Nature is a sea of forms radically alike.

02 Feb, 2025

From a line in Nature, RW Emerson’s text on harmony and wholeness in the natural world, the title prompts the current question, viz: the diverse forms within nature being radically alike, nature even in its diversity seeming of an essential wholeness and harmony, might we use such radical likeness as analogy, model or both for the study and design of buildings, with the aim of replicating such harmony and wholeness in our constructed environments?

Radical is ‘at the root’, today though usually used otherwise, to mean far-reaching, ground-breaking, or subversive. Emerson’s use should be understood in the original sense, the forms of nature are fundamentally alike, but note that for our purpose this ‘radical’ has use in any of these senses; we are indeed and above all interested in fundamental shared likeness, but also in a new application and appreciation of likeness in good built form that would be far-reaching in present development practices and subversive of current practices that have given such poor results.

Of course radical likeness in one form or another has been a feature of constructed environment for as long as constructed environment has existed. Given our nature, as part of nature, as forms in the sea of forms, it couldn't be otherwise.

Standard types, elements and processes too have always existed in building, whether codified or otherwise. Best practice becoming better practice through constant application and iteration is the constant way of human progress, and standard process begets standard type. Instances of each type will exist on a spectrum of scale and complexity according to means available and time spent, but will share common and identifiable features, will always be radically like others of its type.

Fundamental to structuralism as an architectural idea has always been such radical likeness. Indeed in a more general sense the whole basis of professionalism suggests standardised processes, with a radical likeness underpinning it too, and architectural design is largely based on established patterns of relationships between materials, elements, spaces and operations, with such patterns underpinning much of the performance standards in common construction practice.

Further again is the all-pervasive regulatory regime governing construction in whatever jurisdiction it happens to take place, and notwithstanding the wildly different approaches to compliance from each jurisdiction to the next, any regulation, light-touch or heavy, will strongly imply at least some measure of regularisation.

Given then that likeness is a well-established characteristic of all aspects of built form and building formation, what should any of the foregoing or following give us? That is to say, where is the value in stating the long obvious?

Pattern is kin to type, and in respect of form is as radical likeness. A pattern is a formalised relationship, repeatable or applicable alone, a relationship given form or taking form; in the repetition is the likeness. Further to Emerson then, nature is composed of basic repeating patterns. Humanity is part of nature, as are our artefacts. Must then those same artefacts ‘partake of the beauty of the whole’ as in Emerson’s conception of nature? None of our actions are outside of nature when nature is understood (as of course it should be) as the total material universe, yet our built artefacts often seem neither to augment nor to partake of that beautiful unified whole. Being but a small part of that totality of nature, our human perspective, understanding and scope of influence is of course necessarily limited.

Might then our errant actions be subject to nature’s correction in the fullness of time, through the corrective actions of all of nature’s agents and ourselves among them? Might we thus be best to construct with these corrective vectors in mind? Might we understand these corrective vectors simply as natural processes seeking to proceed without limit and acting against limit when encountered?

There is a type of development common to our age that is a kind of radical unlikeness, characterised by formal novelty imposed without due rigour or care, from which comes an inevitable radical sameness and dullness. One could name example, though its proliferation means most will know the type. Not always but often will it be characterised by some grand formal gesture at the scale of the block, not often but sometimes in the promotional material said to reference ‘valley’ or ‘mountain’ or other natural forms, maybe even so called. The grand formal gesture will in turn necessitate the constraint and impoverishment of the contained spaces, the best being merely dull and condemned to remain so, the worst contorted and ill-served.

That these types might reference natural forms without possessing any of Emerson's qualities of nature is not unnoticed. While some such as Cézanne sought the true nature of the mountain, there are those for whom the most glib understanding will suffice, as long as you can convince the right people to pretend to believe what you say.

These things will ultimately be of the dull self-sustaining sameness that always results from this kind of radical unlikeness. The unfortunate spaces within, jumbled rooms shoved and squeezed to fill an extruded polygon or faceted polyhedron, by a junior on a deadline and I've done it myself, clumped with other jumbles to be sold as a ‘unit’, will thus be formed by two limiting factors: a necessary regulatory imposition of standards on one side, the wilful limit imposed on the other by the formal contortions designed in at the scale of the block. The unfortunate spaces without will suffer the deadening effect seemingly inevitable when such patterns of development are instituted.

Where once for a brief moment was development with the aim of addressing problems of quality and quantity in supply, for the benefit of those in need to the general benefit of all, now often instead are vehicles primarily conceived of as stores of capital.

The broad ideology of the best of mid to late twentieth century mass housing was generally (and among other things) informed by a concern with a concretisation of social relationships and a correct and indissoluble relationship of individual and society, with built environment constituted of a whole at all scales, and each relevant component thing within it a whole, the individual and the home a whole, at each stage and scale a whole in the same way as Emerson’s nature is a whole of complementary wholes. Hertzberger spoke of the twin and complementary states of the whole and incomplete, the built environment always and necessarily both, and always functioning and functional as both. Christopher Alexander in similar vein spoke of centres, discrete things themselves with such a character of wholeness. Hertzberger's structuralism in particular was always and above all social imperative, never abstract organisational game or philosophical conceit.

So could a renewed appreciation and exploration of the idea of radical likeness reclaim or reaffirm the social purpose? Taking radical again in its most literal sense, at the root, means identifying what that root is. To conceive of urbanism designed and built from the root out would indeed be far-reaching in today’s development industry. That things are designed with some component or assemblage acting as the least reducible element is almost universally true. That part may be the thing itself: a fork or brick is no less than itself. Other things are otherwise: the street of speculative houses or network of linked devices. Likewise, the house built of bricks is rather different to a shell cast in concrete though it be to the same general expressed end.

Rarely in the contemporary construction industry is the apartment (or flat or unit) thought of as an other than irreducible thing, barely even is the building. So do we return via the radically unlike, not the universal but the very common, wherein the root, the least reducible thing, is this unlike thing, some pointless difference at the scale of the building. We return via the unlike thing to the usual thing, the irreducible building mass, the graveyard of character in-built obsolescent.

The irreducible element of a social group is of course the individual, and so we’d surely begin with them as we end with them. In such a conception of the built environment's design is the root at the scale of the individual, radically anthropometric as inevitable outcome of its radical anthropogeny. In contrast to the unlike things and the top-down impositions, to begin with irreducibility at the scale of the personal allows for a formation bottom-up and outward, and for refinement similarly led at the root.

Though the path to the means to the end, as mentioned above, is actually reasonably well sign-posted, there is of course much practical difficulty in the way of the ideal radically anthropogenic built environment, with reality’s attendant inevitable context of professionalisation, private property rights, planning & building regulations, all the others of the present civilisation’s stringency and contingency further encroaching on the conceivable institution of a radical process of environmental formation.

Yet one might too find that there’s really not so much between the ideal thing and the usual thing, though to bridge the gap may require a certain subtlety and subversion, radical in each and all respects.