture, you have the surround of the door that is, say, seven centimeters. Modern architecture, the door just fits in straight into the hole of the wall. The window frame, there is no window frame.
You see, all these smaller and intermediate scales are totally erased in modern and contemporary architecture, whereas, they’re all present in the older pre-war architecture, and they go back to what we were just talking about, the affordances of James Gibson. But now we are interpreting the presence of these different scales that relate to the human body because they are mathematically relevant. They satisfy the sequence of numbers that you divide. You get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller down to what? If you have something that’s nice, natural wood, you go down to the grain. We love the grain because it’s part of the sequence. Whereas, in modern contemporary architecture, what’s the smallest grain that you go to? It’s some horrible, rough concrete. It scrapes your hand when you touch it. I hate to keep emphasizing this, but every aspect of post-war architecture is meant to create anxiety. Even the surfaces scrape the skin from your hands. It’s consistent.
Jim: I can tell you, I didn’t think about this earlier, but I did stumble along to an amazing example of this long back in the ’70s when I was a college textbook salesman. I’m sure you have those guys come around and pester you from time to time.
Nikos: Yes.
Jim: That was my first job after college, and one of my colleges was Northern Kentucky University, which is a top-to-bottom Brutalist architectural campus that was built from scratch in the Brutalist style. And even the benches were of this rough, sharp, nasty concrete. I remember walking around there for two or three days a year, and I’d say, “I’d like to have the Band-Aid franchise for this place because people are going to be cutting their hands, are going to hit the corners that are sharp.” It was got to have been the ugliest place I ever saw in my life.
Nikos: Well, that was consistent. The power brokers of the world were just completely taken over. They were convinced that this was good for the world. This was the solution to the world’s economic problems, the architecture of the future, right down to those horrible concrete benches that you cannot sit on because they’re so uncomfortable.
Jim: Yeah. You refer to in at least one of your works as deconstructivism as the anti-architecture. Tell us about that a little bit.
Nikos: Well, deconstructivism is when you take a really ugly building, like a minimalist building that’s totally ugly concrete and you dynamite it. It’s building a new building that looks like a dynamited old building. Who would do that? Only psychopaths. We have a generation of architects who are psychopaths.
Jim: I got to tell you another funny architectural story. I was at a conference in Budapest actually once on complexity theory and various other topics, and there were two architects there from a very famous school of architecture in the United States. They were both professors of unbuildable architecture. They were telling us about their designs for buildings that for reasons of physics could never be built. And at that point I said, “There is something deeply wrong with the brain of architecture if they have professors at distinguished schools who specialize in unbuildable, obscure, just idiotic stuff like unbuildable architecture.”
Nikos: The crime being committed is that such people destroy the minds of generations of students who go into architecture school because they want to learn to do something good for humanity, to build nice buildings. And they come out essentially being architectural assassins because they have been trained to destroy instead of create.
Now, you mentioned two eminent architecture professors, we won’t see any names, who design unbuildable buildings. Well, if that were only true, that’s okay. It doesn’t harm anybody except the students who get indoctrinated. However, you have a generation or two of architects who actually construct unbuildable buildings because they pay the client pays a lot of money to a very competent engineering firm that actually draws up the drawings and makes such a building stand up. And then it’s a horrible thing because that city has a horrible building that people will have to experience. Whether it’s an office building, commercial office building or a government building, symphony hall, or a contemporary art gallery, it makes people sick, and it’s going to do that for generations.
Jim: I guarantee you, that post office is going to annoy people for a long time.
Nikos: But Jim, that post office, at least it’s ugly, but it doesn’t come out and feel like it’s poking you in the eye, like deconstructivist buildings. Deconstructivist buildings sort of have jutting forms that you are afraid even to approach from 100 meters away. The post office is ugly but relatively tame compared to deconstructivist buildings.
Jim: Yeah, the old saying on campus is, “Isn’t it interesting that the ugliest building on campus is almost always the school of architecture?”
Nikos: Exactly. Exactly.
Jim: Let’s go back to theory again a little bit. One of the things we do a fair bit here on the Jim Rutt show is try to talk about the deeper ideas. When we think about things like the Fibonacci series and multi-scaler design, something that immediately comes to mind, and you talk about it quite a bit in your work, is fractals in architecture.
Nikos: Yes. A fractal is an object that has scaling, something similar but not identical to the Fibonacci sequence, so that you have something of a certain size and then you have a substructure that goes down by a certain ratio. Say if you have a scaling ratio of three, it could be any number, if you have a scaling ratio of three, you’ll have some prominent features at one-third, and then at one-third squared, one-ninth, and then one-third cubed, one over 27. These things fit very nicely into the fractal. You don’t build a fractal like that. You can design a building like that, by fitting things together, but a fractal usually comes from a mathematical formula. You just put in the formula to your computer and it creates this fractal with a particular scaling ratio.
