Nikos Salingaros
Encyclopedia
Nikos A. Salingaros is a mathematician
and polymath
known for his work on urban theory
, architectural theory, complexity theory, and design philosophy. He has been a close collaborator of the architect and computer software pioneer Christopher Alexander
, with whom Salingaros shares a harsh critical analysis of conventional modern architecture. Like Alexander, Salingaros has proposed an alternative theoretical approach to architecture and urbanism that is more adaptive to human needs and aspirations, and that combines rigorous scientific analysis with deep intuitive experience.
Salingaros published substantive research on Algebras, Mathematical Physics, Electromagnetic Fields, and Thermonuclear Fusion before turning his attention to Architecture and Urbanism. Salingaros still teaches mathematics, and is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio
. He is also on the Architecture faculties of universities in Italy
, Mexico
, and The Netherlands.
parents, Salingaros is the only child of the popular composer Stelios Salingaros, and the nephew of the operatic baritone Spyros Sali(n)garos.
, Florida. He took his Master’s in 1974 and Doctorate in 1978 at the State University of New York
at Stony Brook. In 1982, he started a long-term collaboration with Christopher Alexander, becoming one of the editors of The Nature of Order, Alexander’s four-volume masterwork on aesthetics and the geometric processes of nature.
and the Scale-free network
. Michael Batty, Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London, wrote about Salingaros' contribution: “He shows how networks which evolve from the bottom up lead to ordered (scaled) hierarchies that are both efficient and well adjusted. … This is the theory of the small world, but contained within, there is the germ of an idea which has barely been exploited. In connecting elements in cities, there is a natural ordering from many short links which aggregate to a lesser number of longer links which, in my view, could be linked to small worlds, to scale-free networks, to power law distributions and, more significantly, to changes in transportation technology. Salingaros is the first to hint at this.” Ref.
A Theory of Architecture, a collection of previously published papers, describes a set of guidelines for design, giving scientific principles that link forms to human sensibilities. In it he describes a practical architectural system in a form that any practicing architect can use. The work incorporates Salingaros’ observations of the greatest buildings of the past, which he defines as those that are the most responsive to human sensibilities. While this method and its theoretical underpinning support traditional architectural typologies, Salingaros emphasizes that architects should be free to adapt their ideas to particular situations, leaving decisions to be influenced by the environment and needs of the project. He explores questions such as: How can ornament be justified, and why is it necessary? What are the ratios and hierarchies that promote neighborliness and beauty? What is it about our biological nature — perhaps even about the nature of matter itself — that makes us feel one thing in the presence of one kind of structure and something else in the presence of another? Speaking as a mathematician, he proposes a theoretical framework to answer these questions.
Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction is a collection of essays written as a polemic against contemporary "star" architecture, and its supporters within architectural academia and the architectural media. It is an impassioned indictment against the "bad architecture" that he argues has been promoted by their actions. Salingaros defines "bad architecture" as that which makes people uncomfortable or physically ill, and which pursues formal or ideological concerns instead of adapting to nature and to the needs of ordinary human beings.
"Social Housing in Latin America: A Methodology to Utilize Processes of Self-Organization", by Nikos Salingaros, David Brain, Andres Duany, Michael Mehaffy & Ernesto Philibert, outlined the role of socio-spatial relations in guaranteeing a successful built environment. The principal urbanist problem facing the world today concerns the socio-political processes in the planning and construction of social housing, as well as the large-scale renovation of favelas. This paper identified urban space that is loved by its inhabitants, enough to be defended against encroachment and degradation, as a crucial concept. The criterion is an emotional one, and arises from the correct satisfaction of the residents' emotional needs through the appropriate urban morphology, which is in turn created only through user participation (in a bottom-up process guided by an NGO representative). This successful type of urban space rarely arises from the typologies of post-war planning.
