Bullshit and the Built Environment

If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture. — Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying

Architecture must have emerged out of dissatisfaction with the natural condition of landscapes and the environment. There, Wilde examines a picture of nature as oppositional to art. The creation of architecture as a defense against nature is then a fertile ground for the production of art. Art is defined as existing only when it has been mediated by an artistic convention. The experience of an event in itself, without a frame, cannot be perceived as art.

Realism is a manner of art that is born of simulation. Simulating the experience of vision, perspective, and the organization of solid and void, color and light as a matter of technique has been mastered. When considering the built environment as a subject of art, engineering vs. "design" must be addressed. Engineering carries a connotation of working within the strict confines of nature, of truth and rationality, whereas design has a connotation of something closer to art. The value of architectural design as Wilde explains it must refer to the Capital-A Architecture of pilasters, gargoyles, and volutes. Taken in contrast with the biomimetic designs that have become fashionable in current discourse, this can be framed as an analogy to English picturesque landscape paintings.

The balance that is created by nature is the highest art that can be achieved. The complexity and equilibrium which co-exist as a matter of course in the everyday of nature are, as Wilde suggests, the raw materials for art. The highest art in architecture comes from a thorough understanding of the interactions of those raw materials: situation, culture, politics, and physics on a macro and micro scale, where the designer anticipates how each move adjusts the way a project will perform when exposed to reality. This thorough, rigorous understanding of context and technique is accomplished by few masters of design.

Today's designers can receive assistance through a variety of tools that provide an augmentation of expertise. Simulation tools allow an apprentice to work within an environment that provides feedback on the nature of design, imposing rigor. The complexity of the tools that are now used allows the one who designs to manipulate or misinterpret the output of such tools. Often the tools themselves are… questionable. As Christoph Reinhart puts forth in his paper How Close Do Simulation Beginners Get?, the daylight simulation results of Ecotect were "more frequently misleading and incorrect than trustworthy" — in other words, bullshit.

Bullshit generators have emerged over the past few years as a computational algorithm which stitches together linguistically valid terms into bullshit. A verb, an adjective, and a noun are placed together with no bias toward whether the phrase generated is true or false. This follows Frankfurt's summary, that "bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about."¹ The algorithm in this case has no concern with semantics; it is an operational process with categorical, random output.

allocate suburban laminar flows
design urban clusters
disintermediate sectional circuits
remediate suburban infrastructures
re-tool intermodal meshworks
incubate mutable methodologies
anticipate post-Fordist contexts

Obviously, some of the bullshit has truth or meaning, given an appropriate context. The search space of the algorithm is sufficiently constrained that the resulting phrase — undeniably bullshit — is a valid solution. A person goes through a similar process when speaking to a topic that they have not completely mastered. Speaking with confidence to the state of the built environment requires some degree of bullshit, as the realm of relevant information is too vast to grasp completely. The quality of the bullshit produced is heavily weighted when determining the reputation of a designer.

Simulation-based optimization of a parametric model holds the promise of making design models prove their worthiness as they relate to the predictable laws of nature.

There is a great deal of bullshitting in the architectural profession.

Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. ↩

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