The Evolution of Designs

Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts

Philip Steadman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134062331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book tells the history of the many analogies that have been made between the evolution of organisms and the human production of artefacts, especially buildings. It examines the effects of these analogies on architectural and design theory and considers how recent biological thinking has relevance for design.

Architects and designers have looked to biology for inspiration since the early 19th century. They have sought not just to imitate the forms of plants and animals, but to find methods in design analogous to the processes of growth and evolution in nature.

This new revised edition of this classic work adds an extended Afterword covering recent developments such as the introduction of computer methods in design in the 1980s and '90s, which have made possible a new kind of 'biomorphic' architecture through 'genetic algorithms' and other programming techniques.

Chapter 1
Introduction

When I was no more than a boy and beginning to show some interest in living creatures I can remember being sternly warned by my elders to beware of the dangers of analogies. It was said in the same tone one might tell someone not to eat a certain kind of mushroom.¹

J. T. Bonner

Underlying [the doctrines of the modern movement in architecture] was an implied belief in biotechnical determinism. And it is from this theory that the current belief in the supreme importance of scientific methods of analysis and classification is derived…. Form was merely the result of a logical process by which the operational needs and the operational techniques were brought together. Ultimately these would fuse in a kind of biological extension of life, and function and technology would become totally transparent…. The relation of this notion to Spencerian evolutionary theory is very striking.²

A. Colquoun

In this work I have tried to set out and subject to critical analysis the many analogies which have been made, by a great variety of writers, between biology and the applied arts, in particular architecture. My purpose in doing this is twofold: it is to show what I believe to be useful and valuable in such analogies, and to show what I believe to be dangerous and pernicious. Thus the work is written with a theoretical and polemical purpose first of all – although some small contributions are offered to the history of ideas and to art history along the way.

I have come to the study through an interest in the theory of design, especially architectural design, and a concern with what contribution, if any, systematic or scientific research can make to design. In the last twenty years or so there has been increasing activity in design research, ‘environmental studies’ (‘environment’ in the sense of ‘built environment’) and research in architecture – this last in its turn coming out of a somewhat longer tradition of the study of engineering and materials problems, in what has conventionally been distinguished as ‘building science’.

Such research has been enormously wide in its scope, and varied in its methods and aims. It is nevertheless possible to see many of the (often undeclared) theoretical premises of these studies as having their origin in the ideological dogmas of the ‘modern movement’ in architecture, or perhaps to trace them further back, to the artistic philosophies of the nineteenth century. I will argue later that a great misconception in design research, in particular in the so-called ‘design methods movement’ and in recent attempts to employ the computer in design, has been the prevalent notion that to apply scientific or rational thinking in design must in some sense involve making the design process itself ‘scientific’. I regard this idea not only as nonsensical, but ultimately highly dangerous.

On the other hand I believe most strongly – and would emphasise, while there is now such a mood of irrationalism and anti-scientific prejudice abroad in the design professions and in the architectural press – that this does not mean that rational thought applied in research to the problems of design and architecture can make no contribution to improving either design processes or their final results. Quite the opposite: there is today a great need, perhaps greater than ever before, for some hard thinking about the fundamental questions of design. And in particular, as it will be argued here, these questions can be illuminated not by any attempt to make the process of designing ‘scientific’, but rather by subjecting the products of design – material artefacts, especially buildings – to scientific study.

Such a programme of empirical investigation and theoretical analysis would bring the material products of architecture and the applied arts within the scope of what Herbert Simon has termed ‘the sciences of the artificial’ – sciences devoted to the study of all kinds of man-made objects and structures, material or otherwise.³ Such a science of material, utilitarian artefacts is, of course, well-established, inasmuch as it already forms part of archaeology (and the present study will touch on the history of archaeological theory, focussing on the applications of biological analogy in that subject). The tradition of ‘building science’ previously mentioned also constitutes as it stands an ‘artificial science’ devoted to the study of architecture. But the subject matter of building science has until recently been made up from separate topics in the study of building materials, building elements, engineering structure, and the environmental behaviour of enclosures in terms of heat, light and sound. There is the opportunity, in my view, to extend – or perhaps better, to integrate – the fields of interest of building science so as to cover some of those features of building design which are more usually regarded as ‘architectural’: the geometrical organisation of their parts and structures, the topological relations of rooms one to another, the structure of circulation routes, and so on. The programme and promise of such an architectural science will be treated at greater length below.

