Architectural Extinction

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Different dwelling types exhibit varying degrees of tolerance to environmental conditions, influenced by factors such as environmental changes, cultural dynamics, the availability of skilled workmanship, and economic justifications. In the realm of architecture, the term “type” encompasses both the visual representation and the organizational elements that encapsulate the essential and distinctive features shaped by a specific set of forces.

Contrary to intuition, seemingly random processes have the capacity to yield discernible patterns. Dwelling types that span across geographic regions exhibit resilience against extinction. The collective strength of a group of related types lies not just in its diversity but in its abundance; a multitude of types within a group enhances its resistance to extinction compared to groups with only a handful of types. Moreover, dwelling types constructed over a broad geographic range tend to navigate crises more successfully than those confined to a single climate.

In times of mass extinction, factors such as the quality of workmanship take a back seat to the significance of belonging to specific groups or distributional geographies. The survival and endurance of dwelling types during such critical periods hinge more on their association with larger, widespread categories than on individual craftsmanship or localized climatic preferences.

How Does Evolution Work In Architecture?

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Translating biological theories into architectural studies necessitates a clear understanding of the evolutionary processes at play. Often, our lack of clarity obscures what exactly is evolving. While recent anthropological focus has shifted towards human behavioral evolution, there remains a tendency to overlook the role of inorganic elements in evolution. Cultural attributes, crucial in effecting change, are frequently excluded from discussions on human evolution, despite their significance in shaping it alongside genetics and natural selection.

Organisms, including humans, undergo change due to various selective pressures, whether from the physical or social environment or random chance. Anthropologists must grasp not only the evolutionary context but also its outcomes. Just as biologists extend the phenotype of birds to include nests, understanding human evolution demands considering cultural constructs like housing.

Among the built environment, houses hold paramount importance due to their prevalence. Understanding the evolution of dwellings requires establishing criteria, with typology offering a robust framework. Typology encompasses both the essence and organization of architectural forms, facilitating not just imitation but transformation. Architectural types evolve gradually, responding to economic, cultural, and environmental factors.

Civilization’s coherence relies on the continuity of its dwelling typology. Integrating new constructs into existing contexts ensures vitality, whereas neglecting historical typological compositions leads to semantic triviality. We must assess past and present housing prototypes to grasp their utility and significance.

Evolutionary narratives often overlook the halting, unpredictable nature of the process, characterized by shifts between adaptive plateaus. Dwelling types exhibit long periods of stasis punctuated by rapid change, akin to punctuated equilibrium in biology. Specialists face greater extinction risks than generalists due to their narrow adaptations.

Random processes contribute to patterns, with geographically widespread dwelling types exhibiting resilience. Environmental context and cultural interactions drive the evolution of new house types, irrespective of geographical changes. Even in stable environments, economic pressures perpetuate evolutionary dynamics in architecture.

 

 

Some ideas to think about:

  • Mosaic evolution is a concept used primarily in evolutionary biology and anthropology to describe a pattern of evolution where different traits or features of an organism evolve at different rates and times, rather than all traits evolving simultaneously or uniformly. This concept helps explain the complexity and variability observed in the evolutionary history of species.

Cave Dwelling Myth

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Even today, because the narrative form is so powerful and seductive, it is hard to avoid. One of the specific characteristics of us is a love of stories, so that narrative reports of human evolution are demanded by society and even tend toward a common form. Scientists are generally aware of the influence of theory on observation, Seldom do they recognize, however, that many scientific theories are essentially narratives. There is an element in evolutionary approach that make it particularly susceptible to being cast in narrative form, both by those who tell the story and by those who listen to them. It lies in the fact that in seeking to explain the origins, we are apparently faced with a sequence of events through time that transformed a phenomenon. The description of such a sequence falls naturally into narrative form. clearly a narrative structure is more than just a story; it conform to the structure of the hero folk tale. Telling a story does not consist simply in adding episodes to one another, It consists in creating relations between events.

Prehistoric men are commonly referred to in the popular media, in literature and in films as cave men, in spite of the fact that the availability of caves was limited to those mountainous areas where they existed in geological formations and where the entrances were accessible. Yet where they existed, they came to be occupied repeatedly by people from Mousterian times onward, often in competition with other inhabitants such as bears and hyenas.  If these people had shelters at all, they must have been simple structures of branches, leaves and skins which stood no chance of preservation, what we now called ephemeral dwellings. Within cave and rock shelter sites, we started to see glimmers of evidence for spatial patterns of human behavior after about 200,000 years ago.

According to archaeological findings, the groups who visited the caves were very small and were there for only short episodes. They are usually located in well-sheltered locations, offer extensive wide-angle views the valleys they overlook, and are near to sources of high-quality flint. Also, they were well-situated to function not only as shelters, but as the focus of a wide range of economic and technological activities, with many resources available within a short radius.

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