| GREEN EXPOSÉ Ecological Code: A Collage of Quantum Informatics in Living Automata Cities By Mitchell Joachim Preamble to E-CODE The Directives for a Green Algorithmic Program: Order Adaptation Metabolism Movement Responsiveness Reproduction Development Gene Evolution This is a Code of fluid election that infuses a sense of developing responsibly with nature. It is meant to have multiple robust interpretations encasing nimble policies. As of yet we cannot fully enact its decrees only its needs and rights. The following can be read in any desirable order. All relations and critiques of modernism are points of focus, but not by any means rendered unconditionally. Comparisons of other kinds of urban codification and pattern making are for suggestive purposes only. "Tomorrow is our permanent address if they should find us there we will move even further into now." - e.e. cummings 0.1) Coming Down the Mountain Certainly we can design the entire universe with its many bridges, planetary habitats, star systems and boundless infinitudes. Inside our very make up exists the synergetic comprehensive primordial Code that illuminates every possibility of every micro/macro cosmic event. 0.2) 1-800-B-COGENT Our purpose is to devise a revolutionary test for ourselves. Test our civilizations metabolic rate. Test our society's constitution. Test ourselves against the prophets of the machines. Test the fires that burn the seemingly immutable. Test our billion years of incidental evolution against a single second long shrug from mother earth. Count the constellations and ask yourself: How do we matter? 0.3) One Eyed Foible An inter-city teacher once proclaimed to her ecologist friend that there was no place near where she could take the children that exemplified "nature". The ecologist abruptly replied, "Start by taking them into the asphalt school yard and asking them why they are alive". Ecological Codes are everywhere shouldn't we explore them? 0.4) Marx the Spot The romantization of the machine in the garden is associated with patterning dysfunctional moral certitude. Urban humanist ecology becomes some precious few blades of grass choking in a cracked inter-borough sidewalk. Leo Marx articulates the pastoral ideal intertwined with technological dwelling. The pastoral ideal, in contrast to primitivism, highlights the ideal of the mix of nature and culture -- a resolution to the conflict between these different poles. This ideal is complicated by the varying definitions of nature and the city. The city, as a bastion of civilization, is frequently maligned by pastoral writers (Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Shakespeare) as the source of corruption and disease. However, although this may prompt a withdrawal into the wild, the lessons of nature are often intended to be brought back to the city -- there is not a primitivist abandonment of the city but rather, it is accepted as one of the major components of the ideal state, bad qualities and all. Similarly, nature is far from ideal. Nature carries different valuations in this analysis, often wild and striking, or pure and righteous; fertile and lavish, or severe and pestilent. Information prescribing natural ecology is the resolution of these disparate terms. As an attenuated instrument in the hands of towering guardians it is our great catharsis 0.5) Herbs of Herodotus Ecological history underscores our terrestrial issues. How much and how fast has the climate changed? How far are such changes man-induced? Is nature in balance? Are humans helpless to stem -- or bound to alter -- natural processes? Has humanity on the whole improved or spoiled the Earth? In what sense do environmental misuse and reform matter? Today's ecological concerns trigger these essentially historical questions. Save for the subject of oppressed minorities, no aspect of history is currently so resurgent as that of the environment. Past historians habitually disjoined nature from history. As recently as 1984, Donald Worster found "little history in the study of nature, and little nature in the study of history". History --the annals of civilization -- is derived from recollections and written records. By contrast, erudition of nature -- Earth and Cosmos -- emerged from material residues, theoretical logic, and verifying research. History was a humanistic enterprise, ecology a scientific one. Analogies abounded, "the book of nature" was a common cliche, and historical "science" was recurrently trendy. But most scholars stressed the disparate temporal horizons, subject matter, and sources of the two realms and slighted their parallels. Nature was mundane and mindless, history the sublime drama of human will. To be sure, historians never forgot that men and women required terrestrial abodes for food and shelter, even for sanctuary and faith. And the reciprocal influences of locale and life perennially intrigue chroniclers. At least since Herodotus, historians have invoked landscape and terrain, climate and soils to explain why peoples and nations differ. In the Western world, human dominion over nature was decreed by the deity and lent added impetus by Enlightenment science. While ecologists doggedly termed nature mankind's master, devotees of advancement saw nature as mankind's servant. 