NOT SCIENCE so much as a little bit of logical thinking, engineering and the collaging together of ideas and images from experience are the methods by which we arrive at a design. (Riverside Main Library, Riverside CA 2021)
Clearly, we have a problem in America with science. Most prominently are the examples of the anti-vaxxers and the climate deniers, but the examples are many. There are still parents who believe, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that vaccines administered at infancy cause autism in children and not long ago, it was controversial to suggest that ingested smoke of any kind caused cancer despite the evidence borne of the science.
IN SCIENCE WE TRUST or not for whatever reasons, but the scientists themselves operate on evidence and replication, not trust.
NO TRUTHS are verifiable in science only falsehoods, but this is what also distinguishes science from art in which there are no truths or falsehoods and instead only what works and what doesn’t. Popper was critical of those fields that claimed to be science psychoanalysis and economics being two he considered fake science.
PROVISIONAL TRUTH means objectively true until proven false and therefore in science there are no absolute truths only a process across generations of advancing toward better, greater understanding.
But it hasn’t always been that way. Without our confidence in Newton (laws of gravity), Kepler (laws of planetary motion), Liebniz (calculus), Oersted, Volta, Tesla and Edison (electricity), Goddard (rocket propulsion), Marconi (wireless communication), and Turing (computer science) as well as countless others like them, we never would have put a man on the moon in 1969 (although there are those, however marginalized, who still believe we never did). That success among others engendered dutiful confidence in science and it has come to permeate every area of our life. We now have food science, exercise science, and sleep science. One wonders how we ever got along without science.
THE ATTEMPT TO DIAGRAM THE THOUGHT PROCESS of a designer or an architect is admirable but futile in assisting that same designer or architect through the thought process itself which is more complex than what can be described in an algorithm.
WHILE ADMIRABLE in wanting to incorporate more rationality and less individuality into the design process, formulations such as this, are like psychoanalysis, engaged in the kind of scientism that Popper rejected as false science (not subject to falsifiability) and therefore only valid as much as they contribute to the quality of the practice of design and its outcomes, the evidence for which in over a half a century has yet to materialize.
But our relationship with science is not as straightforward as it seems. Except for the scientists themselves, there is, in our relationship with it, a degree of faith. Without first-hand experience (meaning without being the scientist), we are dependent on our trust in what the scientists tell us. We do or do not “believe” in science in a way that sounds more religious than rational. Verification--meaning the replicability of any scientist’s evidentiary finding by other scientists in compliance with the standards of objective, controlled experiment-- is the principal means by which trust in the findings is first established in the scientific community and then if they mostly agree so, we do.
ALL KINDS OF CITIES were imagined in 1960s—"Plug In”, “Instant”, “Walking” (meaning literally a city that walks) by such faux visionaries as Peter Cook and his cohort at Archigram--imaginings justified by quasi-scientific rationale and intended to suggest that in one generation we could and should supersede 5,000 years of human experience. (Peter Cook, 1960s)
POLEMICS FOR ITS OWN SAKE might entertain the author but accomplishes little else—who, after all, would ever believe that there could ever be an “instant city” and what is that we as practicing architects are supposed to learn from this? (Peter Cook, 1960s)
JUST AS WE WERE PUTTING MEN ON THE MOON the theory and practice of architecture sublimated all things scientific and technological in a most unquestioning, uncritical and, more often than not, mostly ornamental manner-- a habit we have yet to kick. (Archigram, 1960s)
But also, we forget to acknowledge the provisional nature of science. We think that scientists seek and verify truth: we start with a hypothesis (evolution, relativity, big bang) and then set out to prove it—if proved, then fact. But as 20th century philosopher Karl Popper pointed out, what if something else comes along that disproves it? It would surely mean that the theory was at least partially false but does that also make it not science? In Popper’s view, no. It just means that we can never know with certainty if anything is objectively true and can only know what is provisionally true and false. A theory in science is false (flat earth, miasma theory of disease) only after it has been shown to be by newly revealed facts and a better theory (round earth, germ theory of disease). It is the falsifiability not the verifiability of science that makes it science.
