THESIS ON BEAUTY - updated
Beauty - the indispensable category – explained, justified and critically employed
Patrik Schumacher, Tongji, Shanghai 2024
Abstract:
Beauty as the manifestation of aesthetic responses and valuations is a human universal. All societies operate with (a version of) the category of beauty. We all navigate the world aesthetically. Architecture and the design disciplines together shape the outward appearance of the social world. Therefore, beauty as the engaged response to appearances should be an indispensable category of all design discourses, including architectural discourse. However, beauty is an increasingly embattled and by now nearly extinct category within a conscientious architectural discourse that is rightly aspiring to rational accountability and evidence-based propositions. Beauty has been eliminated from the discipline’s discourse because it is seen as subjective and irrational, as an irresponsible diversion or distraction from architecture’s societal tasks. However, beauty is clearly not being abandoned by the end-users of design. Nor are aesthetic choices absent from actual contemporary design practice. Its just no longer talked about.
This paper argues that the characterization of beauty as subjective or irrational is fallacious, and that the abandonment of the category is a grave mistake that impoverishes architectural discourse and practice. This paper will justify the category of beauty by explicating the way aesthetic sensibilities and valuations function and contribute to both the life of the end-users as well as to the efficiency and success of the designer’s efforts.
The thesis of this paper is thus that aesthetic responses are, more often than not, beneficial, life-enhancing responses. By demonstrating this, and by identifying the conditions of this functional rationality of beauty, this essay hopes to rehabilitate the category of beauty and integrate it into our conscientious contemporary discourse. The paper will also discuss how to engage both critically and constructively with aesthetic values and sensibilities within contemporary architectural discourse and practice.
So, I shall defend beauty against its progressive, conscientious detractors by making its rationality and utility explicit, while also defending it against its regressive, conservative protectors.
The Riddle of Beauty
Beauty seems to be wholly subjective. Beauty is indeed no inherent quality that resides in the object itself. This truism has to be re-stated, due to the fact that many attempts to defend beauty work with just such a reification of beauty. This attempt to defend beauty by taking it for granted and simply celebrating it will surely backfire. We must rather start with the acknowledgement that beauty is not a substance but a relation between object and subject. This relation consists, first of all, in individual responses or acts of appreciation and selection. However, this, in itself, does not make beauty something merely subjective or arbitrary. Neither is it merely an intersubjective convention. The problem is that, the act of aesthetic choice happens intuitively, spontaneously, instinctively, without any rational deliberation. (This also has its advantages, as we’ll see later). Nor, are we usually able to rationally account for our aesthetic choices if asked, other by saying something like: I just like it, or simply: its beautiful. In everyday conversations, including routine professional architectural discussions, there are no rationalisations of beauty at play. This lack of explicit rationality leaves us with the (false) impression of a merely subjective statement.
Contemporary architectural theory and discourse is abandoning the category of beauty because it seems to resist rational accountability and because the concern for beauty seems to run counter to architecture’s concern with architecture’s functions.
The premise of this paper is that aesthetic valuations should indeed be rejected if they were merely arbitrary subjective responses. To defend architecture’s concern with beauty by simply insisting that rational accountability must be suspended to give ‘the ineffable’ its due, or because “life is more than utility”, does not constitute a legitimate defense. I also reject the idea that beauty is a pleasure or value in its own right that deserves appreciation and is worth some sacrifices in utility.
The premise that beauty stands opposed to utility in the sense of an unavoidable trade-off, although a wide-spread assumption, is in my view a fundamental fallacy that plagues our discipline. My thesis, in contrast is – as will be elaborated below - that beauty and utility go often enough hand in hand.
My premise is that rational-functional probing, explanation and justification should, in the final analysis, indeed be the condition for accepting or rejecting categories and their related human practices. This rationality test – or functionality test – or utility test - must also be guiding architecture’s critical self-reflection. There is no other way, in my view, to constitute an credible academic and professional discipline. Therefore, again, if beauty were indeed inherently ineffable, rationally indefensible, or outright irrational, then it would indeed have to be cast aside. If aesthetic judgements and choices are to count as rational decisions they must - at least under certain specifiable conditions - be to some extent reproducible.
All my theoretical pursuits are guided by the heuristic principle of function probing, by the quest for functional explanation with respect to all persistent categories and professional practices. This quest for functional explanation also pervades biology and – significantly - sociology.