Salingaros’ newer writings focus on biophilia
as an essential component of the design of the human environment, thus joining the ideas of Edward Osborne Wilson to Sustainable design
.
and Notes on the Synthesis of Form
, describes Salingaros' influence: “In my view, the second person who began to explore the deep connection between science and architecture was Nikos Salingaros, one of the four Katarxis editors. He had been working with me helping me edit material in The Nature of Order, for years, and at some point—in the mid-nineties I think—began writing papers looking at architectural problems in a scientific way. Then by the second half of the nineties he began making important contributions to the building of this bridge, and to scientific explorations in architecture which constituted a bridge.”
Prince Charles, an influential critic of contemporary architecture, expressed Salingaros' influence in his own preface to Salingaros’ A Theory of Architecture: “Surely no voice is more thought-provoking than that of this intriguing, perhaps historically important, new thinker?”
written principally by the highly influential modernist architect-planner Le Corbusier
. That blueprint segregated urban functions and contributed to generating post-war urban typologies such as monoculture and sprawl. Through this and other writings Salingaros sought to retrofit suburbia, and reconnect US and European cities at the human scale. This work can be seen as allied with the New Urbanism
movement to replace sprawling development with compact, walkable cities and towns.
Salingaros is involved in forming a community that applies analogous techniques of File sharing
and Open-source software from computer science to urbanism. This movement, based upon Peer-to-peer
principles, is aptly called P2P Urbanism, and combines user participation in design and the use of Design Patterns
from Christopher Alexander
with other methods found useful in handling complex software. A description, definition, and recent articles are published on the website of the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives.
The Structure of Pattern Languages (2000) argues that patterns (a concept central to the design pattern movement in CS and introduced by Alexander) encapsulate information about recurring design solutions and human activities. Techniques for linking observed patterns validate a Pattern language
, and dismiss stylistic rules and antipatterns as arbitrary. E. Todd, E. Kemp and C. Phillips commented: “Salingaros shows that a loose collection of patterns is not a system, because it lacks connections, implying that the quality and nature of the connections between patterns is what determines whether a collection is a language or not. He identifies two forms of connectivity when discussing pattern languages: external connectivity and internal connectivity. These two forms of connection are central to validating a pattern language. Salingaros implies that the richness of connections between levels and within levels in a pattern language is a factor in determining a language’s internal validity.”
The Information Architecture of Cities (co-authored with L. Andrew Coward, 2004) Ref. describes cities as systems of informational architecture, in which high-level functionality separates the system into communicating modules. Information exchange in urban systems includes visual input from the environment, personal contact, telecommunications, and the movement of people. Journeys by residents through a city accomplish a primary information exchange (the interaction that is the intent of the journey). But ideally, journeys have secondary, serendipitous information exchange. For example, a pedestrian on the way to work visits shops, sees advertisements, buys a newspaper, encounters a friend and has a quick word. The virtue of cities is this dense, fractal, multilayered information exchange. It is closely related to the generation of economic wealth and culture within cities.
In "The Information Architecture of Cities" Salingaros also defined the useful notion of "fractal loading", later picked up by Richard Veryard
, Phil Jones, and others in Computer Science.
by using an analogy with thermodynamic quantities in physics, later developed in collaboration with the Computer Scientist Allen Klinger. This work adopted the notion of Herbert Simon
that what is important is the organization of complexity, and it proposed a simple means to measure it. Christopher Alexander
discussed Salingaros’ model in Book 1 of The Nature of Order: “I believe it is important to show this result simply to underline the fact that living structure is, in principle, susceptible to mathematical treatment, and may therefore be regarded as a part of physics.”
in architecture, and its uncritial application of the philosophy of post-structuralism
. His essay “The Derrida Virus” argues that the ideas of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida
, applied in an uncritical way, effectively form an information "virus" that dismantles logical thought and knowledge. Salingaros employs the meme
model earlier introduced by Richard Dawkins
to explain the transmission of ideas. In so doing he provides a model that validates earlier claims by philosopher Richard Wolin
that Derrida’s philosophy is logically nihilistic. Even though Salingaros uses Dawkins’ ideas, he nevertheless strongly disagrees with Dawkins’ evaluation of religion as just another meme, as expounded in Dawkins’ book The God Delusion
. Supporting Alexander’s most recent work tying religion to geometry, Salingaros argues for the important historic contribution of religious tradition to human understanding, both in architecture and in philosophy.