0.6) Less is a Bore + Enough is Enough Mies Van Der Rohe in 1920 portrayed a glass and iron skyscraper for Berlin by generating the plan from an ordinary maple leaf. This process of organic mimesis devolved into a reductive exploitation of industrial aptitude. As intended, Mies accentuated precision and environmental culpability through machine conflated geometry (it has long been standard practice to fully air-condition office structures and hermetically seal fenestration throughout the building - the burning diamond effect). An outright rejection of this brand of building stock and culture would not be prudent. The profession has to restructure its pedagogical goals, particularly assuming a balance and responsibility of giving aspirants a sufficiently bona fide comprehension of environmental studies. It is vital to admit that the practice of architecture is still at length a craft, however much its operations may be qualified by techno-scientific methods and routines. 0.7) Hop on the Partridge Family Bus Perhaps the earliest complicit modern abstraction of nature is evident in Mondrian's influential essay: Natural Reality and Abstract Reality. He presents idyllic theories regarding art and life as a narrative occurring in real time rather than as a manifesto. The participants are identified only as; "Y" a layman, "X" a naturalistic painter, and "Z" an abstract-real painter, obviously Mondrian himself. Taking place at six sites in the countryside at night while observing various natural and manmade phenomena, the trio discusses the relationship between art and life, and naturalistic vs. abstract art, finally ending in the studio of Z. The discussion is a re-working of Mondrian's ideas already presented in the previous essays "The New Plastic in Painting" (1917) and "Dialogue on the New Plastic" (1919). Mondrian's clever use of the conversational format serves a dual purpose - it is his attempt to convince the world at large, represented by the layman and the naturalistic painter, of the necessity for the new in art (specifically Mondrian's own); and presents in written form the contrast of opposites so necessary in Mondrian's painting, the pairing of the naturalistic art (the "tragic") with abstraction (the "universal"). What initially began as an exquisite metamorphosis of a tree culminated in the non- arboreal invention of Broadway Boogie Woogie. His arguments facilitate the modern use of grided rectilinear forms that re-present diminishing associations of nature. Laymen, in truth, never embraced modernists sterile aesthetic propositions. 0.8) Jungle Boogie Now the story of a farcical narrative of machine conspiracy, of mechanical devices that have minds of their own and the ability to communicate with each other. The future of adaptive behavior in machines, of smart, cybernetic cities in which the distinction between metropolis and computer interface will effectively dissolve. The ecology of settlements and computer interchange will be simultaneous and inseparable. Perhaps one invocation, -that of Code- will enrapture these biological hives of computation. 0.9) Elevator anti-Semitism In his stand-up comedy days back in the 1960s, Woody Allen used to tell a great story about mechanical objects with attitude. He details the relationships he has with various household appliances, such as his blender, his toaster, and the quirkiness of their individual personalities. He meets with them to discuss problems and on occasion has to chastise them (he hits his television set for jumping up and down). One day in a New York elevator, the voice of the automated operator asks him, "are you the guy that hit the television set", and promptly bounces him up and down the building before dumping him in the basement. 1.0) Upon the Soapbox Ecological Code is the very first liberating and harmonizing apparatus for human accountability. Ecological operations with diversity and movement towards homeostasis institute an eternal field of iterating design informatics. Code reflects the larger scope of this ecology. Code is its quantum nerve. Code has only a single performance dimension. It is an infinite point line. The nature of Code is to dwell next to its mother after birth. Ultimately this stochastic reproduction forms desire lines of parents and children. The matrix of Code is a seed of dreams that become lines of clairvoyant visions. Code seeps and sweats like a programmatic ooze over boundaries and through connective tissues. Code distinguishes living and green from molten and red. Code is an infinite order like an encyclopedia to the library of eternal traveling. 1.1) Clouds May Move At the quantum level Code satisfies a focus of semi-grouping informatics that behave as automata. These automata are working to illuminate a much larger picture. The Code itself only possibly defines a microcosm at the first dimension. Today design happens in the realm of 2D, 3D and so on.... Because Code behaves as an automata in may be multiplied to other dimensions without altering its original intentions (1D x 4D = 4D). Imagine it as something similar to the Eye of Jupiter. A constantly sized storm moving evenly through the equally tumultuous chaos of the atmosphere. 