The Renewed Novelty of Symmetry [1]

Greg Lynn

The title of this text attempts to combine two familiar architectural concepts
in a slightly unexpected way; that is, that novelty is the organizer of
symmetry rather than vice versa. Symmetry continues to be conceptualized in
architecture as one of the characteristic underlying organizations upon which
variations are ordered. The relationship between order (of which symmetry is
perhaps a primary example) and variation or novelty has been critiqued
elsewhere [2]. The critique has been focused primarily on "phenomenological
reduction through iterative variation" in architecture. Rather than these
reductive theories of "eidetic types" and ideal essences a generative theory
of complex variation involves a reappraisal of "vague" organizations through
"anexact yet rigorous" geometries.

Idealization and differentiation have been the constituents of any concept of

organization based on repetition. Previous theories of variation have
structured their relationship around the concept of "iterative reduction to
ideal essences." The design process of this project and the theoretical
materials referred to in this short text could be characterized by an
alternative conception of repetition that can be broadly understood as
evolutionary, flexible and proliferating. Alfred North Whitehead has described
evolution as the "creative advance into novelty." This project and text
attempt to develop theories and techniques of repetition that incorporate two
kinds of differentiation; endogeneous (the unfolding of unmotivated internal
directives toward diversity) and exogeneous (the infolding of external
constraints toward adaptability). This dynamic combination of systems of
internal directed indeterminacy and external viscissitudinous constraint leads
to organizations that can not be reduced to any ideal form or any single order
or cause. Complexity is an integral, generative and stabilizing characteristic
of these two-fold systems of organization. In order to theorize these kinds of
differential organizations, new concepts of "order" and "difference" must be
developed that are distinct from received notions of "typology" and
"variation."

In this economy of order and difference, novelty, rather than being some
extrinsic effect, can be conceived as the catalyst of new and unforeseeable
organizations that proceed from the interaction between freely differentiating
systems and their incorporation and exploitation of external constraints.
Novelty and order are related in an autocatalytic rather than binary manner as
they are simultaneously initiated from a constellation of viscissitudes [3].
This regime of dynamical organizations should not be understood as either
Neo-Platonist or Neo-Darwinist as they are neither reducible to merely
external nor merely internal constraints. It is the resistance to both fixed
types and random mutation that makes flexible, adaptable, emergent and
generative systems so provocative at this time. Through the development of
abstract techniques of organization, the project for the Cardiff Bay Opera
House explores architectural concepts of symmetry in this dynamical style.

The competition brief for the Cardiff Bay Opera House was explicit about two
expectations for the project. First, that it must have a symmetrical horseshoe
Opera Hall, and second, that the primary urban concern was a strong
relationship to the historic Oval Basin. Initially, it seemed odd that in 1994
the authors of the competition would ask for both a new architecture and would
legislate formal symmetry. The dillemma inherent to these seemingly
contradictory constraints became the catalyst for the project. After rejecting
the revolutionary potential of opposing these requests, and rejecting the
reactionary possibilities of supplicating to a predefined catalogue of
Beaux-Arts parti, our design team decided to take a monstrously evolutionary
position by incorporating both oval forms and symmetry so thoroughly that they
could proliferate wildly in unexpected ways. Thanks to the competition
organizers we became involved with a renewed attention to symmetry. Our
engagement with symmetry began not with its valorization as a central
organizing principle but rather with an assumption of its bankruptcy. This is
only to say, that the competition brief for the Cardiff Bay Opera House
initiated the present discussions of novelty and symmetry. It was this strange
coupling of requests for newness and symmetry that instigated this text and
the project.

The project became an experiment in the development of new concepts and

architectural techniques for contextualism. The task was to develop a monument
that could be understood as absolutely continuous with its context while
having a distinctly new identity. The new, or unattributable difference is
defined as that quality of a difference that is unattributable to any previous
system, yet that has nonetheless been sponsored by extant orders. While
setting the terms for continuity with a context there was also an attempt to
develop such a new unified identity that could be understood as emerging from
its urban, institutional, temporal and cultural setting. To avoid the mere
reproduction of the existing context, unification was approached through
processes of differentiation rather than simplification, through mutation
rather than duplication. Like a monstrosity that despite its difference can
still be understood as inhabiting the familiar class of the normal, the Opera
House project attempted to turn the indigenous information of its context into
an alien novelty. In the design of the Opera House the context was understood
as a gradient field of generalized and unorganized information rather than as
a repository of fixed values, rules and codes. Our tactic was to exploit the
rusting technological husks of the ship building industry such as the Oval
Basin as the chrysalis for the symmetrical proliferation of a new urban
structure. The maintainance of the Oval Basin and the compulsion toward
symmetry became the internal motor of differential growth. The progressive
assimilation of differences within this continuous system led to an emergent
organization that was unpredictable at the outset and irreducible at its
conclusion to either the external constraints of its context or the internal
parameters of the competition program.

