metamorphosis

Metamorphosis/Bin

I am very interested in the term of “entropy”. It means moving towards a gradual equilibrium and it’s suggested in many ways. However, entropy also has been associated with disorder and chaos. Robert Smithson had mentioned that “planning and chance almost seem to be the same thing.” In some degree, architecture practice can be seen as a chaotic system which appears to be random. He then argued, “Geology has its entropy too…so that the irreversible process will be in a sense metamorphosed, it is evolutionary, but it’s not evolutionary in terms of any idealism”. Based on my experience, I feel it has more possibilities for architects to make the system chaotic rather than equilibrium, very much because architects turn to be so “ideal” and “creative”. For example, among this year’s thesis projects in our department, most students intend to solve a certain social chaos by insert another system, most of which have impressive forms. The result is that we add one more system in the chaos. Although we may solve the problem by now, we can hardly predict the problems coming soon. The city is evolutionary. Hence the new system can be a new chaos. We are making more and more architecture debris for the planet. The entropy theory does suggest that the cosmos will die because of unsolvable chaos. Before that the cities may already reach an end. We cherish the pureness of ancient cities because “things just change from one situation to the next, there’s really no return.”

The judgment to great architecture is usually described as “solve the problem in a creative way.” To creative something new is human’s instinct. I haven’t seen any wrong with it. However, to create something new doesn’t necessarily to add something new. If we think reversely, reducing the existing forms may also be something new. Metamorphosis can be a useful term not only for architects to create new forms but also to reduce forms. In that case, architects may design some “returns”. The question is, do we have the courage to say “I haven’t added anything new”? At least I don’t. That may be a weak point of the profession of architecture design.

Despite of the chaos we make, whether architecture should have a stable or metamorphosed form is not the point. What of most significance is that one part of architecture, as an intellectual and creative thinking, should have the sensibility to reflect the changing of the world we are living in. From Newton to Darwin, Leibniz, or whoever it is, their theories can be the catalysts of architecture. As result, the concept of “architecture” changes. As Marina Warner said in the article, “The concept (metamorphosis) has itself metamorphosed through history, partly as a result of its encounter with science. It now evokes images not just of shape-shifting but of a smooth, organic unfolding of forms in time and space.” In this circumstance, architecture itself is a metamorphosis.