How important is beauty? In the context of architecture there is always a compromise between aesthetics and utility. A building is built to serve a purpose or function. To maximise that utility it is also necessary to understand beauty because people are undoubtedly affected by their surroundings. The science and psychology of architecture, architectonics, has long been studied. Modernist designers like Le Corbusier attempted to raise the quality of people’s lives with mass socialised building programs, called urbanism. To many this was a failure as designers often ended up creating sterile angular spaces of conformity that diminished any sense of the potential of the individual spirit.
In an age of postmodernism the philosophy of Le Corbusier is still evident through what is termed 'regeneration' in urban areas although it has been slightly tempered by comparison with the grand visions of old. In contrast to this there is also a strong and ever growing trend amongst individuals to shape, create and improve their own properties, to make beautiful their own dwelling through augmentation or through simply building from scratch.
Design, creativity and the architectonics of space, form and light, are subtly interwoven with our emotional attachment to the buildings we live and work in. Our ability to create is developing in so many new avenues through the refinement and sophistication of our tools and resources. But where futurism in the past was all about novelty for novelty sake, contemporary thinking understands that beauty is a greater force and that beauty emerges everywhere, and in the styles of old as much as in the new and novel, and often most prominently in nature.
Architecture is strongly linked to self-improvement. A house is more than a machine for living. It is an extension of the 'self', a shrine to our mind, body and spirit. Even the merest furnishing can express an aspect of this. As technology allows us to integrate ourselves ever more into the world around us and as it converges on so many platforms, we are emerging into a new paradigm, one where the boundaries between human and natural design are becoming blurred.
Nanotechnology, the ever increasing sophistication of computer hardware and software and the development of new and more exotic materials offer the amazing possibility of design and intelligence governing the development of every aspect of construction, even down to the atomic scale. Our buildings are becoming ever more organic, as we both seek to emulate nature in keeping with Frank Lloyd Wright's philosophy of 'build the way nature builds' through sustainable and eco-friendly housing, and in the very fact that, with intelligent systems embedded everywhere, our buildings are literally becoming alive.
Molecular nanoassembly could produce architecture through a process similar to genetic evolution, only faster, and therefore build exactly 'the way nature builds'. On the other hand, Wright intended to establish a method through which designers could shape the entire visible environment at every scale: sites, structures, furnishings, and fixtures. While buildings may become literally organic, they may also become autonomous, free from the control of designers. In which case, for humans, the balance and understanding of beauty in architecture may come to be appreciated as it is in the natural world, as something separate rather than something we directly control.
In the awakening of spiritual machines will we also see the emergence of conscious buildings, buildings that may be able to answer for themselves Louis Kahn's question 'what will this building be?'
Will architecture become its own designer? Its own decider of what is beautiful? To what extent will it weigh the considerations of aesthetics and utility? Or will we embed a part of own minds in the emergence of conscious buildings? Will they literally become an extension of us, not just figuratively? How happy will their beauty make us?
We are already at the emergence of a new form of dwelling, one that is dynamic, not static:
If the development of solar power can maintain the same (exponential) growth rate it has for the past decade, it could supply all of mankind's projected electricity demands 26 years from now.
The photovoltaic (PV) solar electricity market has shown an impressive 33% growth per year since 1997, with market support programs as the main driving force (source: ‘PV solar electricity industry’ by Winfried Hoffman). According to the Earth Policy Institute solar energy is the ‘world’s fastest growing energy source’.
Due to economies of scale solar power technologies get less costly as people use and buy more as manufacturers increase production to meet demand. The cost and price is expected to drop in the years to come vis a vis the price/performance relationship that Ray Kurzweil often discusses.
The main hurdle to solar energy being truly competitive at the moment is its high cost relative to fossil fuel energy but, as just mentioned, solar technology is benefitting from the fastest acceleration of any energy industry in the history of man. Solar technology, like computer technology, is information driven (a photovoltaic cell shares many aspects with microchips including the use of silicon). Development occurs through many incremental steps of innovation building on previous innovation. It is exponential and chaotic. Invention, or novelty, within information technology is akin to small perturbations in a dynamic system that cascade into enormous paradigm shifts, essentially a butterfly effect of accelerating innovation. The trend of growth from the invention of the transistor to the emergence of the modern internet is a potent example. Kurzweil famously called this the law of accelerating returns. This trend is a powerful phenomenon that is often overlooked when the potential of solar power is considered.
