Emergence

In both the Gould and Jacobs writings, the idea of emergence is not explicitly defined as the subject of the article, rather, natural phenomena serve as case studies for the principles of emergence. In both these articles (neither of which used the word emergence) and the multiple case studies they present, the key to understanding change as a phenomenon is to see it is a complex result of many interrelated variables rather than a simple problem—the essential definition of the word emergence. The Gould article argues this point with multiple examples ranging from the dome of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice to the development of cannibalism. In each situation, whenever a simple (or singular) adaptive strategy is developed, the authors cite the complex myriad of extraneous factors that also contributed to this condition. This is best summed up in the statement, “organisms are integrated entities, not collections of discreet objects.”

Jane Jacobs, in her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, expands the same essential argument as Gould, using, as the chapter’s title “The kind of problem a city is” suggests, the city as an example. Clichés (“slippery as an eel” on page 433) and commonsensical language (“the processes that occur in cities are not arcane…they can be understood by almost anybody” on page 441) are used to draw the reader into a didactic discussion of why cities are misunderstood. Tracing the history of problem solving (as outlined by “Dr. Weaver,” who stands in as surrogate teacher), problems were first understood and analyzed “as problems of simplicity,” or problems where several variables can be analyzed to determine behaviors. I thought this argument was particularly valid for much of modern architecture’s city planning, where I can just imagine practical men such as Ebenezer Howard comparing quantity of housing versus number of jobs as the key principle in this Garden City. Jacobs readily dismisses this (correctly) as naive and instead postures that cities are “complex, organized problems.” This, to me, was Jacobs inadvertently describing emergent systems. Furthermore, she uses the word “behavior” (she even uses italics) as crucial in understanding “complex, organized problems,” or emergence. So phenomena such as vibrant (or dead) streets “emerge” from a complex network of organized behaviors. Although Jacobs, as I have already noted, states the problem can be understood “by almost anyone,” the seemingly infinite number of influences makes understanding the city in this way daunting—a sentiment Jacobs practically tackles with a three-point plan.

Having taken a studio taught by an architect whose practice is named “emergent,” I was particularly intrigued that these two readings gave me a better idea of emergent systems than I got all semester in studio, despite the fact neither of them used the word. Which raises a larger question: how can emergent systems be a design mechanism rather than a design result? The typical design of a large structure (e.g. the Seattle Public Library as outlined by the Metropolis article, “we built this”) involved hundreds of people from different professions with different motivations. In this sense, the resultant design could be characterized as emergent. However, the emergent aspect arises in the process of design development through construction, not in schematic design, where one architect (i.e. Rem Koolhaas) is able to assert authorship. Seemingly, emergence, by its definition, cannot have a singular author and architects who profess this as their design strategy fail to understand the principle in the way Gould and Jacobs describe it.