The same might quest for functional explanation might be applied to the individual features of any particular architectural artefact or designed environment. To be sure this principle must be understood as heuristic principle, not as a priori axiom claiming that indeed all features are functional. Even when we indeed find a specific function of a feature we must not therefore presume that the feature was consciously designed with this function in mind. Often features assume latent or hidden functions, unnoticed by end-users, and unintended by the designers. One important example is the semiological functioning of ornament which is often not understood. This misunderstanding about ornament lead to the modernist abandonment of ornament, and thereby to the communicative impoverishment of modern architecture. So, the search for functional explanations that goes beyond the obvious is a fertile pursuit, in all domains that have been subject to a long evolutionary history. Another set of examples of evolved functionality are the climatic adaptation we find in the various vernaculars around the world. These adaptations emerged via trial and error and can now inspire a science-based reconstruction and rationalisation as sustainable passive systems, in a research programme that closely resembles the broader bio-mimetic research programme.
My theoretical work – here and in general - is guided by what might be termed the pervasive presumption of ultimate rationality or rationalisation as a project. That means all of architectural practice, without residue, should be subject to rational reconstruction, critique and upgrading. My motivation is not only pure theory here, but the agenda of applied theory: the ambition to design and build high performance environments where, again, all features are functionally motivated. This is of course an infinite project. This is both an importnat and fertile research and development programme in a field of architecture that evolved over many centuries but to this day has not developed a sophisticated scientific culture. Those areas that were more easily susceptible to scientific treatment – the aspects of technical functionality – were split off to become the engineering disciplines. What remained, namely all aspects of social functionality, did persist in operating largely in either a craft-like or in an intuitive manner. (This by itself does not invalidate architecture’s ways. But its an invitation to functionally probe, explicitly validate, and where called for, upgrade architecture’s ways of working.) The author has established divided the classified the aspects of the built environment’s social functionality into four task domains for the rationalisation and upgrading of architecture’s competency: spatiology, phenomenology, semiology and dramaturgy. In all these domains aesthetic valuations play an indispensable role. While aesthetic values play no role in the science of engineering, they might still guide the designing engineer’s intuitions and sense-checking. They are certainly come into play in the architect’s engagement with the engineering results or proposals and their compositional orchestration.
In establishing this principle of ultimate rationalisation, we must be wary of rationalist hubris. We should give long standing practices the benefit of the doubt even if they are not explicitly underpinned by rational argument. We must avoid brushing aside traditional categories and practices too quickly and too impatiently, just because they don’t come with ready-made explicit functional justifications. The mere fact that a category is uncritically taken for granted and practiced in accordance with tradition does not imply that it is to be cast aside as irrational superstition. This was the mistake of the first phase of the enlightenment. And this is the mistake of our current bashful abandonment of beauty. Traditions are evolutionary survivors and therefore, even if prima facie irrational, deserve at least the benefit of the doubt, and some investment in a search for a functional explanation. The pervasive fact of relying on aesthetic evaluations, both by end-users and by designers, should have alerted our contemporary conscientious architects that they might be missing something. In a different context Rem Koolhaas formulated this heuristically useful reminder: The persistent pervasiveness of a phenomenon implies that it must mean something. Hegel used the memorable dictum “the real is the rational” to express the same insight. The intellectual aspiration should be to query and then, if possible, rationally reconstruct and explain the hidden function and benefit of pervasive practices that are not self-transparent and seem prima facie inexplicable. To be sure: ‘the rational is the real’ is only a heuristic principle for generating promising hypotheses, not an axiom.
With longstanding cultural practices and traditions we can usually presume to find some underlying functional rationale. However, uncritical traditional practices display inrertia. This means that the practice continues to be reproduced even if the life-conditions with respect to which the practice in question represents a functional adaptation might have disappeared. The cultural practice has then lost its functional justification, and runs idle, might be comparable to rudiments we find in organisms. Practices will probably persist as long as there are no competing alternative practices as challengers. As example we might cite the practice of transmitting epic stories via highly formalized and structured speech involving rhythm, rhyme and meter, as we can find in ancient epics and dramas, but also in many later works of European literature all the way into the 19th Century. The functional rationale of this phenomenon and practice is mnemotechnical and the stabilisation of oral reproduction and transmission of important societal founding myths and epics, especially important in pre-literary, and to some extent also in literary civilisations prior to printing where literacy was not wide spread. Thus, here we have a functionally grounded practice that might seem to be motivated by an inexplicable investment in beauty, but also one that has displayed inertia and lingered on long beyond its functional necessity.