So you can keep magnifying the fractal. And you see, because there is a scaling all the way down from the size of the fractal that you have on a page all the way down to the microscopic level. So every time you magnify the fractal, you uncover more similar structure that also has these scaling of substructures. So that’s what a fractal is. Now, that’s a mathematical fractal. When we look at nature, look at a cauliflower, that’s a fractal. Nature creates a fractal. Look at the lung, a lung is open for an operation, that’s a fractal.
Jim: Our circulatory system’s another example.
Nikos: Exactly. Exactly.
Jim: And so how is this relevant to architecture and conceptually, how is that applied to, let’s say, thinking about a design for architecture?
Nikos: Well, we have just described something in different words that we have described before with the, say, Fibonacci sequence, that you have the human scale including all the scale of the arm, the hand, the fingers, the eye, the nostrils. If you put all those scales together, you create an approximate fractal. We have already described this in yet another way, in Gibson’s affordances. We want to be able to see that we can reach to a window and grab it with our hands. So those are necessary scales that can only occur if you have a scaling hierarchy of a fractal.
Now, the fractal adds one thing more that could unify some of the architectural elements if there is a similarity. So you have, say, an arch at a certain scale and then you have a larger arch at the bigger scale, but it’s just a magnification. Now, the brain immediately sees that this is the same object that is magnified, so that links two scales together. A mathematical fractal is perfectly self-similar. Namely, you magnify any portion and it looks exactly like the unmagnified part. But in nature and in good architecture, it’s only approximate self-similarity, but it’s similar enough that the eye ties these together. And this is a way of tying together the different scales, which leads to the informational coherence that we crave so much. Our brain craves this.
Jim: Again, a word I tend to use that’s not necessarily formally a fractal is richness. For instance, the painters that I love like Vermeer, you look at their work and then you look at a piece of their work and then you get a magnifying glass and look at the piece of the piece and there’s something going on at every level. While many of the modern work is just… Actually, we’d looked at a house one time, the guy was very proud of his art collection. One of the things he had on his wall was a nine inch by nine inch green square, which he probably paid $20,000 for. And I go, “What an idiot.” There’s no detail, there’s no richness. It’s a green square, dude. You could go down to the hardware store and buy a floor tile in that color and it would’ve cost you $1.29. I think my idea of richness is congruent with, or at least related to, these ideas of fractals and self-similarity and Fibonacci series.
Nikos: Let us categorize your idea of richness. In a fractal, when you magnify something, it looks exactly the same. So you keep magnifying and it looks the same, and you magnify some more and it looks the same. That’s a fractal. Now, statistical self-similarity is when you magnify a piece and it doesn’t look the same, but it’s somewhat similar. And you go to the end where you magnify something and it doesn’t look the same, but there is structure there, there is ordered complexity.
Jim: There’s multi-scale.
Nikos: Exactly.
Jim: There’s multi-scales that are related, right?
Nikos: Exactly. That’s what you’re pointing out. The human mind wants that. It wants to be able to go in closer and find more structure that’s ordered and even closer, and there’s still more structure, so it doesn’t have to be similar, in which case it goes away from the fractal, but it keeps the fractal scaling. So the self-similarity goes away, but you keep the fractal scaling, which is just as important.
Jim: Got it. Now it gets me to my next topic, which you’ve also written about, is all these phenomena, richness and multi-scale and complexity and coherence across scales, et cetera, to be meaningful have to relate to the human mind. What does cognitive science tell us that’s useful with respect to architecture?
Nikos: Cognitive science tells us that our mind has evolved to interpret living geometry and other information in nature in the environment in which we evolved. So if we experience this information, then we can interpret it. And that’s what the brain is for. The brain was not created arbitrarily. The brain was created to interpret this information.
Now, when you have architecture that violates living geometry, you don’t know what’s happening. You see this large thing, you try to interpret it. Is it a danger to me? It’s huge, it’s bigger than a dinosaur. You’re just paralyzed there and you’re anxious. Now, you never say that, but your body’s telling you this. And now in the last five years, we have portable sensors that you wear, and they’re telling you that these things are going off the scale, creating anxiety in the body. These award-winning architectural constructions are creating anxiety in the human body because the brain does not have a reference, and the only reference it has is telling you, “This is a menace to me, and I have to stay away.” But as we said earlier, if it’s the post office and you have to go in there to send a registered letter, you force your body to enter under stress.
