Nikos Salingaros: Difference between revisions

Nikos A. Salingaros (born in Perth, Australia, of Greek parents) is a mathematician and polymath known for his work on urban theory, architectural theory, complexity theory, and design philosophy. He has been a close collaborator of the architect and computer software pioneer Christopher Alexander, with whom Salingaros shares a harsh critical analysis of conventional modern architecture. Like Alexander, Salingaros has proposed an alternative theoretical approach to architecture and urbanism that is more adaptive to human needs and aspirations, and that combines rigorous scientific analysis with deep intuitive experience.

Prior to turning his attention to architecture and urbanism, Salingaros published substantive research on Algebras, Mathematical Physics, Electromagnetic Fields, and Thermonuclear Fusion before turning his attention to Architecture and Urbanism. Salingaros still teaches mathematics, and is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is also on the Architecture faculties of universities in Italy, Mexico, and Holland.[1]

Salingaros is the only child of the Greek popular composer Stelios Salingaros, and the nephew of the operatic baritone Spyros Salingaros.

Salingaros began working in the Arts as a painter, but soon switched to the sciences. He obtained Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Physics from the University of Miami, Florida. He took his doctorate at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1978. In 1982, he started a long-term collaboration with Christopher Alexander, becoming one of the editors of The Nature of Order, Alexander’s four-volume masterwork on aesthetics and the geometric processes of nature.

Salingaros joined the Mathematics faculty of the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1983, where he remains today. In the 1990’s, Salingaros began to publish his own research on architectural and urban form. In 1997 he was recipient of the first award ever for research on architectural topics by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In 2003, he was elected to the Committee of Honor, International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism (INTBAU), and to the INTBAU College of Traditional Practitioners.

Salingaros' writings helped to introduce two key concepts in urban morphology, fractals and networks. His book Principles of Urban Structure has been compared to that of Michael Batty (United Kingdom) and Pierre Frankhauser (France) in describing cities as giant fractals, and the separate efforts of Paul Drewe (Holland) and Gabriel Dupuy (France) in describing cities as giant networks. His work links urban form to new concepts such as the Small-world network and the Scale-free network. Michael Batty, Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London, wrote about Salingaros' contribution: “He shows how networks which evolve from the bottom up lead to ordered (scaled) hierarchies that are both efficient and well adjusted. … This is the theory of the small world, but contained within, there is the germ of an idea which has barely been exploited. In connecting elements in cities, there is a natural ordering from many short links which aggregate to a lesser number of longer links which, in my view, could be linked to small worlds, to scale-free networks, to power law distributions and, more significantly, to changes in transportation technology. Salingaros is the first to hint at this.”

A Theory of Architecture (a collection of previously published papers) describes a set of guidelines for design, giving scientific principles that link forms to human sensibilities. In it he describes a practical architectural system in a form that any practicing architect can use. The work incorporates Salingaros’ observations of the greatest buildings of the past, which he defines as those that are the most responsive to human sensibilities. While this method and its theoretical underpinning support traditional architectural typologies, Salingaros emphasizes that architects should be free to adapt their ideas to particular situations, leaving decisions to be influenced by the environment and needs of the project. He explores questions such as: How can ornament be justifed, and why is it necessary? What are the ratios and hierarchies that promote neighborliness and beauty? What is it about our biological nature -- perhaps even about the nature of matter itself -- that makes us feel one thing in the presence of one kind of structure and something else in the presence of another? Speaking as a mathematician, he proposes a theoretical framework to answer these questions.

Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction is a collection of essays written as a polemic against contemporary "star" architecture, and its supporters within architectural academia and the architectural media. It is an impassioned indictment against the "bad architecture" that he argues has been promoted by their actions. Salingaros defines "bad architecture" as that which makes people uncomfortable or physically ill, and which pursues formal or ideological concerns instead of adapting to nature and to the needs of ordinary human beings.

Salingaros’ newer writings focus on Biophilia as an essential component of the design of the human environment, thus joining the ideas of Edward Osborne Wilson to Sustainable design.

Salingaros has had a significant theoretical influence on several major figures in architecture. Christopher Alexander, author of the seminal treatises A Pattern Language and Notes on the Synthesis of Form, describes Salingaros' influence: “In my view, the second person who began to explore the deep connection between science and architecture was Nikos Salingaros, one of the four [Katarxis] editors. He had been working with me helping me edit material in The Nature of Order, for years, and at some point -- in the mid-nineties I think -- began writing papers looking at architectural problems in a scientific way. Then by the second half of the nineties he began making important contributions to the building of this bridge, and to scientific explorations in architecture which constituted a bridge.” [2]

Prince Charles, an influential critic of contemporary architecture, expressed Salingaros' influence in his own preface to Salingaros’ A Theory of Architecture: “Surely no voice is more thought-provoking than that of this intriguing, perhaps historically important, new thinker?”