. This is the first follow-up of the 2001 Utne Reader book "(65) VISIONARIES: people and ideas to change your life", which included Jane Jacobs, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Muhammad Yunus, Fritjof Capra
, Edward Goldsmith
, and William McDonough.
Mathematician
A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....
and polymath
Polymath
A polymath is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas. In less formal terms, a polymath may simply be someone who is very knowledgeable...
known for his work on urban theory
Urban theory
Urbanomics describes the city formation phenomenon where economic priorities prevail to facilitate the city’s propensity to generate and accumulate wealth. Such city formation involves some irreversible spatial investments, massive resource allocations and financial investments recoverable only if...
, architectural theory, complexity theory, and design philosophy. He has been a close collaborator of the architect and computer software pioneer Christopher Alexander
Christopher Alexander
Christopher Wolfgang Alexander is a registered architect noted for his theories about design, and for more than 200 building projects in California, Japan, Mexico and around the world...
, with whom Salingaros shares a harsh critical analysis of conventional modern architecture. Like Alexander, Salingaros has proposed an alternative theoretical approach to architecture and urbanism that is more adaptive to human needs and aspirations, and that combines rigorous scientific analysis with deep intuitive experience.
Salingaros published substantive research on Algebras, Mathematical Physics, Electromagnetic Fields, and Thermonuclear Fusion before turning his attention to Architecture and Urbanism. Salingaros still teaches mathematics, and is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio
University of Texas at San Antonio
The University of Texas at San Antonio, commonly referred to as UTSA, is a state university in San Antonio, Texas. With an enrollment of more than 30,000 students, it is the third-largest of nine universities and six health institutions in the University of Texas System and the eighth-largest in...
. He is also on the Architecture faculties of universities in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
, and The Netherlands.
Personal
Born to GreekGreeks
The Greeks, also known as the Hellenes , are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighboring regions. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world....
parents, Salingaros is the only child of the popular composer Stelios Salingaros, and the nephew of the operatic baritone Spyros Sali(n)garos.
Education
Salingaros began working in the Arts as a painter, but soon switched to the sciences. He obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from the University of MiamiUniversity of Miami
The University of Miami is a private, non-sectarian university founded in 1925 with its main campus in Coral Gables, Florida, a medical campus in Miami city proper at Civic Center, and an oceanographic research facility on Virginia Key., the university currently enrolls 15,629 students in 12...
, Florida. He took his Master’s in 1974 and Doctorate in 1978 at the State University of New York
State University of New York
The State University of New York, abbreviated SUNY , is a system of public institutions of higher education in New York, United States. It is the largest comprehensive system of universities, colleges, and community colleges in the United States, with a total enrollment of 465,000 students, plus...
at Stony Brook. In 1982, he started a long-term collaboration with Christopher Alexander, becoming one of the editors of The Nature of Order, Alexander’s four-volume masterwork on aesthetics and the geometric processes of nature.
Career
Salingaros joined the Mathematics faculty of the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1983, where he remains today. In the 1990s, Salingaros began to publish his own research on architectural and urban form. In 1997 he was recipient of the first award ever by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for research on architectural topics. In 2003, he was elected to the Committee of Honor, International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism (INTBAU), and to the INTBAU College of Traditional Practitioners.Writings
Salingaros' writings helped to introduce two key concepts in urban morphology, fractals and networks. His book Principles of Urban Structure has been compared to that of Michael Batty (United Kingdom) and Pierre Frankhauser (France) in describing cities as giant fractals, and the separate efforts of Paul Drewe (Holland) and Gabriel Dupuy (France) in describing cities as giant networks. His work links urban form to new concepts such as the Small-world networkSmall-world network
In mathematics, physics and sociology, a small-world network is a type of mathematical graph in which most nodes are not neighbors of one another, but most nodes can be reached from every other by a small number of hops or steps...
and the Scale-free network
Scale-free network
A scale-free network is a network whose degree distribution follows a power law, at least asymptotically. That is, the fraction P of nodes in the network having k connections to other nodes goes for large values of k as...