Jim: Specifically in cognitive science and related psychology, we have the system of emotions and the emotional valences. Anxiety is an emotion, but at least my reaction to great architecture is emotions across multiple domains. Being in awe almost. Say, the New York City main public library, you go, “Oh my God.” Both outside and inside it does something to you emotionally. It gives almost a golden glow. What are your thoughts on how architects ought to approach how their work interacts with the human emotional valences and emotional systems?
Nikos: Well, talking to dominant architects today is a totally waste of time because they don’t care about the emotions. But you have middle-level architects who are working on human architecture, and they wish to maximize the positive valence emotions so that you approach a building and you feel positive and that it’s reinforcing, it makes you want to approach it further, it makes you want to enter the building. Once you’re in the building, the interior is such that it gives you a positive emotion. This creates a salutogenic environment. It helps to heal because these emotions actually lead to the release of positive hormones that help in the health, help in the immune system to keep the immune system healthy. So this is a question of medical health in the environment.
Now, going further, how do you go further in a positive direction? Well, a great architect will create a great building that is so overwhelming with positive emotion that you feel the awe. It is just more and a concentration of good stuff, like a great cathedral or a great mosque or a great Buddhist temple.
So let’s go into religion a little bit. I, a Christian, can go into a beautiful mosque or the madrasa if you’re not allowed to go into the mosque, and I feel this wonderful emotion and healing. It’s not because of the religion, because it’s a different religion, it’s because of the architecture. We can go to a civic lay building like the public library and feel the awe. The Japanese person, a tourist, can go to a great Christian cathedral and feel the awe. So it’s in the geometry, it is not in the particulars of the religion.
Jim: And us Westerners can go to a Shinto temple and feel the awe.
Nikos: Exactly. Exactly.
Jim: Now, let’s talk about maybe how some of that is done. You talk a fair bit about the importance of ornamentation in making architecture really be human-friendly.
Nikos: Yes, ornament is something that is integral to a human building. When you build the building, or at least in the past when you build the building, you were constrained by the materials and by the stresses, so you did the best you can. There were a few places that were left blank, not very interesting, and you fill those in with ornament, because intuitively you feel that there should be something there to draw the attention of the eye, something interesting and nice. So that was the ornament.
Today, everything is blank, there’s nothing there. So there is a necessity for ornament to add to these intermediate and smaller scales, which as I said before, in the modernist buildings, everything below, say, two meters is just wiped out, there’s nothing there. That’s where ornament belongs. The ornament is necessary for our well-being because it adds… Okay, let’s go back.
We’ve talked about the same thing five different ways. The ornament adds the human scale, say, from half a meter down to one millimeter. So you have 15 centimeters, five centimeters, one centimeter, three millimeters, these are very important. That’s where the ornament plays a role. If it’s not there, then something is missing and your body feels that something is missing. I will go further. I don’t know if you want to touch it, this is dynamite. The baby’s developing brain needs those scales in order to wire itself in the first six months. So a baby growing up in a minimalist environment is in danger of not developing. There are measurements for that, frightening measurements from the medical profession.
Jim: Not surprising. I will say, I think we talked about in our pre-show chat that I live in a very remote area of Appalachia. People here live decently, but it’s never been rich by any means. But when you look at the older houses, and we are often in people’s older houses, even when these people here were quite poor, before electricity, when it was a two-day journey to the nearest city, when they built their houses, they spent considerable effort in ornamentation on the newel posts, on the door frames, on the fireplaces. They had no functional need to do this, and these were poor people who had to conserve their resources, but they nonetheless felt it was worth making that investment to put a lot of ornament into their buildings.
Nikos: I would turn what you said around. These people felt in their body, in their gut that there was a functional need for that ornament, because that’s all they had. They had the house, and they were going to spend their time in that house, and that house should be as positive as possible to their emotions in order to be a healthy environment for themselves and their family. So functionally, this ornament was necessary. They could not explain it that way.
Jim: But somehow they felt it, yeah.
Nikos: They felt it and they achieved it, and they knew they achieved it.
Jim: I just had an interesting thought, which is that parents, particularly our grandparents, my wife and I’s grandparents, loved very detailed, somewhat biological-looking ornamental wallpaper on the walls of their houses while my wife and I hate it. Whenever we’ve gone and bought a house that had wallpaper, we stripped it off and converted it to plain walls. What are your thoughts about ornamental wallpaper, just to pick a fairly obscure but real example?
