Ende

Andy Goldsworthy’s film Rivers and Tides first reminded me of a couple of ideas in the area of physics. The first, of course, was conservation of energy. In any given system the amount of energy must remain constant. Matter is energy and energy is matter. The second is more complicated. I’m not as familiar with it but from what I understand the ideas seem to apply. This is the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia’s short description of Chaos Theory:

Chaos theory, in mathematics, physics, and other fields, a set of ideas that attempts to reveal structure in aperiodic, unpredictable dynamic systems such as cloud formation or the fluctuation of biological populations. Although chaotic systems obey certain rules that can be described by mathematical equations, chaos theory shows the difficulty of predicting their long-range behavior. In the last half of the 20th cent., theorists in various scientific disciplines began to believe that the type of linear analysis used in classical applied mathematics presumes an orderly periodicity that rarely occurs in nature; in the quest to discover regularities, disorder had been ignored. Thus, chaos theorists have set about constructing deterministic, nonlinear dynamic models that elucidate irregular, unpredictable behavior.

- The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia Copyright © 2004, Columbia University Press.
Licensed from Columbia University Press

In relating this idea of chaos to the energy of a city I am reminded of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi. The title is a Hopi word that means “life in turmoil� or “life out of balance�. The Hopi did not find this term to necessarily be negative, however. It is the unpredictable nature, the mystery of life. Specific scenes in the film that come to mind are those of a chaotic city. There are sped up shots of cars moving through busy intersections and people moving through urban spaces. If you follow any one car or person the movement can seem random but if you view the flow as a whole a pattern emerges. This theme is present in Goldsworthy’s film. As he tosses snow into the air the path of any single particle seems arbitrary but as a whole system complex patterns are visible.

-Koyaanisqatsi

-Koyaanisqatsi

An all around way to examine the flow and transformation of energy in a city is to analyze every sensory element we experience when in an urban landscape – from the sound of a street lamp to the smell of a library. One book (which I haven't read) that looks at these aspects of the urban experience is Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism by Wolfgang Schivelbusch (Contributor), Norman Pressman (Contributor), Emily Thompson (Contributor), Mirko Zardini (Contributor, Editor), Constance Classen (Contributor), and David Howes (Contributor).

The sound of a city is an energy ignored but always influential. An extremely important aspect of a space is its sound. Restaurant, grocery store, gymnasium, or church – all easily identified alone through sound. Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture by Barry Blesser, Linda-Ruth Salter focuses on this area of architecture.

Olfactory influences are also impossible to ignore. Steel or maple, concrete or vegetation – again, these differences are always important. Invisible Architecture: Experiencing Places Through the Sense of Smell by Anna Barbara and Anthony Perliss examines this.

Finally, there is the energy of ideas within a city. The city sustains a free flow of ideas as interesting to observe and as impossible to predict as the loops and swirls of red iron in the river.