1.2) Squeal Like Deliverance We must rise to the inalienability of a neo-biological civilization of heterarchic, and poloymorpic information. Cities need to change their role in recognition of ecology. Ecological resources used in cities are not resources but they are our relatives. Cities are in kinship with Ecological Code. Everything is used in designing an ecological city. We can no longer throw things (resources), away there is no "away". "Away has gone away," as Gertrude Stein places it. Cities, as extended organisms of humans, must be held responsible in a world of nature, akin to nature. 1.3) Who's Next A few years ago we would have laughed at the idea that Ecological Code could change the way we live. Now we sheepishly admit that a gal named Dolly is a clone grazing in a meadow in Edinburgh. City architecture, even as a model of information, will reveal astounding insights when somebody tweaks it at the genetic level, i.e. Code. Sim City models an informational code. Now versions exist that emulate and predict human life styles (The Sims). Tomorrow we will be living in an age of salient machines where computation (especially quantum systems) will have exceeded human intelligence. Strategy has devolved into the sheer force of 35,000 games of chess played per minute before Kasparov could make his next move. Simply put IBM's Deep Blue proved you do not have to be intelligent to play chess. Driven by the engines of these informatic technologies simulations of liminal architecture (from the scale of city to star systems) are predictable. Behaviors of Ecological Code will be prescribed effortlessly. We are at the cusp of playing God and designing babies. How can we open Panodora's box responsibly? Should we institute a Bill of Rights that would insure a humanist directive over this Code? Imagine a genetic green algorithm that enables us to test and design fully sustainable cities. 1.4) Resolution in Revolution As the guardians of knowledge in our ivory towers we could seek a deceleration of this Ecological Code and test it for ourselves. We also can evolve it with a deeper accountability and concern for the address of tomorrow. It is a powerful and facile product of our own minds with pure humanist potential. It can save the earth and invent liminal worlds as new laboratories. It is time to don our capes and design cities with this primordial soup. Design everything at once from every possible origin to every possible ending. Ecological Code is not only boundless individual points of departure but resultants of a dominating generality. 1.5) Feeding Thousands Loaves & Fishes Lamarckian evolution professes a certain failure, as acquired traits cannot be inherited (Code is a one-way transmission). Genetics supports an organic evolution of biology but not of culture. Humans are extended organisms with engines exceeding our own intelligence but not the fecundity of our nature. Our deepest un-realization since our beginning is; what are our natural directives? Prosaic minds of our generation cry for the end of tyranny from the plausible degradations in experimenting with society and high-tech automata. A view by Margalef upholds "Living systems have always been energy systems competing for materials," -- Rather then material systems competing for energy. 1.6) Tommy Boy Every morning Thomas Jefferson awoke to the thought of writing a code to a revolution. A code that would not comprise the right to be free from remote tyranny. Today, generations later, have we compromised this code? How could he possibly foresee the intergenerational remote tyranny that exists today? A form of tyranny created by a passing generation not regulating code to include a comprehensive ecological culpability. He could have never imagined a human race that ignored the right to freedom from toxicity, carcinogens, and ozone depleting substances. He believed humans had natural rights. Rachel Carson in "Silent Spring" believed nature itself also had rights. Shouldn't we devise an Ecological Code to test ourselves against intergenerational remote tyranny? 1.7) I'm The King of Rock, There is None Higher THE FIVE E-CODE RIGHTS OF MEASURE: I. - Ecological Code is the very principle in designing a "qualified fit" between the extended human organism and the natural universe at the quantum level. II. - Ecological Code engages the complex levels of a particular place as 1D automata aura. It is unobtrusive and direct, responsive to both local conditions and local species. We must be sensitive to the intricacy of place; we can dwell without erasure. III. - Ecological Code accounts for the environmental trauma of existing and proposed designs. It is a tracing which bonds our actions to the well being of sometimes dispersed ecosystems. Informatics are deployed to make an ecologically aware distribution of design decisions. IV. - Ecological Code makes natural cycles and processes visible. This brings the designed extended organism to the foreground. Prevalent ecological design informs us of our kinship within nature. V. - Ecological Code includes many individual voices with many lines of desire. Everyone and everything is a participant, there is a zero tolerance for blatant neglect or waste. There are a myriad of approaching vectors and nets of overarching tendencies. Honor the filters of reason that each desire line adds. 1.8) Substantiate the Urban Tissue A Computer model of Code as an ideogram establishes program in units of volumetric measure. This measure is a tissue simultaneously involving the form of the land with spatial volume. Form follows anything as long as no shape is unmotivated. Light and air are key when responding to design the membrane. Encapsulation of program is correctly orchestrated via the generic loft space or any low energy embodied volume. Highly malleable it will support growth, with elaboration and magnification of character at its limits. This is an Ecological Code of rampant plurality in which lifestyle is elective and fluid. Depending on the nerve with which this Code pressures, this reinvention and re-privatization, of consequences could prove to be illimitable. 