REMIXING ARCHETYPE

To historian of myth Mircea Eliade, architect Keith Critchlow and anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, our pan cultural architectures reflect the universal logic that is found in ancient archetypes. From the rippling architectures of human behavior to the shape of our built environment we carry forth these ancient symmetries, often without knowing it. We speak together in the language of archetype - reviving, rebuilding, recasting our rhythmic heritage, over and over again. Like Indra’s jeweled net, where everything is both self-similar and the mirror reflection of everything else, humans have always paid subliminal homage to the natural archetypes of ideal form.



Thinking about a scale independent view, can we look to the natural world for such an “ideal form” that could span the spectrum of scale in what Lewis Thomas described 35 years ago as “biomythology”? If we live in a universe of signs and natural symbols, is there a landmark image that recurs on every scale, from the nano to the astro? A ballast that can help us move seamlessly through the micro dimension to the macro dimension?

There is. Surprisingly, it is a form that is as simple as it is mysterious, as common as it is universal, a shape that is natural, ancient, symmetric – a form that is at once eloquent, iconic, and timeless. Just from our human scale, the scale of the naked eye, this form would have to be…



http://scaleindependentthought.typepad.com/scale_independent_thought/design/