ABSTRACT
Buildings have evolved in fits and starts since humans built the first shelters, improving and elaborating huts and caves, steadily inventing new types of shelter, and enhancing their capacities until people all arrive at the modern metropolis. Hierarchical arrangements of energy transformation and material concentration are evident throughout the built environment, where the conflict between the collective and individual pursuit of maximum power remains an enduring ethical dilemma. Recognizing that buildings are products of cultural evolution does not exempt them from the dictates of thermodynamics-quite the opposite. By identifying the actions of self-organization at multiple scales throughout the built environment, people are able to connect the technical tracking of resource flows with the social and cultural pursuit of wealth, which buildings both facilitate and come to represent. Systems ecology links the longstanding environmental concerns with resource scarcity and pollution effects to the social and cultural dimensions in which buildings operate, and reveals often conflicting criteria with which they are conceived.
