User:Monder ALmuder/sandbox

From harmony to chaos Humans are attracted to symmetry, but our minds like surprises, that’s why imperfect symmetry is usually considered more beautiful than exact symmetry. Symmetry breaking seems to be an original principle of Nature. However, there are strictly regular patterns in Nature, such as the tides. The link between harmony and chaos theory is the heart of aesthetic perception. Aesthetic perception is concerned with the quality of the result of interacting shapes, colours, tones and textures of buildings aside from cognitive meaning. It involves a special way of seeing (holistic vision). Stepping back from the detail in order to take in the wider whole. Aesthetics is the study of wholes which add up to something much greater than the sum of their parts Chaos theory is not about chaos as popularly understood. It started by coincidence in an attempt to model weather progressions, which led to the concept of the butterﬂy effect: A minute disturbance in one continent building up to storms in another. That is the popular metaphor for chaos theory. An understandable reaction would be to consider beauty and chaos as opposites like orderliness and randomness. Yet chaos theory offers to create a bridge between them in that it describes a situation in which there is obvious randomness which is underpinned by laws, where chaos patterns can have the appearance of randomness yet be underpinned by basic rules: randomness with direction. Our existence depends on asymmetry, and it’s possible to regard the human brain as a chaos system. It is the perfect system for producing unpredictable outcomes. This is the mechanism of creativity, where every creative act is a chaos pattern, and the element of randomness is an essential condition for success.

In this chapter the writer tried to explore how the underpinning rules of Nature may have a bearing on the way we attach aesthetic value to buildings and townscape. So the question is How much asymmetry is too much? And where is the point where it is preventing us from seeing the beauty that’s beneath the chaos?