NikosSalingarosAlgorithmicSustainableDesign

This page summarizes Nikos Salingaros's lecture series on Algorithmic Sustainable Design. Videos of the lectures are on YouTube here.

Lecture 1

• Salingaros mentions HarmonySeekingComputations - a term from one of Christopher Alexander's "recent" papers (as of 2008) published in the International Journal of Unconventional Computing, Volume 1 (2008).
• Universal scaling hierarchies: the Fibonacci sequence gives us a geometric sequence that describes the ratios between adjacent LevelsOfScale in traditional buildings.
• The regenerative effects of nature
  • Patients recovered from surgery faster when their room had a view of trees
  • In another study, patients who could see nature needed less pain medication
• A positive emotional response to the environment reduces stress and increases resistance to disease.
  • "A healthy mind in a healthy body in a healthy environment"
• There's nothing magical about it—it's just geometry!
• We can get universal scaling by following a traditional form language, but many architects don't want to do that.
• This series of talks describes how one might develop a new form language that does not imitate any existing architectural tradition, but is biophilic and makes people feel good.

Lecture 2

• He mentions "adaptive design"—what does this mean?
  • adaptive to human needs, apparently
• Sierpinski Gasket
• Two types of fractals: perforated and accretive
• The scaling symmetry of fractals creates coherence.
  • Fractal structures are "compressed"
  • patterns, including scaling symmetries, relate bits of information so we don't have to use as much cognitive power to parse that information.
  • the repeated patterns in a fractal allow your brain to do a kind of data compression. Rather than having to encode all the details and their relationships (which would be overwhelming), the patterns are encoded once and reused to parse each substructure.
  • Postmodernist and deconstructivist architecture have detail but no scaling symmetry, hence no coherence. They are not biophilic.
• Architecture needs to adapt to the human body and senses, with scales from 2 m down to 1 mm.
  • below 1mm, the natural structure of the material takes over
  • above 2m, the "tectonic" building requirements take over
• Perforation, bending and folding
  • perforations: windows, doors, arcades
    • create semi-permeable membranes that let some things through and keep other things out.
    • e.g. bollards, mashrabiya, windows that open, grilles
    • to generate perforation, imagine stretching a material until tears appear.
  • bending: departing from straight lines
  • folding: the opposite of perforation: generated by pushing instead of pulling
• "Anti-gravity architecture" pulls the building vertically, creating horizontal gaps and slabs
  • creates anxiety because we know that gravity does not pull buildings upward
  • examples: parking garages, suburban garage doors, venetian blinds, modernist buildings with horizontal windows

Lecture 3

• Universal Scaling Hierarchy
  • element frequency is inversely proportional to scale
  • the distribution of frequencies/scales follows a power law
  • Natural systems always exhibit this distribution. Systems that don't follow the distribution feel unnatural.
  • Systems that follow the distribution are sustainable (empirically—they are the ones we see in nature, so they're the ones that survived)
  • When we violate the distribution, e.g. by removing elements at one scale from an ecosystem, the ecosystem collapses.
  • Examples of unsustainable systems
    • present-day banking system
    • large-scale agriculture
    • suburban sprawl
    • skyscrapers
    • funding for urban projects and repair
  • These are unsustainable because they focus only on the largest scale. They have no fractal distribution.
  • Christopher Alexander pointed out that funding for urban projects goes disproportionately to the largest projects
  • Lakis Polycarpou

    Q: How can systems based on an unnatural scale distribution survive? A: With massive financial capital, huge expenditures of energy, and sheer force of will.

  • E.F. (Fritz) Schumacher - Small is Beautiful
  • Muhammad Yunus - microcredit