Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Cosmogenesis - Learning through the Master



Modern man lacks a mythology that incorporates our latest discoveries in science, but you make an eloquent case for something called “cosmogenesis.” Would you please tell us what that is and how it manifests itself in architecture?


This is what Charles Jenks... someone I admire and get inspired by had to say....

This is in context to the
“Cosmogenesis” has a 150 year history as a word. It is picked up by Teilhard, de Chardin, Thomas Berry and Harvard physicists. It has come to mean the universe as a continuous, unfolding event (i.e. a genesis, by a cosmic process lasting 13.7 billion years). This is the shift in worldview that sees nature and culture as growing out of the narrative of the universe. In a global culture of conflict this narrative provides a possible direction and iconography that transcend national and sectarian interests. Several architects are involved at different levels. One can discern the beginnings of a shift in architecture that relates to a deep transformation going on in the sciences and in time will permeate all other areas of life. The new sciences of complexity - fractals, nonlinear dynamics, the new cosmology, self-organizing systems - have brought about the change in perspective. We have moved from a mechanistic view of the universe to one that is self-organizing at all levels, from the atom to the galaxy. Illuminated by the computer, this new worldview is paralleled by changes now occurring in architecture.


This is where according to Jenks we should be using computer to our architecture.... He created this iconic masterpiece we call the gerkin..

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