It is often stated that a mechanistic, deterministic and reductive materialism took hold of Western thought at some point during the industrial revolution. Following feminist theory ‘pattern’ (or ‘form’) is often viewed as the privileged side of the pairing, one that is deeply structured and indeed gendered within our language: pattern comes from the Latin pater, meaning father, while the word matter derives from the Latin mater, meaning mother.

Moreover, we find a similar distinction in the very division of labour that underlies modern building production: it is typically conceived as a mental practice, an immaterial labour that informs the matter of the world through the embodied material labour of builders. For him, the pattern/matter dualism represented one version of a deep conceptual structure which can be found in other iterations, such as form/substance, mind/matter and culture/nature.Ī similar dualism structures our concepts and experience of architecture: we perceive built space as bodily experience and conceive it, abstractly, in the form of symbolic and iconographic languages, and various kinds of cognitive mappings. The anthropologist, cyberneticist and ecologist Gregory Bateson (1904-80) observed that matter (what things are made of) and pattern (how they are organised) have tended to be treated as distinct disciplinary areas of study within the dominant traditions of Western thought. Now his thinking and writing could offer an essential guide to the future of architecture and urbanism In the 20th century, the diverse work of Gregory Bateson was hugely influential in many fields.

Bateson mind and nature