. Michael Batty, Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London, wrote about Salingaros' contribution: “He shows how networks which evolve from the bottom up lead to ordered (scaled) hierarchies that are both efficient and well adjusted. … This is the theory of the small world, but contained within, there is the germ of an idea which has barely been exploited. In connecting elements in cities, there is a natural ordering from many short links which aggregate to a lesser number of longer links which, in my view, could be linked to small worlds, to scale-free networks, to power law distributions and, more significantly, to changes in transportation technology. Salingaros is the first to hint at this.” Ref.
A Theory of Architecture, a collection of previously published papers, describes a set of guidelines for design, giving scientific principles that link forms to human sensibilities. In it he describes a practical architectural system in a form that any practicing architect can use. The work incorporates Salingaros’ observations of the greatest buildings of the past, which he defines as those that are the most responsive to human sensibilities. While this method and its theoretical underpinning support traditional architectural typologies, Salingaros emphasizes that architects should be free to adapt their ideas to particular situations, leaving decisions to be influenced by the environment and needs of the project. He explores questions such as: How can ornament be justified, and why is it necessary? What are the ratios and hierarchies that promote neighborliness and beauty? What is it about our biological nature — perhaps even about the nature of matter itself — that makes us feel one thing in the presence of one kind of structure and something else in the presence of another? Speaking as a mathematician, he proposes a theoretical framework to answer these questions.
Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction is a collection of essays written as a polemic against contemporary "star" architecture, and its supporters within architectural academia and the architectural media. It is an impassioned indictment against the "bad architecture" that he argues has been promoted by their actions. Salingaros defines "bad architecture" as that which makes people uncomfortable or physically ill, and which pursues formal or ideological concerns instead of adapting to nature and to the needs of ordinary human beings.
"Social Housing in Latin America: A Methodology to Utilize Processes of Self-Organization", by Nikos Salingaros, David Brain, Andres Duany, Michael Mehaffy & Ernesto Philibert, outlined the role of socio-spatial relations in guaranteeing a successful built environment. The principal urbanist problem facing the world today concerns the socio-political processes in the planning and construction of social housing, as well as the large-scale renovation of favelas. This paper identified urban space that is loved by its inhabitants, enough to be defended against encroachment and degradation, as a crucial concept. The criterion is an emotional one, and arises from the correct satisfaction of the residents' emotional needs through the appropriate urban morphology, which is in turn created only through user participation (in a bottom-up process guided by an NGO representative). This successful type of urban space rarely arises from the typologies of post-war planning.
Salingaros’ newer writings focus on biophilia
Biophilia Hypothesis
The biophilia hypothesis suggests that there is an instinctive bond between human beings and other living systems. Edward O. Wilson introduced and popularized the hypothesis in his book entitled Biophilia.- Love of living systems :...
as an essential component of the design of the human environment, thus joining the ideas of Edward Osborne Wilson to Sustainable design
Sustainable design
Sustainable design is the philosophy of designing physical objects, the built environment, and services to comply with the principles of economic, social, and ecological sustainability.-Intentions:The intention of sustainable design is to "eliminate negative environmental...
.
Architecture
Salingaros has had a significant theoretical influence on several major figures in architecture. Christopher Alexander, author of the seminal treatises A Pattern LanguageA Pattern Language
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction is a 1977 book on architecture, urban design, and community livability. It was authored by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein of the Center for Environmental Structure of Berkeley, California, with writing credits also to...
and Notes on the Synthesis of Form
Notes on the Synthesis of Form
Notes on the Synthesis of Form is a book by Christopher Alexander about the process of design.-Design:Alexander defines design as "the process of inventing things which display new physical order, organization, form, in response to function..."....
, describes Salingaros' influence: “In my view, the second person who began to explore the deep connection between science and architecture was Nikos Salingaros, one of the four Katarxis editors. He had been working with me helping me edit material in The Nature of Order, for years, and at some point—in the mid-nineties I think—began writing papers looking at architectural problems in a scientific way. Then by the second half of the nineties he began making important contributions to the building of this bridge, and to scientific explorations in architecture which constituted a bridge.”
