a fluid-dynamic [social] structure
- Lebbeus Woods
a utopian antithesis of hierarchy
- Jennifer Fletcher
Why does heterarchy matter?
THE HETERARCHY is a new social order.
THE HETERARCHY promotes lateral thinking. THE HETERARCHY allows for multiple relationships between any and/or all the objects within the system. THE HETERARCHY is not an issue of aesthetics, or time; it is precisely the opposite. THE HETERARCHY is a system of tolerance. It is a system of balance and unbalance, of comfort and discomfort, of the expected and unexpected. THE HETERARCHY combats the hierarchy.
However, THE HETERARCHY is not anarchy: without structure (i.e. hierarchy), anarchy means nothing. If hierarchy is orderly and ranked, heterarchy is unranked, and anarchy is disorderly.
Woods created conceptual heterarchical architecture (basically coining the term 'heterarchy') as a way to combat the world's architectural response to war. This thesis is but a basic application of his concept—and that is all it is, a concept. He never imagined that it could be realized, that it could potentially change the way we live.
Architecture already affects the way we live. Purposeful, heterarchical architecture can rewire our entire society.
But why must we change? A good question, and an easy one to answer: Our society is hierarchical, and this hierarchy is destroying us. Just read the news.
As it stands now, hierarchical structure is a societal system brought on by cultural behaviors. Richard Sennet, in a series of essays compiled into the text Practicing Culture, argues that “Culture is a set of practices rather than static representations; culture is made and remade in countless small ways and occasional bursts of innovation. Culture is something people do.”[1] Culture behaves in open and closed systems [of society] the same way entropy does; to use Sennet’s words in his essay “The Open City,” in closed systems, entropy reaches “equilibrium and integration,” and in an open systems entropy dissonantly allows for evolutionary growth “rather than erasure.” The closed system is like a hierarchy: “every part of the system has a place in an overall design; the consequence of that ideal is to reject, to vomit out, experiences which stick out because they are contestatory or disorienting; things that “don’t fit” are diminished in value."[2] For contestatory things to diminish in value, they must first exist…architecture does not need to bring forth contradictory behavior, because it is already present. We shall task architecture to prevent its own value from deteriorating, to be the open system, to be heterarchical, and to draw out new cultural behaviors.