Mimarlıkta karmaşıklık söylemleri
Complexity discources in architecture
- Tez No: 989282
- Danışmanlar: DOÇ. DR. NİZAM ONUR SÖNMEZ
- Tez Türü: Yüksek Lisans
- Konular: Mimarlık, Architecture
- Anahtar Kelimeler: Belirtilmemiş.
- Yıl: 2025
- Dil: Türkçe
- Üniversite: İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi
- Enstitü: Lisansüstü Eğitim Enstitüsü
- Ana Bilim Dalı: Mimari Tasarım Ana Bilim Dalı
- Bilim Dalı: Mimari Tasarım Bilim Dalı
- Sayfa Sayısı: Belirtilmemiş.
Özet
Karmaşıklık, bir anlam bulutudur. Bulut analojisi, hem determinist ve indirgemeci Modern bilimsel yaklaşımların tam karşıtı olarak,“saatlere karşı bulutlar”, kurulan günümüzün karmaşık evren resmini açıklamak bakımından hem de söylemsel olarak elverişli bir kapsayıcı“şemsiye kavram”olarak çift anlamlı konumdadır. Karmaşıklık, teknik anlamda bir sistemdeki parçaların birbirleri arasındaki etkileşim sonucunda bir üst düzeyde“kendiliğinden”“ortaya çıkan”“öngörülemez”davranış ve özellikleri tanımlamak için kullanılan bir terimdir. Pratik anlamda ise, disiplinlerarası ve indirgemecilik karşıtı düşünme biçimlerini tanımlamaya yönelik bir kavramdır. Bu yönüyle“karmaşıklık”teriminin isminin hakkını veren muğlaklığı, neyin içeride neyin dışarıda kalacağını belirleyecek kesin ve genel bir tanımının yapılmasını oldukça zorlaştırmaktadır. Bu muğlak zeminin, teorik tartışmalarda“başka yollarla erişilemeyecek sorulara”ulaşmak bakımından kritik öneme sahip olduğu söylenebilir. Bu nedenle epistemolojik dönüşümler, bilimsel yaklaşım (paradigma) değişimleri, ekonomik eşitsizlikler, sosyal adalet arayışları, ekolojik yıkımlar ve teknolojik sıçramalar gibi sebeplerle bulanıklaşan evren resmini yeniden düşünmeye ve açıklamaya yönelik arayışlar karmaşıklık kavramına sıkça başvurmaktadır. Bu tez, mimarlık alanında karmaşıklık kavramına ve karmaşıklık bilimlerine yapılan atıfların bir söylem olarak ortaya çıkışını ve bu söylemin altında yatan güncel politik, ideolojik, sosyolojik, ekolojik ve teknolojik aciliyetleri incelemeyi amaçlamaktadır. Bu amaçla bu tez mimarlıkta“karmaşıklık”söylemlerini bir süreklilik içinde ele almayı amaçlar. İlk olarak, Modernist mimarlığın (özellikle üsluplaşmış örneklerinin) katı işlevselci ve minimalist indirgemeci tavrına karşı, mevcut yapılı çevreye karmaşıklık ve çelişkiyi kucaklayarak yeniden bakan postmodernizmin karmaşıklık savunusundan başlayarak, postmodernizm içerisinde ortaya çıkan farklı yaklaşımlara uzanır. Sonrasında 90'lar ile tarihlenen“dijital dönüş”ile mimarlık alanında yaygınlaşan dijital araçların karmaşık biçimlerin tasarlanması ve üretilmesini mümkün kılmasıyla mimarlık metodolojisindeki dönüşümlere değinir. Son olarak, karmaşık formların ötesinde mimarlığın (form, davranış, alan, ...) içinde bulunduğu dinamiklerin ifadesi olarak ortaya çıktığı hesaplama yaklaşımlarını inceleyerek günümüzdeki karmaşıklık söylemlerinin etkinliğini ve sürdürülebilirlik tartışmasındaki karşılıklarını tartışan bir kapsamda ele alınmaya çalışılmıştır. Bu açıdan tez, mimarlık disiplinindeki karmaşıklık söylemlerini eleştirel bir mercekten inceleyerek bunların çeşitliliğini ortaya koymak üzere kapsamlı bir kavramsal harita oluşturmayı amaçlamaktadır. Sonuç olarak bu çalışma, karmaşıklığın mimarlıkta yalnızca bir“moda terim”olup olmadığını sorgulayarak, kavramın güncel karşılıklarının araştırılması üzerinden bu söylemin halen geçerli bir söylem mi yoksa çözülmeye başlamış bir ideolojik pozisyon mu olduğunu tartışmaya çalışmaktadır. Bu yönüyle tez, mimarlık alanındaki yeni söylem ve yaklaşımları anlamak için uyarıcı bir tarihsel okuma girişimidir.