The End of Tall Buildings (co-authored with James Kunstler, 2001) argued that the age of skyscrapers is at an end, and that 9/11 marks the beginning of the end of modernist typologies dominating urban form. While the world has not stopped building skyscrapers, this became one of the most cited and controversial essays on the topic. Referring to this essay, Benjamin Forgey of The Washington Post said: “What many are feeling today goes right to the marrow: the fear of being a target. And who today can deny that tall buildings such as the World Trade Center towers make ideal targets?”

Salingaros contributed to the New Athens Charter of 2003, which is meant to replace the original 1933 Athens Charter written principally by the highly influential modernist architect-planner Le Corbusier. That blueprint segregated urban functions and contributed to generating post-war urban typologies such as monoculture and sprawl. Through this and other writings Salingaros sought to retrofit suburbia, and reconnect US and European cities at the human scale. This work can be seen as allied with the New Urbanism movement to replace sprawling development with compact, walkable cities and towns.

Salingaros has never written a true software paper, yet two of his papers are quoted by the CS community. Both these papers were later included as chapters in the book Principles of Urban Structure.

"The Structure of Pattern Languages" (2000) argues that patterns (a concept central to the design pattern movement in CS and introduced by Alexander) encapsulate information about recurring design solutions and human activities. Techniques for linking observed patterns validate a Pattern Language, and dismiss stylistic rules and antipatterns as arbitrary. E. Todd, E. Kemp and C. Phillips commented: “Salingaros shows that a loose collection of patterns is not a system, because it lacks connections, implying that the quality and nature of the connections between patterns is what determines whether a collection is a language or not. He identifies two forms of connectivity when discussing pattern languages: external connectivity and internal connectivity. These two forms of connection are central to validating a pattern language. Salingaros implies that the richness of connections between levels and within levels in a pattern language is a factor in determining a language’s internal validity.” [3]

"The Information Architecture of Cities" (co-authored with L. Andrew Coward, 2004) describes cities as systems of informational architecture, in which high-level functionality separates the system into communicating modules. Information exchange in urban systems includes visual input from the environment, personal contact, telecommunications, and the movement of people. Journeys by residents through a city accomplish a primary information exchange (the interaction that is the intent of the journey). But ideally, journeys have secondary, serendipitous information exchange. For example, a pedestrian on the way to work visits shops, sees advertisements, buys a newspaper, encounters a friend and has a quick word. The virtue of cities is this dense, fractal, multilayered information exchange. It is closely related to the generation of economic wealth and culture within cities.

In "The Information Architecture of Cities" Salingaros also defined the useful notion of “fractal loading”, later picked up by Richard Veryard, Phil Jones and others in CS. [4][5]

Salingaros introduced a model of Complexity by using an analogy with thermodynamic quantities in physics, later developed in collaboration with the Computer Scientist Allen Klinger. This work adopted the notion of Herbert Simon that what is important is the organization of complexity, and it proposed a simple means to measure it. Christopher Alexander discussed Salingaros’ model in Book 1 of The Nature of Order: “I believe it is important to show this result simply to underline the fact that living structure is, in principle, susceptible to mathematical treatment, and may therefore be regarded as a part of physics.”

Salingaros has been a harsh critic of deconstructivism in architecture, and its uncritial application of the philosophy of post-structuralism. His essay “The Derrida Virus” argues that the ideas of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, applied in an uncritical way, effectively form an information "virus" that dismantles logical thought and knowledge. Salingaros employs the meme model earlier introduced by Richard Dawkins to explain the transmission of ideas. In so doing he provides a model that validates earlier claims by philosopher Richard Wolin that Derrida’s philosophy is logically nihilistic.[6] Even though Salingaros uses Dawkins’ ideas, he nevertheless strongly disagrees with Dawkins’ evaluation of religion as just another meme, as expounded in Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. Supporting Alexander’s most recent work tying religion to geometry, Salingaros argues for the contribution of religious tradition to human understanding, both in architecture and in philosophy.

• Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction (2004; 2nd Ed 2007)
  
• Principles of Urban Structure (2005)
  
• A Theory of Architecture (2006)
  
• The Future of Cities (in press 2007)
  
• Many of Salingaros' papers on architecture and urbanism are available on the web, as well as earlier papers on mathematics and physics.
  

Nikos Salingaros’ publications
Michael Blowhard interviews Nikos Salingaros
Nikos Salingaros interviews Leon Krier
NPR panel discussion on saving the TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport