Dynamic Equilibrium
Introduction
A dynamic equilibrium is a steady state held by continuous adjustment rather than by fixity. Nothing in the system is still. The stability is a property of the process, not of the parts.
Standing upright is the everyday case. A person standing appears motionless and is in fact making constant small corrections at the ankle, driven by vestibular, visual and proprioceptive feedback. Remove the corrections and the person falls, because upright was never a resting position.
Design that assumes stability comes from permanence produces objects that are rigid until they break. Design that assumes stability comes from adjustment produces objects that persist by changing, and that report their own condition while they do it.
- A river channel holds its form while every particle in it is moving.
- A flame holds its shape while nothing in it stays.
- A body holds 37 degrees C by continuously spending energy to do so.
Ise Jingū
The shrine at Ise is rebuilt on an adjacent site at roughly twenty year intervals in a ceremony called shikinen sengū, and the old building is dismantled after the new one is complete. Gropius, visiting in 1954, described the just-vacated shrine standing beside the newly built fifty-ninth.[1][2]
No individual timber at Ise is ancient. The building is. What the twenty year interval actually preserves is not material but capability: the joinery, the thatching of cedar bark, the metalwork and the forestry that supplies the timber all have to be exercised once a generation or they cease to exist. A carpenter can participate in three rebuildings across a working life, which means every technique is transmitted by doing rather than by record.
A structure held in dynamic equilibrium does not need to:
- Resist decay
- Be restored
- Retain original material to remain itself
- Rely on documentation to survive
Standard and variety
Gropius identified the same pattern in Japanese building culture at large, and framed it as the specific thing the West could learn: how to hold a common cultural standard and unlimited individual variation at the same time, which he called an organic cultural entity.[3] A shared module supplies the standard. Free arrangement within it supplies the variety. Neither is fixed, and the balance between them is maintained by use.
Just as a shrine stays the same building by being rebuilt, a system in dynamic equilibrium holds its state by continuously spending something to hold it.
References
- ↑ Walter Gropius, "Architecture in Japan," Perspecta, Vol. 3 (1955), pp. 8–21, 79–80. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1566830
- ↑ Gropius 1955, p. 18, caption.
- ↑ Gropius 1955, p. 80.