Özet (Çeviri)
Complexity is a cloud of meanings. The cloud analogy is doubly positioned: it stands both as the opposite of deterministic and reductionist Modern scientific approaches (as in“clouds versus clocks”) and as a discursively convenient, inclusive umbrella term. In technical terms, complexity describes behaviors and features that appear“unpredictable,”“spontaneous,”and“emergent”at a higher level as a result of interactions among the parts of a system. In practical terms, it designates interdisciplinary and anti-reductionist ways of thinking. This ambiguity makes it difficult to draw a precise, general definition of what falls inside and what remains outside, yet this very blur is productive in theoretical debates because it can name problems that would otherwise remain inaccessible. For this reason, attempts to rethink an image of the universe shaped by epistemological transformations, shifts in scientific paradigms, economic inequality, struggles for social justice, ecological devastation, and technological acceleration frequently return to the notion of complexity. Against this backdrop, this thesis examines how references to“complexity”and to the Complexity Sciences emerge as architectural discourses, and analyzes the political, ideological, sociological, ecological, and technological emergencies that underwrite them. It approaches complexity discourses in architecture as a continuum. It begins with Postmodernism's advocacy of complexity, which reconsiders the built environment by embracing complexity and contradiction in opposition to the rigid functionalist and minimalist reductionism of canonized Modernist architecture, and then traces the divergent positions that emerged within Postmodernism itself. It subsequently addresses methodological transformations enabled by the 1990s“digital turn,”when the widespread adoption of digital tools made the design and fabrication of complex forms increasingly feasible. Finally, moving beyond complex form per se, the thesis investigates computational approaches in which complexity is articulated as an expression of the dynamics within which architecture is embedded (as form, behavior, field, and / or process), and discusses the contemporary efficacy of complexity discourse and its resonances within debates on sustainability. Methodologically, the thesis defines its approach as a form of discursive mapping. It places major theorists and movements that mobilize complexity side by side, identifying recurring themes and divergences through an extensive literature review and intertextual reading. The mapping is not presented as a rigid taxonomy. Complexity discourse resists forced dichotomies, yet recurring orientations can still be identified without reducing the field to neat categories. This approach supports the broader claim that complexity in architecture operates as a continuum of discursive positions rather than as a single coherent paradigm. For this reason, the thesis aims to create a comprehensive conceptual map that reveals the diversity of complexity discourses in architectural literature by examining them through a critical lens. In conclusion, it questions whether complexity functions mainly as a buzzword, whether the discourse remains valid, or whether it has begun to dissolve into an ideological position, by tracing its current equivalents. In this sense, the thesis offers a cautionary historical reading for understanding how new architectural discourses frame themselves as responses to contemporary conditions. Building on this framing, complexity is treated not only as a descriptive term for contemporary scientific imaginaries, but also as a historically contingent epistemological posture that gains urgency under conditions of crisis. The claim is not simply that the world is complex, but that what counts as an intelligible explanation, and what counts as a legitimate architectural response, have been reconfigured through intertwined transformations in knowledge regimes and material realities. In this sense, the blurred universe image is approached as a cultural and political condition as much as an epistemic one. Complexity discourse thrives because it can host heterogeneous anxieties and aspirations at once, while also borrowing authority from the ambition of Complexity Sciences to speak across domains through shared conceptual tools. To clarify what is at stake in this borrowing, the thesis reconstructs a conceptual and historical background for complexity as a term frequently mistaken for neighboring notions, and yet continuously entangled with them. This groundwork does not treat definition as a purely terminological exercise. Instead, it shows how the ambiguities of complexity enable it to travel across disciplines and into architecture, where it can function as an explanatory promise, a methodological style, an aesthetic program, and / or a political rhetoric depending on context. Within this background, complexity is contrasted with the simple (as an ideal of determinism, predictability, and reducibility) and the complicated (as layered but, in principle, unfoldable), while chaotic is treated as a distinct category whose unpredictability is tied to sensitivity to initial conditions rather than multi-agent emergence. This conceptual unpacking is paired with core vocabulary such as emergence, self-organization, unpredictability, and resilience, not as stable keywords, but as contested signposts that structure theoretical debate and architectural appropriation. A key move is to treat complexity discourse as internally conflicted. As it circulates in philosophy and culture, it carries tensions that do not disappear when imported into architecture. One such tension is the split between cybernetic explanations and neo-mystical interpretations. The cybernetic line foregrounds feedback, control, and bottom-up organization without presuming teleology. The neo-mystical line, by contrast, tends to reanimate motifs of vitalism and purposiveness, attributing complex phenomena to an immanent cosmic creativity or a life principle. By tracing these conflicts, the thesis develops a critical sensitivity to how architectural texts mobilize complexity either as a rigorous epistemic strategy or as a diffuse