From Letter to Structure: A Fractal Approach to Culture
Public Lecture — School of Fine Arts of Florina, University of Western Macedonia — 17 January 2023
On 17 January 2023, the lecture From Letter to Structure: A Fractal Approach to Culture was delivered within the lecture series of the Visual Arts Workshop of the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, School of Fine Arts of Florina, University of Western Macedonia. The lecture was open to the public and took place both in the Megas Alexandros hall and online. It was accompanied by a presentation of part of my visual and design work addressing the same questions.
Abstract
The lecture examines the use of a fractal dimension in the design practice of space, with an emphasis on the relationship between language and architecture. It considers the semantic and syntactic properties that architectural signs acquired in relation to linguistic signs during the postmodern period of 1960 to 1970. It discusses pattern language, a method for designing and organising complex systems first proposed by Christopher Alexander in 1977, and its connection to fractal geometry, to the non-linear nature of architectural design, and to the fields of complexity science and emergence. It closes with the implications of biophilia for our understanding of the fractal structure of the human brain and its bearing on human wellbeing.
The argument moves from the letter, the smallest unit of written language, to the built structure, treating both as expressions of a single principle: complex wholes assembled from a limited vocabulary of parts through consistent rules of combination. Read at the scale of culture, this fractal logic offers a way to understand how form and meaning are generated and sustained across language, image and space.
The lecture extends the research presented in The Architecture of Language and the Language of Architecture.
Full event details: floroieikastikoi.blogspot.com.