Solution of the Riddle
My core argument: shared aesthetic responses, criteria and ideals of beauty have the function - not conscious purpose - to discriminate the beneficial from the detrimental.
How is this achieved? There are often systematic, though not fail safe, external clues of an entity's functionally relevant capacities, and there are processes of cultural evolution as well as individual learning mechanisms that form well-adapted aesthetic sensibilities that then reflexively respond to the external clues. This function of aesthetic sensibilities is latent rather than manifest. (In evolutionary theory the concept of function is applied to a feature, mechanism or behaviour if its effect contributes to its reproduction. This ‘selected effects’ definition of ‘function’ is also pertinent with respect to cultural evolution.) In its most basic form aesthetic sensibilities involve attraction and repulsion as conditioned reflexes. Although not reducible to these, the appreciation of beauty in aesthetic judgement is connected with such conditioned gut reactions, delivering an instant intuitive discrimination of the beneficial.
My thesis is that our sense of beauty, our being drawn towards the beautiful, is nothing but our animalistic, intuitive way to recognize and choose the useful. This is the underlying rationality of beauty, the solution of the riddle of beauty.
To cast this into a succinct formula: Beauty is the outward appearance of utility.
Here is an example that also exemplifies the conditions and limitations within which beauty signifies utility. As example may serve us the classical ideal of architectural beauty that originated in ancient Greece and Rome, to be picked up again in the Renaissance and once more in 19th Century neo-classical architecture. The classical system of proportions regulates the ratio of column height to inter-column spacing and column width, i.e. insures the avoidance of long spans and buckling. It further gives a vertical shape to the windows and pulls them away from the building corners, to give space to absorb the horizontal forces originating in the window arches. All these features are structurally sensible under the premise of masonry construction and determined by experience, and finally conventionalised into a rule system and ideal of beauty that allows both designers and end-users to visually and intuitively identify and be attracted to the structurally sound construction. The same applies to details like column bases, capitals, arches etc., as well as the imposition of overall symmetry. The latter is not only symbolising the integrity of the structure but is indeed structurally called for to balance weights and thereby to avoid cracks due to uneven settlement of foundations. A composition that violates these rules would look ugly and thereby signal a lack of reliability. The shift from masonry to steel and concrete construction undermined the rationale of the classical way of composing. It had become a meaningless formalism, as was finally – much later than rationality would have demanded - called out by the modernists, dismissing all historical styles and ideals of beauty. The aesthetic revolution initiated by Art Nouveau and Expressionism, and finally delivered by the heroes of modernism in the 1920s in a by then long overdue coup de grace spelled the end of classical beauty and the beginning of the modernist ideal, as cannonized by Hitchcock Russel and Johnson in 'The International Style'. Fifty years later this ideal disintegrated and finally, after 20 years of experimentation through postmodernism and deconstructivism a new system of principles emerged, soon to be christened and canonized as parametricism. This latest shift in aesthetic values is, again, underpinned by an underlying shift in conditions of functionality.
Aesthetic responses stand in a continuity with the most basic discriminatory response mechanisms of attraction versus repulsion we find in all mobile organisms as a basic survival mechanism. Even bacteria discriminate the beneficial from the detrimental and navigate their environment on this basis, by moving up the nutrician gradient. With respect to human life it is helpful to point to our gut reactions to attractive or repulsive smells and tastes because at this basic visceral level the functionality of the response in terms of approaching the beneficial and avoiding the detrimental is rather obvious and unproblematic. Even the seemingly most disinterested, elevated, culturally refined aesthetic judgement stands - or at least should stand - in a fundamental continuity with the basic attraction vs repulsion mechanism, lest it runs idle having disconnected with all distinction of the beneficial versus detrimental. The concept of “taste” - aesthetic aste, architectural taste etc. - is a useful linguistic trace of the continuity claimed here. While the latter case of refined aesthetic judgement does exist as a highly rarefied condition of connoisseurship, it has little significance in the life of society, or for that matter, within architectural discourse and within the life addressed and framed by architecture. To the extend that an untethered connoisseurship or self-referential aestheticism does exist within architectural culture I am rather critical of its influence. It is more likely to confuse and obscure rather than to productively guide architectural design.