1.9) Walking on the Moon Exemplary built precursors exist as rudimentary sketches of Ecological Code. Biosphere 2 is located at an elevation of 1,200 meters above sea level at 32.5 north latitude in southern Arizona. It consists of medium scale synthetic communities of plants and soils encased in a glass and metal shell. It includes a rainforest, desert, savanna, marsh, ocean and a separate agro-forestry area. An artificially induced Gaia system contained under a visually appalling design. The structure covers 1.27 hectares (3.15 acres) and can be operated in a variety of configurations including `flow-through' and `closed system' modes. When operated as a `closed system' the air leakage is estimated at a rate of 1.5% per day. Operation as a `flow-through' system means that the apparatus has external air flowing through it. The glass and structure components of the Biosphere 2 act as a filter for incoming solar radiation. Virtually all UV radiation is absorbed, and photosynthetically-active radiation (PAR) is cut by about 55%. Heating, cooling, and electricity are supplied from an energy center external to the structure. Water is conserved inside the wilderness mesocosm (desert, marsh, savanna, and rainforest). The major internal water cycling components for the wilderness are condensation (mainly in cooling coils of air handlers), artificial rain or irrigation (by sprinkler systems), evapotranspiration, and soil sub-drainage. All the components of habitat evoking Ecological Code are mechanically present. The project possibly considers to much and allows to little room for variability. When a Gaia system snaps into place, self-regulation is the product. However, it must be robust with multitudes of redundant backups. This implicates a necessary finer bonding of ecology and technology. 2.0) Color Me Blind Urban thinking developed a greater sensitivity to ecological issues in the late twentieth century but an ability to deal with these issues remains rudimentary. One instance that recognizes a concern for ecology but remains underwhelming in its application is the UN Agenda 21 on Environment and Development. The Special Session of the General Assembly addressed twenty areas that need urgent ecological attention. These include eradicating poverty; changing patterns of consumption and production, especially in transportation and energy use; environment and sustainable development mutually supportive; and encouraging sustainable agricultural practices. "The flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth has intrinsic value. The value of non-human life forms is independent of the usefulness these may have for narrow human purposes". The Conference has not markedly affected economic, social and environmental trends that have been evident for the past twenty-five years or more . Per capita incomes in many developing countries are rising with industrialization; consumption of energy, goods and services is growing; and levels of education and health are improving. However, despite record rates of economic growth, wealth disparities have increased between the rich, developed countries and the developing world. This directly effects the planners and designers abilities to institute environmental change at the global scale. Sustainable development is about connections -- between sectors, communities, and generations -- as too often efforts to solve problems in one sector create unforeseen problems in other areas. And it is about ensuring that all stakeholders have a voice in decision-making, since what one community or group does often has profound impacts on others. This has become a terrifying prospect, because what has happened is that designers are now designing for the constituent forces and not for people. Code does not discriminate. 2.1) Preaching to the Choir People talk about solar heating a building, even about solar heating a city. But it isn't the city that is asking to be heated it is the people. Consider biologist Dr. John Todd's supposition: "We need to work with living machines, not machines for living in". More focus should be on people's needs, -clean water, safe materials, and durability. "We had degrees and boatloads of academic credentials amongst us". "And we stared at this land and we realized that we'd been tricked". "That our knowledge was abstract". "That none of us could make a piece of the world work." Our present systems of design have created a world that grows far beyond the capacity of the environment to sustain life into the future. The industrial idiom of design, failing to honor the principles of nature, can only violate them, producing waste and harm, regardless of purported intention. Living Machines are premium sources to register and test Ecological Code in order to redeem wasteful policies. 