What is most striking about Bateson's discoveries of the 1890's is the

rethinking of the relationship between order and variation and homogeneity and
heterogeneity. Bateson's insight, that was inherited by his son Gregory, was
that a loss of information leads toward symmetry. This is obvious as iterative
reduction through phenomenological variation is exactly that, the elimination
of difference (or more technically what would be refered to as "alternations
of deformation") toward a reduced eidetic type. This insight equates
difference with information; Gregory Bateson has gone as far as defining
information as "the difference that makes the difference." [4]

William Bateson did not arrive at this theory of symmetry through classical
reduction to types but rather by beginning with a theory of variation itself
[5]. What distinguished his views on symmetry and symmetry breaking was his
explanatory rather than taxonomic perspective toward form, in order to
theorize variation, outside of an irregular relationship to a norm. For
Bateson, monstrosities and mutations were indexes of the polymorphic nature of
repetition, growth and variation that responded specifically to particular
temporal and environmental conditions. The similarity between this theory of
polymorphism, Galton's "multiple positions of organic stability" and later
Waddington's temporalization of the Galton-Bateson concept as epigenetic
landscape has been argued by Gerry Webster [6].. Against Darwinists, Bateson
postulated a theory of "essential diversity" rather than "random mutation" and
organization through "discontinuous variation" rather than "gradualism." As a
teratologist he realized that even monstrosities adhere to recognizable forms
of those classified as normal and they therefore might lead to a theory of
order which does not treat the variant as merely contingent or extraneous, as
he notes; variant forms are as definite and well formed as typical forms. The
variations of monstrosities led him to a theory of diversity and
differentiation. Like the earliest experimental morphologists such as August
Trembley, [7] Bateson looked for typicality in the atypical.

For example, in the two mutations of the thumb, the monstrosities exhibit
higher degrees of symmetry about a mirror axis than is exhibitted in the
normal hand. In the place of the asymmetry between four fingers and thumb
there is a symmetry of four fingers reflected along the axis of the hand. In
the other case within the assymetry of the thumb to four fingers is nested a
second level of symmetry between the normal thumb and an extra thumb that is
opposed to it in a mirror plane. This realization that there were classes of
mutations that exhibited higher degrees of symmetry than the normal led to two
possibilities. The taxonomic assumption would locate extra information at the
point of mutation in order to explain the higher degree of symmetry and the
increases in homogeneity and sameness. Bateson proposed an alternative whereby
the increase in symmetry and decrease in complexity and heterogeneity was an
index of a loss of information. Where the information for the thumb was
decreased the growth reverted back to a default value of mirror symmetry. Thus
symmetry was not an underlying principle of the essential order of the "whole
organism" but was instead a default value of simple disorganization. Moreover,
symmetry was not a global attribute of the whole, but rather was an aspect of
generative and regenerative processes. The organism or order was not
attributable to some reduced simplified type but was rather the result of
dynamic non-linear interactions of internal directives, the viscissitudes of a
disorganized context, and the organized context or generative fields that are
configured by a flexible and adaptable system of integrating differences. For
these morphological processes he invented the term "genetics." "Genes" were
not generators but modifiers of morphology as his theory was that information
was intermittently applied during growth and development to regulate more
general autonomous growth processes. Genes did not provide a blueprint in his
theory but would guide development at critical junctures.

The location of the information that makes the difference was still in need of
theorization by Bateson. He argued that these variations were specific
responses of a biological system to perturbations that could be either
environmental or genetic (opening the door in a very provocative way to
Lamarkian inheritance of acquired characteristics developed through somatic
evolution). Therefore, symmetry breaking could be a sign of the incorporation
of information into a system from the outside in order to unfold latent
diversities.

Thus contexts tend towards entropy. Contexts lack specific organization and
the information that they provide tends to be general. In this regard contexts
might be understood as entropic in their homogeneity and the uniform
distribution of differences. Information and difference are being used here
almost interchangeably, and homogeneity is understood as a sameness of
differences or a lack of information. Thus, homogeneity and disorganization,
or lack of difference, is a characteristic of symmetry.

Adaptive catalysts configure that information into organizations by breaking

their own internal symmetry or homogeneity. Symmetry breaking should not be
confused with a simple dialectic of assymetry, just as exact geometries do not
dialectically invert into inexact forms. Rather, symmetry breaking from the
exact to the anexact indexes the incorporation of generalized external
information into a dynamic, flexible, and temporally and contextually specific
stability. Symmetry, and any exact form for that matter, indicates a lack of
order due to a lack of interaction with larger forces and environments. Deep
structure and typology are just what they seem to be; suspect, reductive,
empty and bankrupt. But, once triggered by generalized and unpredictable
external influences (it must be emphatically maintained that "context" is
meaningless and in and of itself it is unorganized, and "organized context"
requires an agent of differentiation) these "types" unfold through
differentiation into highly heterogeneous yet continuous organizations. Once
put into a non-linear relationship with external forces a directed
indeterminacy becomes a robust system for the unfolding of unforeseen and
unpredictable dynamic organizations and stabilities.

-Greg Lynn