Nikos: Okay, you are addressing a topic that’s highly specialized and rare, which is now that we accept the necessity for ornament, when does it get to be too much and overbearing? If it gets to be overbearing, then it’s confusing. This is an information overload. It’s like having three TV screens playing at the same time a different channel. This is an information overload. I accede to your taste for tearing down the wallpaper, but the major problem in the world today is not the overload from ornament, it’s zero ornament, total lack of ornament. That’s the major problem facing the world today.
Jim: Yeah, and certainly our ’70s post office building there’s not a single, not one square inch of anything you would call ornamentation. No grace notes at all.
Nikos: Okay, Jim, let me say something else. If you buy an older house, say you bought an older house and it’s covered with wallpaper, with flowers in it, you don’t like it. Well, think, when you strip that wallpaper, the rest of the pieces of the room, do they serve well enough for the ornament? Do you have baseboards? Do you have door surrounds? Do you have a nice window sills? Do you have a cornice where the wall meets the ceiling? If there’s enough detail there, then you can strip off the wallpaper.
Jim: Yeah, we happen to like natural wood trim. And so when we redid our place here at the farm, while we got rid of the wallpaper, we also added a lot of wood at different scales, big chunks of wood like an old timber for the fireplace, mantle, wood planks around the windows, window sills, again, that had some detail to them, but again, all solid wood. And so we’ve had a tendency to work through our ornamentation and probably even more than ornamentation, our multi-scaler-ness with different size components of wood. In fact, the core of the house is post and beams, really big pieces of wood, and that works itself down to finger thickness pieces of wood at the lowest level.
Nikos: Jim, you lured me into this conversation under false pretenses. You pretended you knew nothing about architecture, yet you turned out to be an accomplished architect who already has built something with a natural geometry and different scales and down to the wood vein in the structure that makes you feel like it’s a healing environment. You just described that. So why are you asking me? You know this stuff already.
Jim: I know a teeny, teeny, teeny bit, but nothing like what you know. Here’s a very interesting component that gets at the ornamentation and the architecture of the sacred, and that’s the idea of cultural continuity. You have called that out as something that is totally missing in modern architecture.
Nikos: Well, modern architecture was explicitly a reaction to destroy all of the previous culture, architectural and artistic culture. Because as we said earlier, a handful of architects wanted to become wealthy and famous by promoting something that was obviously new because it was so anxiety-inducing, so they condemn everything that has gone back in the past. This is classic revolution, very destructive style of revolution where you have a group of people take over and then they proceed to erase everything from the past.
That is both their strength, because the people support them in erasing the people’s own past and losing the cultural heritage that has kept society alive for generations and generations. That is irretrievable, the erasing of cultural things. But with architecture, it’s not a replacement like in a healthy democracy one corrupt set of politicians is voted and replaces another corrupt set of politicians but society continues more or less the same. It is a discontinuity. It is when a healthy society is running along and then a totalitarian dictatorship takes over and starts killing people. So the modern architecture, they took over and then they started to destroy the culture of the society.
Jim: That seems to be the case. Now then, there’s a partial reaction to that. The first time I heard the word postmodernism was sometime in the mid ’80s. I think it was in a Time Magazine. Remember we had Time Magazine and that was something we looked at.
Nikos: Oh, yes.
Jim: It was a story about the AT&T building in New York City that had the famous Chippendale top on it. This was described as postmodernist architecture. As far as I can tell, that was the first time I ever heard the word postmodernism. In that case, there was somewhat of a return to ornament, but you could call it an ironic return perhaps. What is your thought about postmodernism in architecture?
Nikos: It is not worth discussing. It was all a ruse. If you remember, in the Soviet Union in the ’60s, there were some designated dissenters who were fully working for the Communist Party. They were allowed to dissent a little bit so that the rest of the world could see that there was some dissent, but they were working for the Communist Party. So postmodernism made the most trivial changes to ugly modernism and they said, “This is revolution.” No, it’s not. They’re still promoting the same garbage, the same inhuman…
I don’t want to get personal now, but the leading architects of that movement were part of the establishment. They just wanted to make some small changes. The postmodern buildings are not very good. They’re still hostile. Maybe they have a little more detail, a little more color, but if you notice very carefully, the postmodernist buildings, they avoid living geometry. The elements are there that they copy from other buildings, but intentionally they don’t match. They don’t create a feeling of a positive valence. They’re still anxiety. So you say, “Why is there anxiety? There’s some color and there is some detail and there’s some ornament and some nice things.” But the reason is that they intentionally don’t match, it’s all ironic. But ironic, you are making a joke at the expense of human health because the body does not react to ironic things. The body reacts to the geometry, and if the geometry does not quite match and is not quite coherent, it’s still perceived as a threat. So postmodernism was just a big scandal, was just a big game to gain some people notoriety.