2.2) Frog Technique + Prince Antique Urbanists have a tradition of trying to make better places to live. Paolo Soleris’ Arcology Theory and The Charter for New Urbanism are two somewhat different ideologies on designing better places to dwell. Both proposals are somewhat lacking in achieving their intended goals but remain valid today. Arcology is Paolo Soleri's coded notion of cities, which embody the fusion of architecture with ecology. The Arcology concept proposes a highly integrated and compact three-dimensional urban form that is the opposite of urban sprawl with its inherently wasteful consumption of land, energy, time and human resources. An Arcology would need about two percent as much land as a typical city of similar population (complexification and miniaturization). It eliminates the automobile from inside the city and reserves it for use outside the city. Walking would be the main form of transportation inside an arcology. Today’s typical city devotes up to sixty percent of its land for automobile functions. The miniaturization of the city enables radical conservation of land, energy and resources. An Arcology would rely as much as possible on the sun, the wind and other renewable energy so as to reduce pollution and dependence on fossil fuels. An Arcology needs less energy per capita thus making recycling and the use of solar energy more feasible than in present cities. Unfortunately, the current result of these ideals is essentially a sluggishly developing, seemingly insignificant urban laboratory known as Arcosanti. The ongoing construction vaguely institutes a community of romantic optimists marginally addressing problems for the real world. It is a highly autonomous project that financial supports itself by selling wind-bells. Since it is not integrated into a greater urban context its success is measured on the extent of its current state, incomplete with an unstable population. However, the ideals of an Arcology remain valid, as possible attainable objectives for an ecologically coded city design. This means many systems working together, with efficient circulation of people and resources, multi-use buildings, and solar orientation for lighting, heating and cooling. In this complex, creative environments, apartments, businesses, production, technology, open space, educational and cultural events are all accessible, while privacy is paramount in the overall design. New Urbanism is a town planning movement away from the spread-out, car-centered suburbs that have come to dominate the American landscape over the past 50 years. New Urbanists promote a return to the traditional town planning that defines places like downtown Charleston, South Carolina; old town Alexandria, Va., historic San Francisco and Georgetown in Washington DC. These traditional neighborhoods feature walkable Main Street shopping districts, downtown parks, and grid streets. The following coded principles of New Urbanism are insightful and almost impossible to disagree with: Walkability: Basic goods and services are available within a five-minute walk. Sidewalks, narrow streets, and proximity of commercial and residential areas facilitate walking. De-emphasize the car: Garages are hidden in alleys, out of sight. Parallel street parking replaces the parking lot. Mix: Traditional suburbs put homes in one area, schools in another and shopping in yet a third. New Urbanists mix building types, sizes and prices. A modest townhouse or duplex cozies up to large single family home, which may have a ground level store. Community: New Urbanist design encourages human interaction by keeping houses close to each other and close to the street. Residents gather on front porches, in nearby parks and on open plazas. Neighbors share driveways, walkways and alleys. Critics argue residents care more about privacy and security than community, and that most people want detached homes with yards and multi-car garages at arm's length from the folks next door. The idea of sharing a block with neighbors who make far lower incomes also frightens some people. Others say New Urbanism simply won't sell. They point to New Urbanist settlements like Celebration, Florida (a 5,000-acre compound built by the Disney Co.), and Seaside, Florida, (shooting site for the film The Truman Show) and say these towns feel artificial in their own way, and are still largely isolated from the surrounding area. Critics, like Alex Krieger, also charge that New Urbanism has largely failed to live up to its own goals for diversity, and attracts mostly white, affluent residents. “You are also perpetuating a rather middle-class notion of the good life, just at the moment when genuine alternatives may be promotable. This is what leaves you open to the criticism that the appeal of your towns is a yuppie flight phenomenon. For some it has always been easier to retreat than to repair.” New Urbanists admit that their neo-traditional style won't appeal to everyone, but say they simply offer an alternative to the conventional suburban style. Alex Krieger also claims New Urbanism is; "densities too low to support much mixed use, much less to support public transportation; relatively homogenous demographic enclaves, not rainbow coalitions; a new, attractive, and desirable form of planned unit development, not yet