Meanwhile, the whole conception of devoting buildings and other utilitarian artefacts – tools, domestic implements and the like – to scientific analysis raises the vexed question of how far such a project might feasibly and desirably extend. That is to say, given that such artefacts both serve practical everyday purposes, and may at the same time be works of art in a more elevated sense, how is the demarcation to be drawn between what is amenable to scientific treatment and what is in the realm of cultural, aesthetic and moral factors and values?

The ambition of the ‘design methods movement’ and of certain extreme figures in the modern movement in architecture was, in aiming to comprehend the entire process of design within a supposedly scientific methodology, to claim in effect the complete range of considerations or factors in design for scientific treatment. By contrast, the subject matter of an ‘architectural science’ as advanced here is conceived as covering only a restricted range of factors, principally those which relate to buildings as physical, three-dimensional, space-enclosing objects. It is possible, though more contentious, that some of the social functions of architecture in accommodating patterns of activity might be also brought within its scope.

The way in which such studies are applicable and useful to the design of new buildings is in providing increased knowledge and greater understanding of the particular aspects of building geometry or behaviour in question. Such knowledge would serve to inform the designer, by adding to the wider and more general body of experience and knowledge with which he is equipped by his education and by his professional life. It would, perhaps, contribute more to critical assessment of designs once produced than to stimulation of hypothesis and invention – though there are possibilities here, too. The knowledge could be built up in a piecemeal and gradual fashion, as in present-day building science, without any necessity of being immediately all-inclusive or complete.

However, the question of demarcation – if this is the correct term – remains. There is a parallel concern in anthropological theory, some reference to which will be helpful in this context, with the distinction between the study of what features of human society, institutions and artefacts can be regarded as utilitarian and practical, and what features are to be seen as cultural or symbolic. The reason that the word ‘demarcation’ is possibly not the right one is that the generally held modern anthropological view is not of a simple two-part division into ‘practical’ and ‘cultural’, but rather of culture being overlaid onto the practical functions of life, transforming them and giving them meaning.

The problem is more complicated yet, however. When we are talking of design, it is not simply a matter of distinguishing, as in anthropology, between the scientific study of what is to be explained by reference to practical or ‘biological’ considerations, and the scientific study or historical description of what is to be attributed to cultural factors. We make a conceptual distinction, certainly, between the activity of an architectural or an artificial science, on the one hand, and the activity of architectural, industrial or craft design on the other. But clearly, in the end, the practical interest of the scientific activity is in the application of its findings to the design activity. Thus the issue is raised of the further distinction between the objective and analytical character of science, and the value-laden, subjective and synthetic character of design. There follows yet another question; which features of the behaviour of buildings or material artefacts are the subject in principle of scientific predictions, and which are not?

These points must await the fuller discussion of later chapters. To return to the main purpose: in what follows I have tried to trace, as mentioned, the origin of certain biological ideas which have been influential in the design theory of the modern movement and subsequently in the ‘design methods movement’. The immediate question which arises is ‘Why biological ideas?’. What is the particular relevance of examining the invocation of specifically biological analogies to these more general questions of the role of science in design?

I shall hope to answer this in some detail, but in summary there are characteristics of designed objects such as buildings, and characteristics of the ways designs are produced, viewed both at an individual and at a cultural level, which lend themselves peculiarly well to description and communication via biological metaphor. The ideas of ‘wholeness’, ‘coherence’, ‘correlation’ and ‘integration’, used to express the organised relationship between the parts of the biological organism, can be applied to describe similar qualities in the well-designed artefact. The adaptation of the organism to its environment, its fitness, can be compared to the harmonious relation of a building to its surroundings, and, more abstractly, to the appropriateness of any designed object for the various purposes for which it is intended. Perhaps most significantly it is biology, of all sciences, which first confronted the central problem of teleology, of design in nature; and it is very natural that of all sciences it should for this reason attract the special interest of designers.

