ABSTRACT
Although ‘complexity’ has thus become something of an imperative in various strains of contemporary architectural production, the resulting work and its theoretical claims ultimately remain somewhat beside the point in this instance. Instead, the issue at hand involves a set of expectations surrounding the identity of architecture itself, discernible both in historical encounters between architecture and science and in recent scientific popularisations of complexity theory alike. Indeed, the latter frequently rehearse a quality that architecture has historically integrated into its very being: the capacity (or incapacity) to provide a home, and to instantiate a form of interiority that, once and for all, keeps the threatening clouds of noise and confusion permeating a denaturalised
Homecomings ‘Here is no mere scientific search. Here is a mystical longing, a sacred core first sought around that small campfire sometime in the past 3 million years. This way lies the search for our roots. If we are, in ways we do not yet see, natural expressions of matter and energy coupled together in nonequilibrium systems, if life in its abundance were bound to arise, not as an incalculably improbable accident, but as an expected fulfillment of the natural order, then we truly are at home in the universe.’1