Prince Charles, an influential critic of contemporary architecture, expressed Salingaros' influence in his own preface to Salingaros’ A Theory of Architecture: “Surely no voice is more thought-provoking than that of this intriguing, perhaps historically important, new thinker?”
Tall Buildings
The End of Tall Buildings (2001), co-authored with James Kunstler, argued that the age of skyscrapers is at an end, and that 9/11 marks the beginning of the end of modernist typologies dominating urban form. While the world has not stopped building skyscrapers, this became one of the most cited and controversial essays on the topic. Referring to this essay, Benjamin Forgey of The Washington Post said: “What many are feeling today goes right to the marrow: the fear of being a target. And who today can deny that tall buildings such as the World Trade Center towers make ideal targets?”Urbanism
Salingaros contributed to the New Athens Charter of 2003, which is meant to replace the original 1933 Athens CharterAthens Charter
The Athens Charter, or Charte d'Athènes was a document about urban planning published by the Swiss architect, Le Corbusier in 1943. The work was based upon Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse book of 1935 and urban studies undertaken by the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne in the early...
written principally by the highly influential modernist architect-planner Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-born French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930...
. That blueprint segregated urban functions and contributed to generating post-war urban typologies such as monoculture and sprawl. Through this and other writings Salingaros sought to retrofit suburbia, and reconnect US and European cities at the human scale. This work can be seen as allied with the New Urbanism
New urbanism
New Urbanism is an urban design movement, which promotes walkable neighborhoods that contain a range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually continued to reform many aspects of real estate development, urban planning, and municipal land-use...
movement to replace sprawling development with compact, walkable cities and towns.
Salingaros is involved in forming a community that applies analogous techniques of File sharing
File sharing
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multimedia , documents, or electronic books. It may be implemented through a variety of ways...
and Open-source software from computer science to urbanism. This movement, based upon Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
principles, is aptly called P2P Urbanism, and combines user participation in design and the use of Design Patterns
Design Patterns
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software is a software engineering book describing recurring solutions to common problems in software design. The book's authors are Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides with a foreword by Grady Booch. The authors are...
from Christopher Alexander
Christopher Alexander
Christopher Wolfgang Alexander is a registered architect noted for his theories about design, and for more than 200 building projects in California, Japan, Mexico and around the world...
with other methods found useful in handling complex software. A description, definition, and recent articles are published on the website of the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives.
Computer Science
Salingaros has never written a true software paper, yet two of his papers are quoted by the CS community. Both these papers were later included as chapters in the book Principles of Urban Structure.The Structure of Pattern Languages (2000) argues that patterns (a concept central to the design pattern movement in CS and introduced by Alexander) encapsulate information about recurring design solutions and human activities. Techniques for linking observed patterns validate a Pattern language
Pattern language
A pattern language, a term coined by architect Christopher Alexander, is a structured method of describing good design practices within a field of expertise. Advocates of this design approach claim that ordinary people of ordinary intelligence can use it to successfully solve very large, complex...
, and dismiss stylistic rules and antipatterns as arbitrary. E. Todd, E. Kemp and C. Phillips commented: “Salingaros shows that a loose collection of patterns is not a system, because it lacks connections, implying that the quality and nature of the connections between patterns is what determines whether a collection is a language or not. He identifies two forms of connectivity when discussing pattern languages: external connectivity and internal connectivity. These two forms of connection are central to validating a pattern language. Salingaros implies that the richness of connections between levels and within levels in a pattern language is a factor in determining a language’s internal validity.”
The Information Architecture of Cities (co-authored with L. Andrew Coward, 2004) Ref. describes cities as systems of informational architecture, in which high-level functionality separates the system into communicating modules. Information exchange in urban systems includes visual input from the environment, personal contact, telecommunications, and the movement of people. Journeys by residents through a city accomplish a primary information exchange (the interaction that is the intent of the journey). But ideally, journeys have secondary, serendipitous information exchange. For example, a pedestrian on the way to work visits shops, sees advertisements, buys a newspaper, encounters a friend and has a quick word. The virtue of cities is this dense, fractal, multilayered information exchange. It is closely related to the generation of economic wealth and culture within cities.