A second point is that as a matter of historical fact, it has been biology out of all the sciences to which architectural and design theorists have most frequently turned. Indeed it is surprising, in view of the ubiquity of biological references and ideas in the writings of the architectural theorists of the last hundred years, that no work of book length has so far been devoted to the history and theory of biological analogy. The history is certainly a fragmented one, leading into many remote corners and backwaters of the architectural literature. Nevertheless analogy with biology is a constant and recurring theme – to be found most prominently in Wright, Sullivan and Le Corbusier, but very widely elsewhere too, as I will demonstrate.

The only historical coverage of any general kind which I have been able to discover is Peter Collins’s article on ‘Biological Analogy’,⁴ the main substance of which was subsequently included as a chapter in his book Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture 1750–1950.⁵ I have made repeated use of Professor Collins’s paper, as my references will show. Three of the main themes which he develops – the relationship of organisms to their environment, Cuvier’s principle of the correlation of organs, and the relationship of form to function – are central to the discussion here. But despite the broad coverage of the different aspects which Collins provides, he seems to have no particular theoretical stance of his own, and his treatment is disjointed. Different authors and instances are held out more for their curiosity value, one senses, than because Collins is committed – on the one side or the other – on the question of the validity or continuing usefulness of such analogies.

While the history of the subject is certainly itself fragmented – further complicated by the fact that the time taken for biological thinking to make an impact on architectural or design theory is often as much as fifty years, or more – the fact is, I believe, that if all the various separate analogies are once set together, then the picture as a whole is a relatively coherent one.

With the analogies laid out in organised form, it is possible to proceed to the critical task of sorting out what is useful and illuminating from what is trivial, what is misleading, and what is downright dangerous. I believe – and it is for this reason I have thought it of value to reconstruct their history – that some of these biological ideas have been the root cause of certain theoretical shortcomings in recent design theory, and that in particular they have contributed significantly to the idea described above that architectural design could be made a wholly scientific procedure.

There is one central fallacy, I believe, at the heart of most of the historical analogies made between architecture and biology – of which Geoffrey Scott’s ‘Biological Fallacy’ is just one aspect – and which arises principally out of an improper equation of the Darwinian mechanisms of organic evolution with the ‘Lamarckian’ characteristics of the transmission of culture and the inheritance of material property. Alan Colquoun is one of the few architectural commentators to relate the ‘biotechnical determinism’ of the modern movement explicitly to nineteenth-century cultural evolutionism and in particular to the philosophy of Herbert Spencer – as the quotation at the head of this chapter indicates. A demonstration of the nature of this biological fallacy goes a long way to explain other related failings in the philosophy of the modern movement in architecture, as Colquoun emphasises. I have tried to amplify some of these points here, particularly in relation to Christopher Alexander’s work, which is I suggest based largely on an extended biological analogy coming through cybernetics and the theories of W. Ross Ashby.

I most definitely do not think, however, that the fact of certain kinds of biological analogy made in the past being fallacious ones has meant that all such analogies between biology and architecture are useless or entirely misleading and should be immediately abandoned. The fact that the biological theme is such a constant one in past architectural theory in itself suggests its importance. And, so long as the central fallacy which has confused previous theory is avoided, some of the principal concepts of modern biological philosophy– of evolution, of morphology, of classification, of the behaviour of dynamic systems, of the transmission of information through hereditary processes – all these have, at the abstract, formal level, a great deal to offer those infant sciences which are devoted to the study of man-made objects and their design.

There are techniques or mathematical approaches which several authors have already applied to the study of architectural phenomena – numerical classification methods, or various branches of systems theory, for example – which have ultimately biological origins. An architectural science conceived of as a ‘science of the artificial’ could, in short, borrow a lot of conceptual and methodological apparatus from biology.

Of course there are other sciences which would contribute, perhaps more – both social sciences and physical sciences. And when all is said and done, the fact is that buildings, machines and implements are inert physical objects and not organisms; and the relevance of biological ideas to their study can only remain in the end of an analogical and metaphorical nature. In a mature science the use of intellectual props of this kind can be dispensed with. But at an early stage they have their value (if also their dangers).

There is some advantage to be gained here from the fact that other disciplines, in particular anthropology and archaeology, have gone through and emerged from periods of intense adherence to and subsequent revulsion from biological analogy, in the wild evolutionary enthusiasm of late-nineteenth-century thought and the counter-reaction which this brought in the early part of this century. This experience and the debate which it generated – and continues to generate – can perhaps help show the way to a newly developing architectural research, while keeping it from falling into old and demonstrated errors.

