Gaia Theory was created by James Lovelock in 1972. Lovelock’s idea was named by his neighbour, the novelist William Golding, after the Greek Earth Goddess. The idea that Earth was alive gained special resonance after the 1960s when space flights allowed Earth to be viewed as a complete entity for the first time. The theory suggests a holistic view of the world, where all life on Earth interacts with the physical environment to form a complex system that can be thought of as a single super-organism.
Overall, the Gaia Theory is a compelling new way of understanding life on our planet. It argues that we are far more than just the “Third Rock from the Sun,” situated precariously between freezing and burning up. The theory asserts that living organisms and their inorganic surroundings have evolved together as a single living system that greatly affects the chemistry and conditions of Earth’s surface. Some scientists believe that this “Gaian system” self-regulates global temperature, atmospheric content, ocean salinity, and other factors in an “automatic” manner. Earth’s living system appears to keep conditions on our planet just right for life to persist!
Fractals and Architecture
Until a short time ago scientists described nature through so called “smooth” continuous mathematics, which is the mathematics of smooth forms such as lines, curves and planes and which is expressed in the language of Euclidean geometry. The “new” science of complexity does not try to simulate any more the rugged character of nature through smooth forms but it deals with the raggedness of the structure itself – this field of mathematics is expressed in the language of fractal geometry: “The whole is more than its parts.”
Architectural composition is concerned with the progression of interesting forms from the distant view of the facade to the intimate details. As one approaches and enters a building, there should be another smaller scale, interesting detail that expresses the overall intent of the composition, which is the fractal conception. Thus fractal geometry is the formal study of this progression of self-similar detail from large to small scales.
Source:
The Gaia Theory <http://www.gaiatheory.org/index.html>
Making the Modern World <http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/stories/the_age_of_ambivalence/02.ST.06/?scene=3>
Fractals and Fractal Architecture <http://www.iemar.tuwien.ac.at/fractal_architecture/subpages/05Architecture.html>
Filed under: Theory, Fractals in Architecture, Gaia Philosophies, gaia theory, Mathematical Theories
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