Emerging Networks

Emerging Networks
The notion of emergence in architecture is analyzed by Jane Jacobs in her “death and life of great American cities” by studying the relationship of scientific thought and cities. This idea of emergence can be carried further to architecture by understanding the evolution of scientific thought and the emergence of post modernism from modernism. The emergence in modernist design was the same transition as from problems of simplicity to organized complexity. This is important because the state of architecture today is an emergence from the simple analysis of modernism to the organized complexity of post modernism today.
This would all make perfect sense to Duncan Watts as he explains in his book “Six Degrees” that every science and more generally any method can be explained in terms of networks. Therefore this tandem relationship between the progression of scientific thought and architecture is really a display of the interdependency of these two networks. Each network not only becoming more complex but also the understanding of them as being a complex organization. While in two different fields, the modernist designers were gathering new ideas from science through the new technological revolution that was changing our world. The science at the turn of the century was based on problems of simplicity. Therefore the formalist of the modern movement were concerned with simple resultant answers.
These simple answers could only be based on simple questions made up of the relationship of rudimentary geometries. However cities, as explained by Jacobs, are “problems in organized complexity” and “present situations in which a half-dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously and in subtly interconnected ways.” Now while she is describing cities, they are made up of architecture and can be judged as a different scaled network, but a network that works on the same governing principles. So just as scientific thought was forced to recognize the multiple complex networks to properly describe its disciplines, the modernist were forced to recognize the failure of the simplistic responses to the complex networks of design.