The trouble with biological analogy in architecture in the past is that much of it has been of a superficial picture-book sort: ‘artistic’ photos of the wonders of nature through a microscope, juxtaposed with buildings or the products of industrial design. But analogy at a deeper level can be a most fundamental source of understanding and of scientific insight, as many writers on that subject have pointed out. The conclusion of J. T. Bonner’s essay on ‘Analogies in Biology’, from which the terrible warning at the beginning of this chapter is drawn, is that though analogies are certainly hazardous – they are the stock-in-trade of quacks and crackpots – at the same time, if made with sufficient care, watching always for where the analogy breaks down, they can be a most fertile source of new ideas and knowledge. At least some philosophers of science would argue that analogy is absolutely central not only to the psychological genesis of scientific theory, but to its continuing extension, development and intelligibility as well.

A word should be said about the detailed format of the exposition of biological analogies with architecture and artefacts which follows. This study combines a primary theoretical purpose with a certain amount of history, and hence the retailing of the ideas of particular historical individuals. This has posed the problem of whether to give the history first and then to draw out the theoretical points, or whether rather to present first the theoretical arguments, and illustrate these by reference to the works of individual writers. Since the principal intention is a theoretical one, I have chosen to do the latter. The penalty is paid, however, of a certain amount of chronological dislocation, and the discussion of the same authors or architects under a number of heads.

It is perhaps unnecessary to say this, but to avoid any possible misunderstanding (particularly in the art-historical fraternity), I would point out that by making reference to biological ideas in the writings of some theorist I do not intend to imply that such ideas provide the key to the whole of that individual’s architectural or design philosophy. In many cases these references are merely incidental asides, illustrations, small parts of much larger arguments. (On the other hand there are several writers cited – Greenough, Sullivan, Alexander – for whom biological analogy is central and crucial.) In effect a unified theoretical overview of the range and interconnected structure of the variety of biological analogies, or aspects of a single large analogy, is assembled eclectically for the present purposes out of the ideas of a number of theorists; and could not be attributed as such to any single writer.

It is not suggested, either, that biological analogy and its pitfalls can be blamed for all the theoretical failures or misconceptions which are here exposed. There are other factors involved, to which some attention will be drawn as the argument proceeds. It is, however, suggested that metaphors from biology can be blamed for much of the trouble. All history must be selective, must have a point of view, must take a particular route through the phenomena and ideas of which it treats; and I have chosen here to take the biological route.

Finally, attention should be drawn to the use, in the subtitle of this book, of the specific phrase ‘biological analogy’. This is chosen deliberately in preference to the term ‘organic analogy’, which is older, has wider connotations, and is a subject to which much critical and historical discussion has been devoted elsewhere, in the context of literature and the fine arts perhaps more than in architecture and the applied arts. The interest here is in recent design theory, and in what biological science can offer to an ‘architectural science’. Therefore the historical treatment goes back in the main only to the beginnings of biology as a scientific subject around the start of the nineteenth century.

Despite the fact that the ‘organic analogy’ involves a much looser metaphorical comparison of works of art with the phenomena of nature, and is concerned with aesthetic qualities rather than with strictly scientific parallels, there is clearly a large area of overlap between what has been traditionally de...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the revised edition
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The organic analogy
• 3 The classificatory analogy: Building types and natural species
• 4 The anatomical analogy: Engineering structure and the animal skeleton
• 5 The ecological analogy: The environments of artefacts and organisms
• 6 The Darwinian analogy: Trial and error in the evolution of organisms and artefacts
• 7 The evolution of decoration
• 8 Tools as organs or as extensions of the physical body
• 9 How to speed up craft evolution?
• 10 Design as a process of growth
• 11 ‘Biotechnics’: Plants and animals as inventors
• 12 Hierarchical structure and the adaptive process: Biological analogy in Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form
• 13 The consequences of the biological fallacy: Functional determinism
• 14 The consequences of the biological fallacy: Historical determinism and the denial of tradition
• 15 What remains of the analogy? The history and science of the artificial
• Afterword: Developments since 1980
• Notes