Architectural Entropy

In Everyday Urbanism, Margaret Crawford discusses Henri Lefebvre’s take on urbanism as a duality of constants and change. Many forms of urbanism concentrate very heavily on the constants, as architects and urban planners seek to provide order, whether through Corbusier’s Radiant City plan, Euclidian Zoning that was widely adopted, or even orthogonal street grids.

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The thermodynamic concept, entropy, that describes the inherent nature of an object or system to move towards a state of disorder, reflects the idea of change that Lefebrve discusses. People will always seek to change their world to improve their lives which can lead to a disorderly and more chaotic world, seen best in cities where large numbers of people are affecting an environment. This challenges the utopian vision of modernism, the strict zoning quadrants that can be found in many cities and other “conceptually pure” ideas of architects and planners.

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The form of constants may be less important than the ability to change within them. Vibrant cities exist in all forms but many have a quality of organized chaos that makes them endearing.