In evolution organisms adapt to their environment.

I was trying to work out why architecture changes so slowly compared to some other fields.

Just as a warning, this is very unstructured. I think it needs some diagrams and some very aggressive editing! You can think of this as the raw ingredients of an idea-cake that I’ve shelved to come back to another day.

I tried “Projects take a long time” and a few other arguments but they just didn’t seem to work. Then it dawned on me that I could use the same ideas that make evolution work to think about organisations and cultures[1. As usual, I’m sure I’m not the first to realise this!]. This is going to need a little diversion into evo-nerding.

Most of this is wholly unsubstantiated, so if you find it useful then great. If it makes you hate me more than you already do, then great too! (But could you leave a comment telling me why please.)

Before I looked into it[1. I wrote my masters thesis on evolutionary algorithms, all very nerdy stuff.], this seemed like an unstoppable force for change. After all, the standard story[1. throughout this, I’m not sorry if I’ve offended you by suggesting that we weren’t made by god made man on Saturday.] is that we were slightly fancy chemicals and we progressed into smartphone wielding space travellers. It feels as if progress is a thing that just happens.

Given an environment there is usually an organism [1. or in our case organisation or profession] that is ideal for it. The range of environments where that’s true is pretty wide[1. sharks in volcanoes, extremophiles living at the bottom of the ocean etc.]!

A simple way to think of this as two roulette wheels. One is environments and the other is organisms. They can roll past each other so that they fit. This idea took me ages to come to because it was presented as a set theory equation. If I explain it in English it might be easier to grasp.

  • Given the set of all environments
  • And
  • Given the set of all organisms
  • There exists a set of corresponding environment-organisms pairs that are possible.

It’s a bit strange, but you can try imagining the 4 groups

Environments that can't exist Environments that can exist
Organisms that can't exist Organisms that can exist

The two giant roulette wheels contain them both, but we only really care about the can’s.

Let me try and tie this back to the question of why things don’t change faster. If the environment wheel is fixed in one place, then you can only turn the organism wheel a little way before it won’t be fit for that environment. What that means is that:

In an unchanging environment, natural selection is a stabilising force

The requirements that we put on built space haven’t changed a huge amount recently. We (humans) haven’t changed much and neither has the environment we live in. In A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History De Landa[1. I think that Deluze is a total dick, but despite that De Landa still manages to say some interesting things.] talks about the last time that architecture was a military technology. Cannon technology caused a change from square columns on castles to round ones. Then made defensive buildings obsolete in the end. I’d say that that was the last time that environmental change caused natural selection to act on building design on a time scale that was fast enough to see.[1. You could argue that reinforced concrete did the same too, maybe lifts and aircon. Feel free to do so in the comments!]

What is driving me to have the thought in the first place? If there is little pressure to change the building (the outcome) then it is much harder to realise the pressure to change the way that the building is designed. That is the part that is interesting me at the moment. We are an industry that is ripe for disruption. If we don’t do it, then someone else will. We need to ready cannibalise our own business model to feed the next generation.

If we go back to the wheels, there’s a wheel for the environment that controls the buildings that get designed and it rotates very slowly. There’s also another wheel that rotates much faster, and it’s being accelerated by Google and the rest of the tech industry. That much faster wheel is the environment that controls how we design buildings generate value in the world.