substantial infill, or even better, connections between new and existing development; marketing strategies better suited to real estate entrepreneurs than public officials, etc." Architect Peter Calthorpe, a co-founder of the Congress for New Urbanism, has responded to the movement's critics. He states, "Clearly, replacing cul-de-sacs and malls with traditional urban design, although desirable, is not sufficient, both practically and ideologically. If it were, beautiful main streets would not be dying across the country and traditional urban neighborhoods and many first-ring suburbs would not be in decline". Andres Duany also responded to Alex Krieger’s criticisms of new urbanism. “However, Krieger is correct that many NU projects have a lower density. The reason is not the abdication of principle, but the application of the more complex criteria for housing that serves a variety of human needs and desires". Both Paolo Soleris’ Arcology Theory and The Charter for New Urbanism are two moderately contrary ideologies on designing coded communities. They share many of the same humanist goals in coded urban design; such has the reductive treatment of the car, and more compactness instead of sprawl. But they fail to successfully implement what they preach. This does not mean that their respective ideas are not valid as nascent Ecological Codes. They are valuable lessons, if not representations of important lines of desire in urban dwelling. Among their notable achievements is simply the fashioning of documents (Code) that contain what many have validated, and making those beliefs evident to their movements. 2.3) Old School Patterns In an effort to build a philosophy of the human use of space, Christopher Alexander managed to set down many of the big ideas of the 1960's in a venturesome trilogy of books --proclaiming their careful observation of human settlements, "The Timeless way of building, A Pattern Language, and The Oregon Experiment" are accessible to everyone. The core idea is the elaboration of a series of patterns, like codes, inherent in the way we build any habitation --from a garden bench, to a sleeping room, to a house, to a university, town, or region. The patterns; written, concrete and specific, can be interlocked and extended --like a language-- in unlimited ways (Alexander found a lot of his patterns in pre-industrial villages of Scotland and Wales). These patterns are not blueprints for construction. They are more about behavior than about decoration, more about relationships than about dimensions. Thus, the pattern, "Sunny Window", when joined to another pattern, "Thickened Walls" leads to just the right arrangements for a window seat-- a fitting place to sew, or read, or daydream. "When we build aright, we inevitably follow these patterns, and enjoy the fullness of our humanity as we inhabit them". Alexander believes that the best buildings are vernacular structures; the ordinary furnishings, gardens, rooms and houses that evolved slowly as ordinary people built what they needed and repeated what worked. What one might call "right building", as opposed to architecture, is not about style or the individuality of the professional designer, but the discovery of transcendent and inherently beautiful supports for the human functions of work, play, intimacy, and family living. 2.6) Noble Salvage Vernacular structures are fine for now. A Code for their continual production would be mutually devolving. Progression does not need to truncate culture with technology. Ultimately, vernacular structures will be replaced by equivocated performance systems with genuinely fitted biotic transactions. In a true process of ecological creation, allowing for incident to strengthen form is key. The seed grows following its program, until context forces it to blend obligingly. 2.5) The Day of Reckoning The synergetic comprehensive primordial Code that illuminates every possibility of every micro/macro cosmic event awaits fruition. It will be the test for harmony. Ecological Code will adopt a pattern language for the universe, but shares absolutely no affinity for the vernacular image. Imagine a biology of fiction: plant a seed and out grows a city. Its image is dictated by a fitness to the surroundings and climate. All ensuing patterns are elaborated in order to accommodate the presence of the body. Circulation, light, air, and volume are all conditional sets of preprogrammed axioms. Pre-existing historical edifices are gently assimilated into the mix. These are architectural fantasies embedded in the sketches of science in the interest of testing. Ecological Code is one of many bromides to practice in the every day operation of a human habitation. It asserts basic rights and needs, not moralities. Non-Utopian, un-grandiose, it is simply a visible theory of the good. "Cities are not machines and neither are they organisms, and perhaps resemble them even less --Rather then communities of non-thinking organisms undergoing inevitable phases until they reach a certain iron limit --cities are the product of beings capable of learning. Culture can stabilize or alter the habitat system, and it is not clear whether we wish it to be otherwise." -Kevin Lynch, "A Theory of Good City Form" |
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| MITCHELL JOACHIM ARCHITECTURAL + URBAN + ECO-DESIGN |