Jim: All right, let’s move on to another topic. You’ve talked a fair bit about math and algorithmic design. What do you think are the opportunities and dangers in algorithmic design?
Nikos: The opportunities are for an architect who wishes to make a human building to apply some of the techniques that my friends and I have developed and design something in steps. You don’t sit at your computer and you sketch out something and you say, “This is brilliant because I’m a genius,” and then people have to suffer living in this thing for 100 years. No, you design a sequence of slightly different designs and then you check them using diagnostic tools that have been developed recently, and then you make a change and then you do the same process.
So algorithmic means that you compute the effect of the changes and you go through a sequence of steps. The result gets better and better and better and better. That is totally opposite from the genius architect who crumples a piece of paper and throws it on the ground and says, “I’m going to build this as a concert hall.” Well, it’s a piece of crap. That’s not the way you create human architecture. You have to see how the human will enter that building on the human scale on foot, how the human being will go up the stairs. And there you need to do the computations and keep changing whatever ideas you have to accommodate the human biology and the human psychology.
Jim: And as I’ve listened to you here this morning, I could think of some algorithms one could run to make sure, for instance, that you had multi-scale that cohered across multiple ranges. So if you took your AutoCAD drawings and threw some AI at it, you might actually be able to calculate the multi-scaleness of a design. Is that the kind of thing you’re talking about when you think about algorithmic design?
Nikos: Exactly. But when I wrote my papers on algorithmic design, you had to do this using software or by hand. Now we have AI that has created a revolution in architecture, and the revolution is on our side because AI now can create human-scale architecture and just bypass all this nonsense about the modernist style and the deconstructivist style. And it gives you the result instantly. So you can be generating alternative variants of your design and the AI will check each one and tell you which one is better. And then you make some changes or the AI itself can make those changes. The AI can act as a diagnostic tool.
This is a revolution. It’s right, we’re living in that revolution. However, I need to warn the audience that AI is also being misapplied by the architectural establishment. It is used to create even more monstrous designs that somebody is going to build as a contemporary art museum. The reason they’re monstrous is because AI is used to create some abstract, artistic image of a building. It is not used to diagnose the human qualities of the building, which is what my friends and I are doing. So these are opposite applications of AI.
Jim: So you are actually working on applying AI to architecture today?
Nikos: Absolutely. I have a new paper that’s under review. Well, we have two, three papers already published using AI to diagnose and validate living geometry. So this is not using AI to create crazy forms, it is use AI to question and revise the basis of architectural design to make it fit for human neurology. That’s what the architectural establishment refuses to look at.
Jim: It’d be interesting. It may be an opportunity for new entrants that don’t need to have all the fancy credentials from the fancy architecture schools if some common sense and ability to draft plus some AI might be able to get them to the point where they can design functional buildings.
Nikos: Absolutely. You can avoid all of that. All you need is a client who is courageous, because I’ve heard so many terrible stories of a client who wants something nice, has an intuitive feeling, they go to an architect, they find an architect, the architect creates a design that’s just horrible. The client says, “I don’t really like this,” and then the architect just bullies the client into building this horrible thing whereas the client wanted something nice. But clients are easily bullied by university professors who are architects or famous architects who have won prestigious awards. Clients are still easy to bully. They don’t realize that the client pays. The client can insist that they want something human. But so far, very few people have done that. But let me tell you, the two or three clients that have insisted on a beautiful thing have created some wonderful things.
Jim: What are some good examples of modern buildings that you would describe as wonderful?
Nikos: I would go on the urban scale. We have the new urbanist developments all over the world, where the client has insisted on the human scale. And they’re very nice, more than very nice. The client insisted on the human scale and has seen his or her investment go up 10 times, because people who want to buy into these new towns, they’re knocking down the door to buy into these new towns. The price goes up astronomically because they’re so nice.
Jim: Yeah, there was an early one building in Maryland when I was working over there in the ’90s, and it sold out immediately. And as you say, it’s appreciated tremendously. The architectural critic of the Washington Post described it as trite and stupid and silly and more or less an abomination. But the customers voted with their feet.
Nikos: Yes. Well, Jim, you have put your finger now on the great divide between what is good for human health, which agrees with what the marketplace wants and gives a premium too versus the totally opposite opinion of the architectural dogmatism that reigns in the architectural critics and in academia.