In "The Information Architecture of Cities" Salingaros also defined the useful notion of "fractal loading", later picked up by Richard Veryard
Richard Veryard
Richard Veryard is a British computer scientist, author and business consultant, known for his work on Service Oriented Architecture and the Service-Based Business.-Biography:...
, Phil Jones, and others in Computer Science.
Complexity
Salingaros introduced a model of ComplexityComplexity
In general usage, complexity tends to be used to characterize something with many parts in intricate arrangement. The study of these complex linkages is the main goal of complex systems theory. In science there are at this time a number of approaches to characterizing complexity, many of which are...
by using an analogy with thermodynamic quantities in physics, later developed in collaboration with the Computer Scientist Allen Klinger. This work adopted the notion of Herbert Simon
Herbert Simon
Herbert Alexander Simon was an American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist, and professor—most notably at Carnegie Mellon University—whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computer science, public administration, economics,...
that what is important is the organization of complexity, and it proposed a simple means to measure it. Christopher Alexander
Christopher Alexander
Christopher Wolfgang Alexander is a registered architect noted for his theories about design, and for more than 200 building projects in California, Japan, Mexico and around the world...
discussed Salingaros’ model in Book 1 of The Nature of Order: “I believe it is important to show this result simply to underline the fact that living structure is, in principle, susceptible to mathematical treatment, and may therefore be regarded as a part of physics.”
Philosophy
Salingaros has been a harsh critic of deconstructivismDeconstructivism
Deconstructivism is a development of postmodern architecture that began in the late 1980s. It is characterized by ideas of fragmentation, an interest in manipulating ideas of a structure's surface or skin, non-rectilinear shapes which serve to distort and dislocate some of the elements of...
in architecture, and its uncritial application of the philosophy of post-structuralism
Post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s...
. His essay “The Derrida Virus” argues that the ideas of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
, applied in an uncritical way, effectively form an information "virus" that dismantles logical thought and knowledge. Salingaros employs the meme
Meme
A meme is "an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena...
model earlier introduced by Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL , known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author...
to explain the transmission of ideas. In so doing he provides a model that validates earlier claims by philosopher Richard Wolin
Richard Wolin
Richard Wolin is an intellectual historian.He is Distinguished Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he has worked since 2000...
that Derrida’s philosophy is logically nihilistic. Even though Salingaros uses Dawkins’ ideas, he nevertheless strongly disagrees with Dawkins’ evaluation of religion as just another meme, as expounded in Dawkins’ book The God Delusion
The God Delusion
The God Delusion is a 2006 bestselling non-fiction book by British biologist Richard Dawkins, professorial fellow of New College, Oxford, and inaugural holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that...
. Supporting Alexander’s most recent work tying religion to geometry, Salingaros argues for the important historic contribution of religious tradition to human understanding, both in architecture and in philosophy.
General
Salingaros has been included in "50 VISIONARIES who are changing your world", published in the November–December 2008 edition of Utne ReaderUtne Reader
Utne Reader is an American bimonthly magazine. The magazine collects and reprints articles on politics, culture, and the environment from generally alternative media sources, including journals, newsletters, weeklies, zines, music and DVDs...
. This is the first follow-up of the 2001 Utne Reader book "(65) VISIONARIES: people and ideas to change your life", which included Jane Jacobs, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Muhammad Yunus, Fritjof Capra
Fritjof Capra
Fritjof Capra is an Austrian-born American physicist. He is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, and is on the faculty of Schumacher College....
, Edward Goldsmith
Edward Goldsmith
Edward René David Goldsmith , widely known as Teddy Goldsmith, was an Anglo-French environmentalist, writer and philosopher....
, and William McDonough.
External links
- Nikos A. Salingaros: Papers on Architecture, Complexity, Patterns, and Urbanism
- International Society of Biourbanism (ISB)
- Michael Blowhard interviews Nikos Salingaros
- Nikos Salingaros interviews Leon Krier
- NPR panel discussion on saving the TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport
- International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism (INTBAU)
- Lakis Polykarpou interviews James Howard Kunstler and Nikos Salingaros