The rationality of aesthetic responses involves two aspects, the aspect of recognition and the aspect of action motivation, i.e. perceptual-cognitive rationality or discrimination and evaluative-motivational rationality or attraction. Lets consider, once more, the pervasive human practice of ornamentation alluded to above: It seems as if its purpose is to beautify, for the sake of aesthetic delight, as an end in itself. However, ornamentation is a human universal, i.e. there are no human societies in which ornamentation, including the ornamentation of the human body itself, is not pervasive, and indeed absorbs a very significant amount of resources, also in otherwise extremely poor societies. From this we can draw the conclusion that human society cannot function without ornamentation. No human group could have survived if it had just wasted such huge efforts on useless ornamentation. Instead only those who invested in developing systems of ornamentation survived. This means that ornamentation is indispensable for human survival and flourishing. The explanation here is that human societies are increasingly large, differentiated, cooperative productive organisations that can only function if both the different social spaces and the social roles are legibly marked and distinguished. The designed environments and fashion systems deliver the semiological system necessary to sustain the division of labour and social order of society. The concept of semiology points us to the recognition aspect. The concept of beauty and the aesthetic sensibility sustaining it – which here also includes the sense of propriety - points also beyond recognition to the required motivating emotional investment. The reproduction of the semiologically functioning system of markings and demarcations become fetishes and are sustained by compulsive internalisations in aesthetic sensibilities.
The evolution of the general mechanism and practice of aesthetic valuations and choices goes deep into biological-genetic evolution, but also evolved further through a long cultural evolution. The evolutionary emergence of particular ideals of beauty has partly also genetically sustained components or aspects while being largely driven and differentiated by cultural evolution, especially in the realm of the built environment and architecture. Cultural traditions are transmitted via socialisation processes. However, individual learning based on direct experiences also shape individual sensibilities and tastes by way of conditioning.
The idea of beauty’s dependence on utility has been a staple theorem of the modern movement, and can also be found in earlier figures like Semper and Pugin. The modern functionalist architects insisted that beauty cannot be pursued directly but only emerges indirectly as a result of a functional pursuit. Le Corbusier presented utilitarian industrial structures like grain silos, ships, and air planes, and invited us to see their (unself-conscious) beauty, or rather he declared them to be beautiful in a revolutionary aesthetic manifesto.
The understanding of beauty’s crucial connection to performance, while mostly ignored or forgotten, is thus not new. It even has much older precursors. We find the central insight in David Hume’s ‘Treatise on Human Nature’, where he quotes a paragraph from Quintilian's ‘Institutio Oratoria’ that already clearly expresses the core insight: “An athlete whose muscles have been developed by training presents a handsome appearance; he is also better prepared for the contest. Attractive appearance is invariably associated with efficient functioning.”[i] The crucial element missing here is the necessity of recurrent historical updating of ideals of beauty.
The Universality of the Category of Beauty & the Historical Relativity of Particular Ideals of Beauty
Here is how I explained beauty in an article from 2001, in the context of architecture/urban design: “The aesthetic judgement of cities and buildings is rational in as much as it operates as an immediate intuitive appreciation of performativity, short-circuiting first hand comparative experience or extended analysis. Aesthetic judgement thus represents an economical substitute for experience. It depends on a tradition that disseminates accumulated experience via dogmatic rules. This dogmatism is the virtue as well as the limit of aesthetically condensed experience.”[ii] The virtue of this reduction to dogma is its cognitive economy, stability and easy transmissibility. (Analysis, rational explanation, and verification, can be skipped.) Its limitation is its inertia in the face of rapid transformations in the conditions of life. The condition of beauty’s proper functioning is thus a certain stability of life conditions, so that there is enough time for well-adapted morphologies to evolve and enough time, moreover, for respectively well-attuned aesthetic sensibilities to form and spread.
When technological and social life-conditions, change, then high-performance urban morphologies change also, and therefore aesthetic responses should (and will eventually) change too. “With the development of society what once was an accumulated wisdom becomes an irrational prejudice that has to be battled on the ideological plane of aesthetic value. Such a battle was waged and won by the heroes of 'modern functionalism'. The technological and social revolutions called forth an aesthetic revolution”[iii], rejecting the classical canon and establishing and aestheticizing non-classical proportions, asymmetry and seriality. Buildings that were admired as beautiful are now seen as ugly monstrosities, and buildings that would have been monsters in the eyes of those socialized into the classical canon are now the height of pristine elegance. That’s comparable to the self-declared ‘revaluation of all values’ that Nietzsche tried to enact in the realm of moral values. (The analogy between aesthetic and moral sensibilities as functional adaptations to the respective historical conditions of human life is indeed pertinent.)