Jim: We were talking earlier about art. The same seems to be true in the art world, where the art dealers bully the clients, the critics support the dealers, and everybody gets rich except for the last fool who owns the nine-inch green square that he paid $25,000 for. And someday that’s worth no more than $1.39.
Nikos: Exactly. It is the musical chairs, the last one that’s left standing loses all the investment out of stupidity. But Jim, it is the same con game, but there is a huge difference between the art world and the architectural world. The art world, you can take all this junk one day and just take it to the landfill, the junkyard, and leave it there. But architecture, you are stuck with giant buildings for 50, 100 years that are ugly and ruin our health.
Jim: That’s actually a very important point, a very important point. We spend a fair bit of time in Pittsburgh for family reasons, and as we leave Pittsburgh on the expressway, we go by a 1970s office building that it’s like somebody designed this thing to be as ugly as possible. It has smoke glass windows which haven’t aged well. It has black gaskets around the windows, which don’t look like they seal well and thing is maybe 20 stories tall. And it’s like you would’ve had to use an AI to design something so ugly. And yet it’ll probably be sitting there for another 50 years at least. So that’s a good warning that the stakes in architecture are way higher than they are in fine art.
Nikos: What you describe is something that doesn’t need AI because it doesn’t need any intelligence. It is a typology that comes from the 1920s, just a very simplistic typology that’s copied endlessly, still looks as ugly as it did in the 1920s. You find the architecture critics writing pages and pages about how the technology has improved, so now they put a film of rare earth on the glass. It doesn’t make any difference. The gaskets still leak, it’s still ugly, the temperature control is impossible. It’s a failure. It’s a failed typology. There’s nothing you can do to fix it despite all this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It is the architecture cult attempting to preserve its power in the system. And there’s a lot of power in the system and a lot of money, and many careers depend on it.
Jim: All right, well, let’s transition to my second topic. In addition to architecture, you’ve also written a lot about urban planning. One of the papers I really loved was one called Peer to Peer Urbanism. So let’s step back one level from single building architecture. What are your organizing thoughts about urbanism and urban planning?
Nikos: Yes, urbanism arose as an attempt of human beings to live close together. And so they had to make several systems work simultaneously on the same level. Namely, flows, which is the traffic, pedestrian, and then vehicle of traffic, and at the same time accommodate the spaces that are distributed between public spaces and private spaces. So if you put all that together, you get a complex system, different functions of the buildings, different functions and different speeds of the connective network.
Now, early we talked about fractals. The connective networks of a healthy city are a fractal, because you have flows of different size and capacity and they must all be there and they must all connect very nicely just like the mammalian lung. And you cannot just eliminate the small streets like some modernists. Like Brasilia has eliminated all the small streets, all you have is highways. That’s why it’s a dead city, the formal part of Brasilia. So there are definite mathematical rules to follow when designing a city. Even if you don’t design a city, you go to these historic cities that arose over centuries and millennia, and they show those rules there, right there. You take a photograph. They have evolved that way because that is the most efficient way to have a city with all the human qualities.
I don’t mean efficient to maximize the speed of flow through downtown as the urban planners did in the 1960s where they destroyed downtown to run a highway through downtown. So you maximize the speed. No, I said optimize all these different flows. Now, to connect the different functions and the different types of buildings in the city, I used in my book, Principles of Urban Structure, I used a result from a random graph theory that Stuart Kauffman loves. Stuart Kauffman took result and use the primordial soup. And Kauffman said, “How do we get the primordial soup, and where do we get the catalysts?” And his answer is brilliant. We don’t have catalysts. We have different molecules in the primordial soup, and some of the molecules add as catalysts for some of the other molecules. And that is a result that comes from random graph theory.
Jim: Yeah, we’ve had Stuart on numerous times and I’m a great fan. In fact, one of my first things I ever read in the complexity field was his book Origins of Order and his idea of autocatalytic network-
Nikos: Exactly.
Jim: … where the elements in the soup itself, well, they don’t even have to be that strong a catalyst.
Nikos: Exactly.
Jim: As long as they have some level of catalysis, they can make a auto-poetic system emerge, essentially.
Nikos: Yes. That’s the auto-poetic system. So I applied that to the structure of cities. So you need many, many different functions close together in the regular high density city in order to catalyze each. So you need to have residences, you need to have offices, retail, a little bit of industry, not heavy industry because it’s polluting. So you have all of these, and then they auto-catalyze and you have the living city, which has noise and some congestion. But you go to the older cities, you go to Rome, you go to Mumbai, Kolkata, Kuala Lumpur, okay, there’s a lot of traffic, it is a little bit chaotic, but it’s alive because it’s auto-catalytic. Now, you go to Brasilia and it’s dead because there’s a single function. These are just government office buildings.
