CHAPTER 2 TOPICS
• Systems Thinking
• Architectural Systems
• Levels of System Organization in Architecture: Hardware, Prototype, Grammar, and Species
• Developments in Systems Architecture: Precepts and Trends
The significance of seeking a scientific basis for design does not lie in the likelihood of reducing design to one or another of the sciences….Rather, it lies in a concern to connect and integrate useful knowledge from the arts and sciences alike.
Richard Buchanan, "Wicked Problems in Design Thinking," in Margolin and Buchanan, eds., The Idea of Design, 1995.
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he world is animated by flows of information, energy, and material. Any network of structured relationships defining these flows forms a system. Systems are so common that their inherent levels of sophistication are often forgotten and the word system seemingly designates a single object rather than a web of functional, organizational, or regulatory networks. In everyday life there are justice systems to resolve complaints; library systems to catalog documents; construction systems comprising building kits. Our own bodies function through self-regulating systems of respiration, circulation, digestion, perception, and so on. Buildings contain structural, lighting, electrical, plumbing, mechanical, and many other systems. Urban environments are similarly made up of transportation systems, park systems, zoning systems, and a host of other infrastructure networks. Ultimately, of course, all these systems operate within the largest of all systems, our ecosystem.
Corresponding to the preceding examples—justice, library, construction, and ecology—the various applications can be generalized as systems of control, classification, planning, and biology. Buildings manifest all of these forms of systems. The sophistication of building components and of the design process long ago achieved the level of system. This fulfills the scientific and classical definition of a system as a cluster of interrelationships with internal flows of information, forces, or material. Classical systems are categorized as simple or complex, like a fulcrum or a combustion engine; and as either deterministic or probabilistic, like gravity or a coin toss. As a science, the idea of systems, systems thinking, systems theory, and so forth, is described as cybernetics. This is an effort to gain understanding into how flows of information or material become networked and how decision making about the systems can affect outcomes. The study of systems is concerned with models of optimization, control, information structure, numerical analysis, and simulation.
The common architectural mention of structural, mechanical, and other building elements uses the term system rather differently from its scientific meaning to distinguish and classify sets of elements from one another and inclusively suggest their many individual parts and functions. A structural system, for example, would nominally consist of a network of columns and beams that transfer gravity, wind, and occupant loads from the top of a building through its network of supports to a supporting foundation. Load-bearing masonry is a structural system in this context, as is steel frame or heavy timber. Again, the designation of system indicates that the components form an interrelated group connected by flows of force, material, or information.
The notion of systems as an approach to architectural design begins with the recognition of the interrelated flows of material, forces, and information in buildings. Widespread use of industrialized building components led to similar systems nomenclature as a shorthand for how functional mandates of a building would be satisfied. Envelope systems function as separation of the inside from the out, structural systems keep buildings stable, environmental systems keep occupants comfortable, and so on. Familiar use of this shorthand, however, has corrupted systems into a form of hardware classification—it captures the idea of functional mandates but often overlooks the underlying complexity of internal relationships.
The methods of science, engineering, and technology are commonly understood to use a more systematic approach to problem solving than architecture. But these analytical disciplines have always influenced architectural thinking because of their inherently honest logic and explicit means of achieving well-defined goals. This influence emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s along with the study of environmental behaviorism and systems management. This systems theory or systems thinking can be briefly described as the management of complex problems through rigorously detailed descriptions of the problem, the establishment of project goals and objectives, and the recognition of dynamically interconnected elements of the solution.
Much of the research into architectural design as a disciplined method and teachable activity refers to the application of systems thinking to buildings. This is also the source of division between two philosophical positions: design as structured methodology and design as free creative exploration. If, to take an extremely skeptical and methodological view, design is principally the result of genius and refined taste, then architectural education is largely an ordeal by fire to identify the most gifted candidates. This first position argues that some collection of structured thoughts on design processes can be assembled and discussed, refined, and translated. Otherwise, design is a haphazard and unreliable pursuit that has more to do with fancy than with creative imagination. This perspective holds that systems thinking is directly applicable to what an architect does. The second, conflicting point of view, taken to its similar extreme, sees design as a creative exploration that is antithetical to the notion of a deterministic or functionalist process. It holds that architectural design is indeterminate, a forest through which no methodological map can be systematically plotted. Although a design can be good or bad, for example, it is not absolutely right or wrong. There is no single solution for any given architectural problem, no limits on how broadly it is formulated, no conclusive test of how well it has been solved; and, finally, the built solution will be unique and nonreplicable.
Richard Buchanan summarizes this “wicked problem” of design as a “fundamental issue that lies behind practice: the relationship between determinacy and indeterminacy in design thinking.” Discussions about the appropriate balance between determinant and indeterminant approaches to design are important to architectural education and practice. The resolution of the question is largely a matter of personal philosophy; any number of credible arguments can be made and several parallels to the arts and sciences can be drawn. They are, after all, two different perspectives of the same activity, and it is possible that they are two complementary views of the same coin: heads and tails. Perhaps they can even be compared to the explicit and implicit wings of the hypothetical library in Chapter 1.
Determinant and indeterminant views obviously differ in the detail to which design activity could or should be considered an objective investigation. They do, however, share an appreciation of the overwhelming complexity of design thinking and of architectural design tasks. The complexity of design is so deeply rooted in both arguments that it moves the discussion closer to a common and widely accepted meaning of system in architecture—namely, as a discrete assembly of building components collectively satisfying a particular set of requirements. The primary architectural systems, for example, are site, structure, envelope, services, and interior. A discussion of what makes each of them a system is presented in the next section.