How Very Complex

Before last week, I had heard of chaos and complexity theories before but I never really knew what they entailed. From Victor McGill’s website, The Complexity Pages, I learned that chaos theory describes a circumstance in which very simple things come together to form something very complex. Complexity theory, on the other hand, looks more at how something very complex can work with other complex things to self-organize and create something simple. Some examples that were brought up in class are an ant-hill, and all of the cells that make up a body.
When I first viewed the website and read chapters from Mark Taylor’s book, “The Moment of Complexity,” I felt like these “theories” were kind of useless and didn’t have any practical application. While I still think they are useless, I started to realize how many different ways these theories can be applied, especially in science.
The one thing that I am having difficulty applying the chaos and complexity theories to is architecture, which was Taylor’s focus. I understand how today’s “network culture” is “between order and chaos” and is “emerging” from this “moment of complexity”; however, I do not understand how this relates to the architecture that was brought up in the chapter (Taylor, 25).
Kurt, Becky, Kristin and I agreed with Taylor that architecture often represents the social, political and economic state of the time something is built. Taylor brings up how several architects used a grid model after the introduction of the assembly line. Taylor uses Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of Technology, which is where my brother attends, as an example. I thought this was very interesting because I did not think there was any architectural design behind IIT, unless boring is considered a design.
Taylor then goes on to say that the new, complex network culture is giving rise to more flowing architecture, such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. This is where Taylor lost me. I did not understand how this new architecture had anything to do with the complex theory. After viewing the video I found on YouTube.com about the museum, I thought it is perhaps because all of the parts that make up the museum are complex, but they just organize into a simple building. I’m still a little skeptical of Taylor’s argument, but it is definitely intriguing and has forced me to think about how complex theory is applied.



The narrator is a little boring and the giant dog is kind of creepy, but I thought this video was interesting.