Kurzweil noted in ‘The Singularity is Near’ that:
‘…once we have MNT (molecular nanotechnology) based manufacturing, we will be able to produce solar panels (and almost everything else) extremely inexpensively, essentially at the cost of raw materials, of which inexpensive carbon is the primary one. At an estimated thickness of several microns, solar panels could ultimately be as inexpensive as a penny per square meter. We could place efficient solar panels on the majority of human-made surfaces, such as buildings and vehicles, and even incorporate them into clothing for powering mobile devices. A 0.0003 conversion rate for solar energy should be quite feasible, therefore, and relatively inexpensive.’
The molecular foundry at Lawrence Berkley already holds numerous patents for its work in developing new technologies and techniques for nano-engineered production of highly efficient and inexpensive flexible solar cells. Following this several companies have developed nanoparticle inks that can be sprayed onto flexible substrates to form layers of semiconductor. A solar panel can simply be printed onto a roll of thin foil. These processes don’t need traditional vacuum chambers, and in many cases they can even use conventional printing equipment.
‘The real innovation is that we’re trying to move the photovoltaics industry from the economics of the semiconductor business to the economics of the printing business.’ -Erik Straser, MDV-Mohr Davidow Ventures, investor in Nanosolar Inc.
The bottom line is that there remains a great deal of work and research to be accomplished before such grandiose claims of solving all the worlds energy can become practical realisations. The benefits of solar energy are clear though, it’s clean, it would be extremely liberating in terms of taking us away from our dependency on big centralised government controlled power stations and grids, and it’s sustainable with a figuratively inexhaustible supplier via the Sun. So, if the current trend of growth in solar technology continues the future could look very bright, after all there’s around 89 petawatts of energy from the Sun hitting us every day.
One of the most puzzling aspects of prehistory is in accounting for why civilisation only occurs very recently, essentially within the last 8000 years, when modern humans have been around for much longer. Archaeologists like Colin Renfrew place modern humans in Europe as early as 40,000 years ago and in other parts of the world even earlier.
How can we account for this period of over 30,000 years when our forefathers seemingly made little strides in technological and societal development compared with the more monumental changes that have occurred relatively recently such as the Agrarian Revolution and the development of metallurgy. How can we understand what Renfrew terms the 'sapient paradox', the transition to a modern style of life?
Well, perhaps it is precisely because technology develops through little strides that this seeming discrepancy maybe accounted for. Technology develops in a chaotic manner, with small events or perturbations within a dynamical system building over time to produce much greater effects. Kurzweil often observes that the exponential nature of technological development means that while little change may at first be observed in such a system, eventually small alterations will lead to great paradigm shifts where innovation builds on past innovation and where the pace of acceleration is itself accelerating vis a vis the law of accelerating returns.
It may have taken many years or even centuries for new ideas and innovations to filter through Palaeolithic society, however because today's society is built upon those innovations and many innovations that came after them, the entire system and mechanism for communicating that information has evolved too and in fact that process of evolution has itself been evolving or accelerating. Indeed it now takes mere minutes or seconds for a new idea or innovation to spread globally.
As Kurzweil has noted: 'A primary reason that evolution - of life-forms or of technology - speeds up is that it builds on its own increasing order, with ever more sophisticated means of recording and manipulating information. Innovations created by evolution encourage and enable faster evolution'.
The vast time period of the Palaeolithic (the early Stone Age), in contrast with the later and quicker Neolithic and later metallic ages, would seem to fit within this picture. As the complexity of technology increases, the gaps between paradigm shifts decreases. While the leap from flint napping to producing copper took many tens of thousands of years, the leap from producing copper to smelting bronze was measurably shorter, just a few thousand years.
In the light of exponential growth it is unsurprising to find comparatively small changes across large spaces of time and large changes across small periods of time. If technology does indeed develop through paradigms of exponential growth we should expect the fossil record to bare testimony to relatively small technological changes for most of modern man's existence and some very profound changes occurring very quickly and latterly over a small fraction of that time. From the almost static seeming pace of the Palaeolithic welcome to the hyperspeed of the twenty-first century!
Proceeding from an article about Zyvex labs and DARPA's $9.7 million investment in nanotechnology, specifically diamandoid mechanosynthesis; a debate on the feasibility and growth paradigm of nanotechnology and its potential impact on engineering and society as a whole.
With this investment by DARPA, the Nanofactory Collaboration at the University of Nottingham UK and the work being done in Geneva by IBM on nanorobotics and nanowires, we are observing the transition of nanotechnology as a theoretical concept into a demonstrable capability.
It is not unreasonable to imagine, if Kurzweil's law of accelerating returns proves consistent, that by the end of the next decade we will have transitioned into a practical commercial capability for nanotechnology and by the late 2020s or early 2030s into a situation of ubiquity similar to today's ubiquitous microtechnology.
