Matter and Pattern – or the questions ‘What are things made of?’, and ‘How are they organised?’, have tended to be treated as separate questions within the traditions of western thought. There have been notable exceptions – Aristotle’s concept of entelechy, Goethe’s romantic science, or more recently the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx, and the organismic and cybernetic systems thinking of Deep Ecology philosophy – in particular the work of Gregory Bateson, David Bohm, Fritjof Capra and Rupert Sheldrake. For all of these thinkers, our minds are dispersed and active across fields of matter – our environments – in ways that we are only beginning to understand (or remember?)
A living conception of matter and pattern – to which architectural knowledge might have a particularly significant contribution to make – is, I think, key to the formulation of a modern political theory of ecology and mind.

The concepts ‘matter’ and ‘pattern’ are more fundamentally connected than it might at first appear. ‘Pattern’ has its roots in the Middle English word patron – in the sense of something serving as a model. The idea of a ‘pattern book’ of designs, of a template which can be copied uses the word in exactly this original sense. The wordpatron comes to us via Old French from the Latin pater, meaning ‘father’. The word ‘matter’ also has its roots in Middle English, and also comes via Old French from the Latin materia meaning ‘timber, substance,’ also ‘subject of discourse,’ and ultimately derives from the Latin mater, meaning ‘mother.’

This text and image were recently exhibited at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, as part of the recent ‘Green Forum 2009′ event. I presented material from my soon to be submitted PhD - Eco-Cybernetics: The Architecture of the Extended Mind

Tags: bateson, ecology, environment, matter, mind, pattern