A Symmetrical Story Santiago Miret

Longitudinal plan lines of structural and circulatory components. The angle of inclination in respect to the longitudinal central axis is lower than 45°. Transversal structural lines. Segments connecting the intersections of longitudinal and transversal lines and the longitudinal central axis. Interpolation of these segments. Foreign Office Architects FOA, Yokohama Port Authority Terminal. Yokohama, Japan, 2002. Drawing by Valeria Ospital

Since it is not contemplated from strictly operational notions, symmetry implies broader conceptual constructions that define positions regarding the discipline of architecture as a whole. Symmetry organizes the essential attributes of objects. Its presence involves the generic, the undifferentiated, the primitive, and the synthetic. Given that symmetry is a form of order, control, and unity, its appearance requires the consolidation of an object. The ability to visualize symmetry in an organization allows us to understand it as a whole. It reassures us. It gives us sternness by letting us understand the whole. However, the symmetry that David Salomon presents us is not reassuring. In fact, it is the opposite: disturbing, omnipresent, and elusive. As soon as we think that we have brought it under control, it sneaks back and filters through the slits of control that it produces, generating uneasiness, uncertainty, and perplexity because it is not symmetry as a practical tool that Salomon is presenting us, but as a complex construct that includes the technic and overcome it. This research is not intended to develop a historicist notion of the idea of symmetry as a technique, but to present it as a specter, which operates architecturally at many levels, not only in the generative process of the project but also in its form, its idiosyncrasy, its reason of being, and its inspiration. Symmetry is an unassailable presence that has determined the historical development of architecture.

In this pursuit, though, Salomon does not restrict the idea of symmetry to the domain of architecture. He starts from the hypothesis that architecture is informed by other disciplines, expanding its register. In this context, symmetry is not restrained to the known geometric operations of reflection, translation, rotation, and glide reflections, for there is also a conceptual manifold of scientific, biological, physical, sociological, mathematical, syntactic, semiotic, informational and psychological notions and approaches to its concept, all of them deploying a novel understanding of its reaches. That is one of the virtues of the book: its multiplicity, as its title indicates, since these notions are presented as stratifications that need to be fully deciphered.

Throughout the book, the thesis is constructed that symmetry has had a recurrent presence in the architectural project. The digital turn that began in the 1990s and the contemporary post-digital turn seemed to neglect it, but the complex configurations developed by digital architects cannot escape repetition and geometric reflection techniques. Modernism, in all its versions and protagonists, is marked by the use of symmetry both as an explicit technique of geometric generation and as an implicit manifesto in search for order and control. Renaissance is perhaps the period in which symmetry was most widely experimented, expanding its register and improving its scope with respect to its effects and modalities. It was during the classic period that symmetry was strengthened as a canon and, since then, it was consolidated as a legitimating beacon, inevitable and permanently present.

The thesis presented in this book is that an architecture of symmetry can allow complexity to coalesce without being simplistic or dull. Expanding the register of this notion allows us to approach the concept with seriousness, and ask ourselves about its pertinence and contemporaneity without falling into contingent trends widely spread around the idea.

Salomon argues that symmetry is not order, but something beyond, uneasy to portray. Symmetry is the structure that operates among things, but, unlike topology, its rules cannot be determined from form, but from operations of differentiation. If symmetry implied order to the classics, today it is the infrastructure that allows us to think new orders: orders that go beyond theory, methodology, or sheer technique, orders that are not canonical but that can override the canon, dynamic, unstable orders, appropriable by whomever is attentive to its their intangible presence.

In The Renewed Novelty of Symmetry, Greg Lynn states that symmetry has a direct relation with information: the more information, the less symmetry, and vice versa. However, what we here learn from Salomon is that more information does not necessarily imply less symmetry, but a transformation of symmetry. Information is the factor of complexation of the substrate that provides a symmetrical structure. Symmetry in architecture, unlike in the organic entities realm, does not necessarily represent the zero state of a primitive structure. Rather, it compels us to see beyond and operate from within a substrate that identifies variations, which can be manipulated. Here, the relation with homogeneity and heterogeneity becomes key. Like Lynn, Salomon understands symmetry as an opportunity for the generation of novelty, and proposes that the idea of novelty, as naturally linked to the heterogeneous, is outdated. Rather, when novelty operates between gradients of differentiation, distorting values here and intensifying operations there, it can become more than just a tool (flattening its power of transformation) but as a modality of organization that has repercussions on new notions regarding control, related to contingent yet systematic protocols of action. To understand symmetry as an agent of command proliferation rather than a global strategic rule from above, is to open the possibilities to active and continuous transformation of organizational form.

Going back to the title of the book and its reference to multiplicity, that is, to the presence of symmetry everywhere, it is important to account for symmetry not as something immeasurable, out of our possibility of understanding. Symmetry is a modality of organization of the form that operates materially, consolidating its internal consistency through the scientific disciplines. Lynn’s argument implies a retrocession to magical thought, where the primitive conception of the virgin world is absolutely symmetrical and where only the artificial intervention of the accident is capable of transforming it. The present book insists on constructing the argument by which symmetry does not imply an untouchable universal truth of mystical characteristics that escape reason, but that is a material construction with specific not fixed organizational aims.

Finally, the transdisciplinarity ubiquitous in the present investigation, does not seek to find foundations for symmetry alien to architecture, but humbly learn the arguments, reasons and values that other disciplines have built towards it. This perspective seeks to expand the material corpus of the conceptualization of symmetry as a modality so that its conceptualization can overcome the idea of geometric control, towards a notion of symmetry as a source of disciplinary novelty.

Longitudinal lines interpolating the longitudinal plan lines and the longitudinal central axis. Foreign Office Architects FOA, Yokohama Port Authority Terminal. Yokohama, Japan, 2002. Drawing by Valeria Ospital