Jim: And block apartments and gigantic fields as I understand it.
Nikos: Exactly. So now let’s go around the world to the post-World War II construction of new urban regions. They’re mono-functional. There is no auto-catalysis. They’re dead. Okay, so maybe 10,000 people go there in the morning, they work in the offices, and then they go back at night and it’s dead.
Jim: Now, to get to the kind of auto-catalyzing network that operates at multi-scales, you talk about something called urban DNA. What is that?
Nikos: Well, you look at what has worked in the past because it was created by humans to serve human scale needs. And by human scale needs, I mean you have small apartments, small shops mixed together, slightly vertically, not too high vertically, and then stuck together horizontally on the plan. We see that there are certain patterns, like the ones given by Christopher Alexander in the Pattern Language, that work in Johannesburg and they work in St. Petersburg and they work in Wellington, New Zealand. These are recurring patterns of how pieces of the city work nicely together. So that’s the DNA, which has evolved independently all over. So if you want to build a new part of the city or tear down some of these horrible, monstrous, monolithic buildings and build some human scale urban fabric, you can learn the lesson or we can learn the lesson because we have documented why this mixed-use urban fabric works.
Jim: Are there any urbanists or urban planners who understood this and have attempted to formalize a system of urban DNA that they can apply?
Nikos: Well, the first person who understood that was the late Jane Jacobs, who wrote this fantastic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In her last chapter, which is a masterpiece, she should have won the Nobel Prize for that, she describes everything by means of organized complexity, because she was not a mathematician, but she went to the Rockefeller Institute and she talked to the mathematicians there. She realized what she had observed as far as the living city was due to the organized complexity of all these forces. So she wrote that. Okay, Jane Jacobs was an activist. She saved much of New York City from destruction by being a political activist.
Now, there are the new urbanists today like Leon Krier, Nir Buras, Andres Duany, who apply some of these techniques in order to create a living urban fabric. Some are phenomenal successes or some new urbanist developments are so-so, but they’re always better and more successful on the human scale than the post-war blocks that we built. Those are invariably inhuman.
Jim: Now, closely related to the idea obviously of urban DNA is that you’ve also described cities as living systems. I should also just in passing mention that the Santa Fe Institute, in our field of complexity, we consider Jane Jacobs one of the founding thinkers, even though she didn’t probably know it. After the fact, it’s clear that she fully understand the concept of complexity.
Nikos: Yes, she was a great pioneer. The city as a living system means that the city continuously adjusts itself. It’s not something just solid. Some of the main buildings are solid, but the city adjusts itself, uses change. One building changes from being a bank to being something else, a school. There’s constant flow. As long as it is a mutually supporting keeps the city alive. It is when you solidify things where you can actually kill the city just by the legislation. Just to forbid mixed use, mono-functional zoning, kill some of the cities even before the bulldozers moved in, because you could not have a restaurant next to a bank.
Jim: Zoning, well, maybe it has some uses, also seems to have done a lot of harm in terms of reducing diversity and experimentation.
Nikos: Post-war zoning killed cities. The post-war zoning was imposed by fanaticized architects who could not find the job as architects, who went into the urban departments of cities around the world and rewrote the laws according to these crazy ideas of the architects of the 1930s. The so-called Athens Charter, totally crazy ideas. And they became law however. After the 1945, they became law so people could not build a living urban fabric anymore. You had your hands tied. But these are mono-functional zoning.
Jim: Of course, you live in Texas, and Texas has less zoning than most. In fact, Houston and Harris County famously have no zoning. How does that worked out?
Nikos: So-and-so. Houston may have no zoning, but it’s a pretty ugly city because petroleum rules in Houston. You can’t have a car city, you need to have a pedestrian city that has access to car traffic. But the heart of the city is pedestrian areas. If you have all-car city, then you spend all your time driving around. It’s not what human beings evolve to do, to drive around.
Jim: And again, that’s multi-scale. You want to be in a car faster or in an airplane, but slow and enjoyable when you want to walk.
Nikos: Exactly.
Jim: I was talking back about cities as living systems and learning. I just wanted to reference a book a friend of mine wrote, Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn, and he talks about how buildings get repurposed and you add rooms to them and you change them. And really quite interesting quasi-biological metaphor for how buildings actually end up getting used over time.
