ABSTRACT
Van Emden’s description of complexity provides a particularly appropriate filter for discussing complexity in architecture. While similar to other such definitions, the link to Gestalt theory and Aristotle’s ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts’ parallels our understanding of how important buildings emerge from piles of bricks and glass. Van Emden’s passage is used here to qualify and catalogue the manner in which design complexities have been encountered by architects. Once identified, the different dimensions of these encounters can be slotted into the missing history of how architecture has begun to frame wicked problems, deep interactions and organizational dynamics of building
design. Indeed, this is a missing history precisely because those wicked, interactive and dynamic factors have often been encountered in architectural thinking but without any coherent connection between their underlying indeterminacy and the methods that architects use to understand them. In short, this paper is a history that connects architectural views of complexity to scientific ones.