The anthropological and historical evidence that ideals of beauty (just like moral or behavioural ideals) are malleable and culturally evolve is clear. Thus, while the category of beauty is a human universal, no particular ideals or aesthetic sensibilities are universal. Like good versus bad, the distinction beauty versus ugly, is a rather general, highly abstract evaluative distinction or discrimination mechanism that can be implemented or concretized by diverse (small) sets of criteria, or (large) sets of paradigmatic examples. To become operational beauty requires historically evolving specifications, and new paradigmatic sample sets, not every year or every decade, but certainly in times of rapid historical transformation. Then designers, and eventually end-users, can be trained on the new exemplars, like AI systems. In the case of designers this might be supported by descriptive, canonizing (not necessarily expanatory) specifications or criteria to identify exemplars as well as by recipes to create new exemplars.
The Critical-constructive engagement with Aesthetic Regimes and Sensibilities
As rational, self-critical, self-determining agents we should not indulge in our aesthetic predilections as something unchangeably given, as something to satisfy without question. We might be captured and held back by nostalgia for by now dysfunctional environments. We thus cannot blindly trust our aesthetic sensibilities and emotional responses. Instead, we should probe and query our aesthetic values, and if found maladapted, update them. Thereafter we can go back to rely on them. Indeed, we cannot avoid relying on them. Without the cognitive shortcuts afforded by aesthetic sensibilities we would not be able to navigate or cope with the world. What applies to us as end-users of designed environments, also applies to us as designers moving rapidly and intuitively through myriads of design decisions. Here too we must rely on the cognitive shortcuts afforded by our aesthetic intuitions and sensibilities. “Thinking fast” versus thinking slow, i.e. we need to invest in slow, very slow, even book-length, analytic thinking to critique the old practices, as well as experiment, select, innovate and develop new viable practices and forms which then can become the basis for developing new fast short cuts, i.e. conditioning new operative aesthetic sensibilities we can rely on to identify the beneficial and reject the dysfunctional.
Beauty is a very abstract, empty, but historically programable and re-programable category. This allows the category itself to be resilient, ultra stable. The programs that in each socio-economic epoch specify the particular operational criteria of beauty constitute (the aesthetic regimes of) the epochal styles, Architecture responded to and participated in the transformation from 19th century laissez-faire capitalism to 20th century Fordism via the transition from 19th Century historicism to 20th Century modernism. Currently architecture is, or rather should be, responding and participating in the transformation from 20th Century Fordism to our 21st Century Network Society, via the paradigm shift from modernism to the new epochal style of parametricism. This, once more, implies a revolution in the discipline’s and society’s aesthetic values and ideal of architectural beauty. This new ideal of beauty also applies to all the other design disciplines from urban design to product, graphic and fashion design. I have specified these new aesthetic values of parametricism in Volume 2 of my book ‘The Autopoiesis of Architecture’. A more elaborate presentation of my theory of beauty can be found in Volume 1 of AoA, in section 3.8 ‘The Rationality of Aesthetic Values’. The thesis (THESIS 17) heading this chapter reads: “Aesthetic values encapsulate condensed, collective experiences within useful dogmas. Their inherent inertia implies that they progress via revolution rather than evolution.”[iv] The theme of beauty is picked up again in Volume 2, chapter 8.6.3 ‘Beauty and the Evolution of Concepts of Order’[v].
There is, at the moment, no substitute for the aesthetic navigation of the world which thus should not and indeed cannot be eradicated, at least not until AI systems substitute for our fast operating but only slowly updating aesthetic sensibilities. The same applies to design practice. Here too is, at the moment, no substitute for well-adapted aesthetic sensibilities as guides to make rapid intuitive design decisions or choices when confronted with the increasing abundance of (AI generated) design options. While more and more computational analysis and optimisation tools become available that empower and further rationalise the design process, these tools each address only a single partial aspect of the overall, increasingly complex, multi-objective task. Even if the designer (the wet-computing neural network) can reduce or eventually eliminate his/her reliance on aesthetic (intuitive, non-discursive, non-analytic) choices - a big if - then architects will still have to anticipate, reckon with, and steer the ineliminable aesthetic discriminations of their end-users. Therefore, architectural discourse is, on more than one count, deficient if it ignores the operation and function of our sense of beauty and of aesthetic values.