worldview. Within the architectural field, the thesis follows the intensification of complexity discourses from the 1960s onward, linking this rise to a wider cultural complexity enthusiasm. It emphasizes that architects' turn to complexity is repeatedly motivated by contemporary emergencies and by the search for theoretical and / or practical ways of responding to them. At the same time, it highlights a persistent problem: as complexity becomes increasingly indispensable in architectural discourse, it is also vulnerable to semantic drift. This ambivalence is treated as structurally productive. The same openness that enables complexity to connect disparate problems also makes it available for ideological work, including the depoliticization of conflict through seemingly neutral systems language. The narrative begins with reactions against postwar Orthodox Modernism, where complexity appears as an insistence on what reductionist functionalism tends to erase. It then takes Postmodernism as a pivotal moment that explicitly advocates complexity and contradiction, with Venturi's difficult whole operating as a foundational reference point, and with later postmodern positions diverging in their commitments and cosmologies. This part also foregrounds how complexity can function as an aesthetic legitimation strategy. In Jencks's nonlinear architecture, complexity is positioned at an edge between order and chaos, where systems are said to jump into new forms of organization, and architecture is tasked with translating this threshold condition into cultural form and symbolic meaning. Here, complexity becomes not only a description of systems, but also an argument about what kind of architecture corresponds to a given scientific worldview and how such an architecture might be recognized. From this postmodern framing, the thesis turns to the 1990s digital turn and argues that the adoption of digital design and fabrication tools changes the status of complexity in architecture. Complexity ceases to be only represented or symbolically evoked and increasingly becomes embedded in production processes through algorithmic thinking, parametric modeling, simulation, and numerical manufacturing. This computational paradigm is read as inheriting cybernetics insofar as it treats architecture not as a static object, but as a system operating through feedback and interaction. Within this shift, the thesis highlights morphogenetic and bottom-up approaches, particularly through John Frazer's evolutionary architecture and the AA EmTech program, where form is framed as emerging from material behavior, environmental inputs, and local interactions rather than being imposed externally through a hylomorphic schema. It tracks how AA EmTech consolidated emergence, morphogenesis, material computation, and performance-oriented architecture into an educational and institutional program often described as a biological paradigm. A crucial critical thread concerns the status of emergence as a concept. Within architectural discourse, emergence is frequently deployed as a slogan. Weinstock explicitly warns that, without scientific concepts and mathematical tools, emergence is easily used as a fashionable term with a definition so broad that it becomes vague and difficult to operationalize. At the same time, later AA EmTech publications can shift from manifesto-like rhetoric toward a more disciplined and operational definition tied to methods, production processes, and materially grounded outputs. This movement is important because it shows how complexity discourse can expand as an inclusive umbrella and also contract into a technically specific toolkit, and how these modes can coexist, sometimes uneasily, within the same milieu. In its final chapter, the thesis examines contemporary transformations and asks whether complexity discourses have become mainstream, and if so, what is gained and what is lost in that mainstreaming. It frames this question through debates about a theoryless period and neo-modernism, where architecture is said to legitimize itself through projects and performance rather than through explicit theory, particularly under the pressures of globalization and funding structures aligned with fabrication-oriented tectonic culture. The thesis also foregrounds critiques that computational design discourse often sidelines social justice and user participation, tending toward technological optimism and technical performance improvement even when it adopts a strong sustainability vocabulary that still treats sustainability primarily as optimization. In this context, complexity can function as a depoliticizing language in which systems and performance displace ethical and ideological positioning. The discussion of Patrik Schumacher is especially revealing. Schumacher frames parametricism's discursive and visual character through notions such as the elegance of organized complexity and seamless fluidity, positioning the integration of multiple systems and the aesthetics of continuously variable forms as its distinguishing value. The thesis emphasizes, however, that this project is also explicitly aligned with liberal theory and market-driven processes. It seeks to reconcile architecture with the logic of the free market and to organize the modern city accordingly, thereby placing complexity discourse within a neoliberal frame. This alignment marks one route by which complexity discourse becomes ideological rather than merely descriptive, sharpening the concluding question of whether complexity continues to function as a critical discourse or dissolves into legitimizing style language. Taken together, the thesis offers a critical, historically grounded conceptual map of complexity discourses in architecture, following their shifts from postmodern advocacy to computational production and contemporary debates over theory, politics, and sustainability. Its central contribution is to treat complexity not as a stable concept to be adopted, but as a discursive field whose meanings, methods, and political effects must be traced, compared, and contested in order to understand what architectural discourses are doing when they claim to be responding to a complex world.
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