Adaptive evolution, not modernism, produces architecture 'of our time'. */By Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros/* */The Post and Courier (Charleston) 6 April 2003, page 13A./* The recent controversy over the proposals for an addition to Charleston's Simons Center has focused renewed attention on the notion, advanced by some on the Board of Architectural Review, that such a prominent work of architecture must be "of its own time". Fair enough: we can all agree that new technologies and new historical conditions require an architectural response. After all, it was in just this way that buildings came to have arches, glass, sanitation, and all the other humane innovations we take for granted today. Even so, it seems the proponents of this idea wish to suggest something more radical: that the architecture of our time can only be, broadly speaking, "modernist" -- by which they mean that it must reject all traditional ornamentation, typology and scale in favor of the familiar minimalist industrial geometries of early 20th century modernism and its descendants. As we will explain, this is a view that is -- rather ironically -- mired in the past. We know that the Romans did not worry so much about their architecture being "of its time" when they borrowed heavily from the earlier Greeks; nor did the Renaissance when they borrowed from the earlier Romans, or the American colonists when they borrowed from all of them. Innovative assimilation of the forms of the past has been a universal trait of architecture -- that is, until the "modernist" era that began in the early twentieth century. That time, almost a century old now, saw a revolution in scientific advancement and technological innovation, and along with it a belief that all of the forms of the new industrial world changed everything -- sweeping away all the reactionary impulses of a dying 19th century in favor of a new, rational "modern" era. It was felt that such an era needed a radically new architecture, based not on human traditions but on the stripped-down "machine" aesthetic. The new modernist architecture certainly offered sleek and dramatic images of sculpturally abstract forms. But they were just that -- superficial images devoid of deeper connectivity, lacking the careful adaptation to the complexity of the city and its delicate web of history. This was considered an acceptable and enlightened tradeoff: in exchange for the loss of a few nostalgic comforts, we would get an architecture apparently offering better sanitation, labor-saving conveniences, a lifestyle of technological elegance. At the end of the twentieth century, however, we are beginning to see much more clearly the naiveté of this view, and its destructive effects on the living fabric of cities. Science is giving us a very different picture of the structure of things, in which the simplistic mechanics of early industry is giving way to a much richer understanding of a universe of processes and field effects. The neat rational simplifications of modernism are giving way to notions of organized complexity and emergent life. And the new sciences reveal the great genius of tradition, which we can only now see and appreciate as an advanced system of evolutionary adaptation -- a collective intelligence that can enrich the human environment beyond what any individual artist could possibly achieve. That process of tradition requires building upon, not discarding wholesale, the genius of the past. The lesson, apparently not yet learned in some circles, is not that the sleek style of modernism is in itself good or bad -- nor that one should only slavishly copy the forms of history. It is rather that contextual structure and pattern is of the essence to achieve geometrical order. It is that no geometry, modernist or otherwise, should be imposed on a city or a site without careful consideration of the adaptation to the complex processes of human life, and the psychological needs of human beings for comfort and coherence. It is that simple sculptural abstractions are not the same thing as complex, living urban environments. The lesson is that modernism needs to reform, and put human life always ahead of primitive machines and abstractions. Instead of destroying the built fabric that already incorporates organized complexity, Charleston -- of all places -- needs to protect and build upon the time-tested genius of the past. That means that whatever is done should add another piece of organized complexity to the existing fabric. It means combining the best of today with the best of our own legacy, representing centuries of adaptive evolution. That will truly be the architecture "of our time". Perhaps this idea was stated best by none other than Albert Simons, the man for whom the Simons Center was named, writing in 1949. It is fitting that he should have the last word: /"Much modern work is extremely dramatic, almost melodramatic in fact, but there is very little poetry of enchantment in any of it. I have no doubt that this deficiency will one day be restored. Then students will again seek the councils of the great men of the past and the study of their thinking will enrich our work with that sense of beauty now absent."/ Mr. Simons might well be pleased to see hopeful signs that such a day has arrived. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *Michael Mehaffy*/ is a philosopher and architect by training, and president of Structura Naturalis, an urban design consulting firm in Portland, Oregon. /*Nikos Salingaros*/ is a physicist and professor of mathematics at The University of Texas at San Antonio, and recipient of a Sloan Foundation grant to study the scientific laws of architecture. Both are associate editors of Katarxis 3 (www.katarxis.com), an international journal exploring new science and new architecture./ mmehaffy@comcast.net, salingar@sphere.math.utsa.edu Salingaros' publications on architecture