Nikos: Stewart Brand is one of the prophets of architecture, even though he doesn’t like to claim the term. He was a long-time friend of Christopher Alexander. So Brand’s book, How Buildings Learn, revealed how living architecture works. If a building is human and it attracts people to work in it or live in it, then it can change over the years. It can change function, it can be sold, it can become a bank, it can become a school, it can become a restaurant, become some private apartments. It serves the same purpose because it is human.
A modernist building doesn’t serve any purpose. Whether it is a bank or a restaurant or apartment it’s still ugly and unpleasant to live in. So a building will learn by incorporating human elements and hopefully improve over the years so that you have historic cities. You have a fifteenth-century building in Rome being used today, and people love it, people love to work. Say it’s an insurance company, they love to work in there. If they have not torn down the wall to put the air conditioner. There’s a way to have minimal interventions. You respect the original architecture and you put the added comforts. There’s a way to do that without gutting the whole building. That’s totally opposite from keeping the facade and tearing down the historic building in order to build some low ceiling, very ugly modernist building. Behind the facade, that’s facadeism that’s being practiced. But Stewart brand understood this. It’s a lovely book not appreciated by the architectural establishment because he revealed some very, very profound truths on the reuse of buildings and the living quality of buildings through their adaptation and reuse.
Jim: That reminds me, I have to get Stewart on the show to talk about that book. Now let’s talk about what people can do or what you see as the road forward. One of the papers you wrote with some other people, including Mikkel Bowen, so I know, called Peer to Peer Urbanism was one set of ideas you had. Why don’t you tell us about that?
Nikos: Well, this was a collection of ideas on how to implement some of human scale urbanism by appealing to the public, educating the public, and then having the public coordinate itself to demand human scale urbanism. After several years, I don’t think it works because the public seems to just accept what it is given by higher authority, political and financial authority. The press is working against human scale urbanism because the press has been acting as the mouthpiece for the worst kind of totalitarian urbanism in architecture. So peer to peer urbanism is the opposite; people getting together, discussing that they like small spaces, they like mixed use, they like to be able to walk, and then organizing and demanding that their elected representatives build the city in that model that everyone loves.
But this bottom-up power doesn’t seem to work much anywhere. It’s either top-down and then special interests do what they want and oppress the people. Or there is a revolution. And unfortunately, from what I have learned in history, revolutions tend to be sparked by other special interests who are hidden. It’s not spontaneous. So they get the people to rise up and demand something, but then it is just taken over, sort of a neat little trick. And then other special interests have come in. So I’m very discouraged about that.
Jim: Now, a contemporary trend, which I think is actually interesting because it’s a mixture of good thinking and special interests, is the so-called “yes in my backyard” movement that I think started in San Francisco where there’s horrific housing crisis because they don’t let anybody build up. And of course, if you could build bigger, taller buildings that would help with the housing pricing and the housing crunch. But of course, it’s a huge opportunity for real estate tycoons. What’s your thought on the “yes in my backyard” movement, if you’ve heard of it?
Nikos: Yes, I’ve heard of it. And it’s not only in San Francisco, it’s also in parts of Europe. What has prevented it from being implemented are those zoning laws that we’re talking about. It’s illegal to build something in your backyard. So with one stroke of the pen, a city council can vote to allow a building in the backyard. But at the same time, they have to have some guidelines of what can be built in the backyard. It’s possible to write some constraints to have human scale additions in new construction that fills in. So this has been applied in France where the zoning laws are slightly less rigid. It’s a way of avoiding tearing down perfectly good housing in order to build some very tall building, because you can increase the density by sacrificing some of these backyards. That’s infinitely preferable to destroying good houses in order to build something much taller.
Jim: Let’s wrap up with your view, whether optimistic, pessimistic, or both, about the future of architecture and the future of urbanism.
Nikos: I’m extremely pessimistic because what I see is a certain system of power that has a stranglehold on the education of architects, licensing system for architects, and a press that praises inhuman architecture and doesn’t care about human type of architecture that my friends and I are trying to promote. So I see everything stacked against us. I’m not as young as I used to be. I had hoped for a revolution earlier, but it has not occurred. And Christopher Alexander, my good friend, was waiting for such a revolution all his life, but he died without seeing the revolution.
Jim: Well, that’s a somber view, but we did talk about the fact that AI might help change things. We shall see.
Nikos: The AI is a revolution that’s happening. Thank you, Jim. Yes, within another revolution, you may spark a parallel revolution in architecture and now that’s a possibility, that’s a positive development.
Jim: I want to thank you very much, but extraordinarily interesting, in-depth, gave me an opportunity to learn a fair bit about something I didn’t know much about. So love to have you on as our guest here on the Jim Rutt Show.
Nikos: Jim Rutt, thank you so much.