THE BIOLOGICAL MODEL, meaning a formula by which a city, like an organism, would grow free of humanity (cultural baggage, individual preference and social conflict) was meant to enable the making of a city as a science project (Smithsons, ca 1960s)
GROWTH BY ACCUMULATION of identical units, like Legos seemingly without the intervention of the hand of the planner or architect, was supposed to achieve (albeit in a most heavy-handed way) a scientific authenticity that affirmative design could not. (Aldo Van Eyck, Team 10, ca 1960s)
JAPANESE METABOLISM took the biological model to its extremes promoting scary visions of cities that grow like giant weeds seeded and nourished like horror movie monsters by science and technology and little else. (Arata Isosaki, ca 1970).
The provisional nature of science, though, hardly negates its value to humanity. With each hypothesis, we posit, test, replicate and sometimes falsify we are building towards the next. Our knowledge advances (and gets applied sometimes beneficially). We could not have had Einstein’s theory of gravitational fields without Newton’s laws of gravity. To quote Popper: “We are social creatures to the inmost center of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.”
PRESCIENT VISIONS of Japanese Metabolism anticipated the arrival in the 21st century of the megacity, a scaleless, alienating environment of towers connected by roads.
THE MID-CENTURY VISION of the scientific city has manifested in places like Dubai although now shaped less by any kind of faith in science or technology and more by the forces of international finance.
Like science, all thought is provisional but unlike science, not all thought is falsifiable. As architects, we only know (or feel) that something is true (or better) through experience. Our experiences of buildings and cities (and drawings and models) tell us that something is true (or rather “feels right”) until we experience otherwise. However, nothing about our experiences—and by extension the theory and practice of architecture- can be falsified in the way that science can. We should not, therefore, ever pretend otherwise for to do so would be to practice what Popper call “scientism” or fake science. As much as science might inform the theory and practice of architecture, it-- like how we eat, exercise and sleep-- is not science (and let’s be real, after all that science we’re more confused than ever about how to eat, exercise and sleep). Our method is instead intuitive, empirical, inductive, and founded on experience—our own and that of other people, even—or especially-- dead people.
SUSTAINABLE CITY VISIONS like their mid-century predecessors, express mostly disdain for cities and offer little in return except quasi-scientific Jetsons’ inspired images and lots of plants on the literal and simple-minded principle that “green” means green.
THE INTERNET OF THINGS, COMMON SENSE AND PLATITUDES are the underlying principles of pseudo-scientific models of “smart” and “resilient” cities.
DUMB VISIONS of sustainable, smart, and resilient cities accept unquestionably and at face value the forms of our mostly hollowed-out cities as a given despite the evidence that these are inherently unsustainable and alienating places for which there is no technological or social policy fix.
Does this also mean that when it comes to the theory and practice of architecture that nothing can be true, however provisionally, beyond the most rudimentary standards (safety, function, cost), that there are no qualitative or value-based guidelines to which we can adhere in the planning and design of our environment other than technocratic, pseudo-scientific ones (“smart”, “sustainable”, “resilient”)? It is hardly a coincidence that just as our faith in science crested in the 20th C, we began to lose faith in shared cultural or aesthetic values and standards-- those very guidelines upon which we architects depend to do our work. In the poverty of that loss of faith, we tried with science to elevate our thinking (and our professional status) in the hopes of regaining society’s trust and instead we only made things worse.
TO CREATE A PLACE where there was once none cannot be divined through the scientific method but instead requires choices—aesthetic and performative ones grounded in personal, social, and historical experience. (Costa Mesa Library and Lions Park Redevelopment, Costa Mesa, CA 2019)
URBANISM LIGHT is how we might characterize the traditional American school campus, but urban can nevertheless still be if conceived as a coherent ensemble artistically considered. (Cyber Security Classroom and Administration Building and the Center for Excellence campus at Magnolia High School, Anaheim Union High School District, Anaheim, CA, 2023)
CITIES ARE SHAPED not by science but by buildings and the spaces they form which are in turn shaped by all kinds of social, political, and cultural forces not the least of which can be in some cases the mind and hand of the architect. (Riverside Main Library and Mixed-Use Development, Riverside, CA 2021)