Metapatterns

by Tyler Volk

Book Overview

In the interdisciplinary tradition of Buckminster Fuller's work, Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature, and Fritjof Capra's Tao of Physics, Metapatterns embraces both nature and culture, seeking out the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 023106750X
• Release Date: April 1995
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

the new guard

Man and woman, the double helix, positive and negative, acid and base, action and reaction, predator and prey. These are pairs of twos found in the world around us. Tyler Volk names them binaries, which are one of his `metapatterns' or `pattern of patterns' or universal motifs described in great detail in his book. Some might find the metapatterns proposed as crazy manifestations. Some might find them real and useful, especially as analytical tools, which can be applied to any field to better understand the larger picture or the behind the scene activities of that field. For example, as an athlete and athletic trainer, I have used the metapattern of `boarders' to better understand why different sports share very common characteristics and lack others. Whatever one's opinions are about the existence and relevance of metapatterns, "Metapatterns" has much to offer beyond its main theory. The observations and analytical methods of "Metapatterns" are truly a feat in the name of interdisciplinary work. Dr. Volk brings you along on his life journey of exploration. Observations are vividly represented and written in a way in which non-science people can understand. Dr. Volk's ability of transcending disciplines to find connections, which become Volk's metapatterns, will urge you to do the same. "Metapatterns" will dive into ideas and explore them from many angles, sometimes more than the reader may have bargained for. The reader must be ready for a true mental exercise. "Metapatterns" will surely take you to uncharted waters. I feel that if you are up for it, "Metapatterns" will be a mind-expanding and illuminating read. As the great interdisciplinarian Gregory Bateson suggested to others, Dr Volk truly discards magnitudes in favor of shapes, patterns, and relations. The explorative, interdisciplinary, and connective methods of thinking are awesome tools in understanding the world around us, and "Metapatterns" will expose you to them in action.

Revolution by Simplicity!

Einstein once lamented that his work "changed everything but the way we think." If you are attached to a dog-eat-dog existence, and change is just too...bothersome, Metapatterns is probably not for you. Science is rapidly changing, and Dr. Tyler Volk generously invites us all to be in on it. If you would like some cobwebs tenderly removed, and would like a window on the new disciplines being born and old ones coming alive, just sit back and watch this guy go. With a flood of vivid images, taken from mainstream culture, everyday life, essential Science laid bare, the banquet shared of one man's experience, Tyler Volk empties by filling. If you believe that meaningful relatedness is essential, read this book. You will learn lots of nourishing stuff and it won't even hurt.

Form, space, & disorder?

As a practicing architect who has a regular opportunity to explore the "meaningful making of space" this book was quite an eye opener. I've spent a great deal of time looking for order amongst the disorder of everyday life and the designed environment, finding the threads in "Metapatterns" was a good pathway to understanding the relationships. If Lou Kahn were alive today, it would probably take him to new spaces and forms. Excellent!

Tfhe Marriage of Science and Poetry

If one does not encompass the fundamentals, how may one comprehend the complicated? Dr. Volk takes us through those basic archetypical forms, which by their ubiquity are the sources by which and in which we live. However, as with all phenomena which stares us in the face; someone must awaken us to the obvious, for nothing is more elusive than that which manifests itself before one's eyes. Science and poetry dance across Dr. Volk's pages like entranced lovers, uniting science and poetry into a Unity.While Metapatterns is realized as a scientific artifact, to this reader it strongly resembles a prose edition of Lucretius', "The Way Things Are". Proof? Here is a paragraph chosen at random: "The simplest animals - for instance sponges - are slso dispersed. But once the path of animal evolution detatches its candidates From such substrates as rocks and set them gliding and swimming Through fluids, mobility calls for global network of communication and control A new center was born The nervous system."Anyone who cannot feel the cadence of poetry in this paragraph has been blindsided by prose.