How then should architectural discourse engage with beauty? My answer: By first trying to make the aesthetic values underlying our operational sensibilities explicit, then by subjecting them to critical comparative evaluation, and, if necessary, by positing new values, and explain those with respect to their functional rationality in connection with general salient aspects of the contemporary life-process. In my writings this has taken the form of concisely formulating the formal-aesthetic heuristics - both positive and negative heuristics - of parametricism. To show that these new formal principles are congenial with current societal life process requirements, I have paired up the formal heuristics with the complementary functional heuristics that guide or should guide our contemporary understanding of architecture’s explicit functional-programmatic side.
Negative formal heuristics paired up with negative functional heuristics:
• no pure platonic forms - no fixed stereotypes
• no simple repetition - no social homogenization
• no collage of unrelated entities - no segregative zoning
Positive formal heuristics paired up with positive functional heuristics:
• all forms parametric - all functions variable event scenarios
• all systems differentiated - all program domains differentiated
• all systems correlated - everything communicates with everything
These heuristics, this system of tabus and dogmas, delivers the operational definition of the epochal style of parametricism. The formal heuristics operationalize the aesthetic values of parametricism. It is important to comply without exception to the prohibitions imposed by the negative heuristics above, without compromise, without sliding back into outmoded solutions. Especially in the advante-garde backsliding is inadmissible. Only if applied without exception can the new style be really put to the test. With respect to the positive heuristics, it is important to understand that they offer a recipe for continuous open-ended design improvement. There is always more that can be done: any form or element can be given further parametric degrees of freedom, any array or system of elements can be further differentiated, along more dimensions or more intensely along the already given dimensions, finally any system can be correlated with more of the other systems at play, as well as with further systems or elements in the nearer or wider context. This open ended game of correlation corresponds with the open game of the potential mutual relevance and affiliation of all programmatic offerings and events that come together in the dense synergy clusters that make up our cities in the age of the knowledge and innovation society.
These heuristics open up a huge new space of creative possibilities. Parametricism therefore, so my argument, offers more versatility of design problem solving and more diversity in the morphological range of its results than all prior styles put together. When this style achieves hegemony and admits all prior styles to the dustbin of history, this will not imply the end of diversity but its take off moment.
This style is not my invention. I have rather been naming and canonizing a sustained and widespread architectural movement. I have done this by listing its most fundamental aesthetic values and by operationalizing these values into explicit formal heuristics, i.e. instructions cast into the form of dogmas and taboos that must be adhered to in every design move. These formal heuristics have been paired up with explicit functional heuristics, again both positive commands and negative prohibitions. This pairing delivers the explicit functional rationality of the respective aesthetic values.
It is the epochal styles of architecture that – in each socio-economic epoch - concretize the abstract concept of beauty via specific aesthetic regimes. Within each epochal style further progress might take the form of subsidiary styles, further refining and adapting the prevalent architectural ideal of beauty. More recently I have been naming and explicating the latest ideal of beauty I am promoting: Tectonism[vi], the current phase of parametricism. A full book-length, illustrated account of this (subsidiary) style and movement, has been published last fall[vii].
To conclude:
Beauty is a very deeply engrained and indeed indispensable category, for end-users who must navigate the built environment aesthetically, for designers who cannot work but via aesthetic sensibilities, and for the discourse of architecture that must critically reflect and update these sensibilities and their underlying valuation criteria.
[i] Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, Institutio Oratoria, Book VIII. , quoted in: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part III, Section I, 1739-40
[ii] Patrik Schumacher, The Work of Beauty & the Beauty of Work
[iii] Patrik Schumacher, The Work of Beauty & the Beauty of Work
[iv] Patrik Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Vol.1: A New Framework for Architecture, Wiley, London 2010, p.300
[v] Patrik Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Vol.2: A New Agenda for Architecture, Wiley, London 2012, p.434
[vi] Patrik Schumacher, Tectonism in Architecture, Design and Fashion - Innovations in Digital Fabrication as Stylistic Drivers, Published in: AD 3D-Printed Body Architecture, guest-edited by Neil Leach & Behnaz Farahi, Architectural Design, Profile No 250, November/December 2017, 06/Vol 87/2017
[vii] Patrik Schumacher, Tectonism – Architecture for the Twenty-First Century, Images Publishing – The arts Bridge, Melbourne 2023