Seattle and Raleigh-Durham marketing, graphic and brand design studio Design Kompany

New York Museum of Modern Art’s architecture curator Paola Antonelli interviews mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in this month’s Seed Magazine, a science publication that titles its current volume “The Design Issue.”

In response to a question about his life’s work’s influence on contemporary architecture, the discoverer of fractal geometry Mandelbrot says most modern architecture was “cheap.”

“They are cubes of the worst kind and I would hate to live there,” he says.

Admiration for this simplified art, this Euclidean architecture, which sticks to cylinders or cubes or parallelepipeds, was very short-lived. And most people didn’t like it. The profession, I’m sure, had no choice at the time.

A few people enjoyed it, a few people got a good name for it.

But at this point, I think it’s safe to say the idea that perfection is a cube is over.” –Benoit Mandelbrot, mathematician who shared with the world the fractal geometry set that bears his name.

In my copy of Seed, I underlined this phrase: “the idea that perfection is a cube is over.” Tonight, I made the above sketch in Illustrator.

It’s taken me a few days to understand what about this phrase resonates with me.

I’m not the kind of person to make marks in the margins of a book or underline things, usually. If I do, I use light pencil. But something about this phrase prompted me instinctively to press a dark, forceful line.

Here’s what it is.

The old way of doing things is just that: old.

More specifically, the idea that some people do things in a linear fashion, and others… well, they break out of Euclidean geometry, so to speak, and go random, has been on my mind since I discovered Pink Floyd.

I’m not talking about the usual gamut of things you might think I mean: getting off the corporate path to “success,” taking time to be with family instead of pursuing a career, buying that round-the-world ticket and hitting Madagascar because it’s there, or doing what Chris McCandless did and heading out Into the Wild.

No, I’m talking about a very different kind of division. It has nothing to do with culture, race, age, personality, or class upbringing.

It’s simply the difference between accepting the new ways that are upon us, or not.

As technology churns, the earth, like any organism, adapts. Or, perhaps it doesn’t, allowing parts of its own ecosystem to perish. Cold and dark, these atrophy and wither. That’s the physical world.

But evolution also underpins our very modernity: parts of our own homo sapien population–the people who hold tight to the deadening branches, despite the warnings, despite the forecasts of the inevitable–experience turbulence at the breaking point. Laminar flow–peaceful, safe–can without warning erupt into chaos.

Truly flourishing ecosystems will have gone through any number of iterations of adapting and adopting new ways in order to survive.

What I want to say here is, hanging on to dated ideas, or “traditional” ones, only gets you stuck. Sure, there’s a power in building routine and setting pattern to keep us human beings running at the right mental frequency, but let’s not close our minds to new ideas.

Where these come from is different for everyone.

Even a tiny slice of a hint of intuition that can bring about real and vivid, fresh and important change: even this could be waiting around the corner. The question is: will you be ready to accept it?

Side notes

On the plane to the East Coast, where we took a recent trip to study up on science for a new project at DK, all of a sudden we hit turbulence.

I said to Akira, “This is related to chaos theory.” He said, really, and I said Yes. Then I went on for a bit about the butterfly effect. About the ways sensitivity to initial conditions influence each and every subsequent action that unfolds. It’s been a while since I read up on this stuff, but I got very excited talking about how consequences of these actions yield future sets of circumstances. At any given moment at any point on earth there are more alternative outcomes than we can fathom.

Sometimes I used to think about this happening in alternative dimensions. And then in high school we learned about imaginary numbers. And complex numbers: the parts of which form the axes of the Mandelbrot set:

Here’s a zoom of the Mandelbrot set. This is the kind of stuff we saw people use for poster art all over the place in the 1990s. Remember? If it had been “discovered” sooner, they might have been on our Trapper Keepers.

How Design Kompany found Seed magazine

DK got interested in Seed magazine while researching what’s on the market to create a new brand identity design for Real Science, a Seattle science news podcast site. We like to read up on lots of things to prepare for all our new projects–it helps us consider all kinds of points of views.

Quotes from Mandelbrot

“The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines…

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.”

Related

DK report: Architects SANAA explore rooms of possibilities
DK sketch inspired by Kepler’s The Harmony of the World
DK’s field report on NY’s design “scene”

Check out the full text of the Mandelbrot interview in Seed magazine

Also see: the math nitty gritty of the Mandelbrot set at math resource website Wolfram Mathworld