Nikos Salingaros

Nikos Angelos Salingaros (Greek: Νίκος Άγγελος Σαλίγκαρος; born 1952) is a mathematician and polymath known for his work on urban theory, architectural theory, complexity theory, and design philosophy. He has been a close collaborator of the architect Christopher Alexander, with whom Salingaros shares a harsh critical analysis of conventional modern architecture. Like Alexander, Salingaros has proposed an alternative theoretical approach to architecture and urbanism that is more adaptive to human needs and aspirations, and that combines rigorous scientific analysis with deep intuitive experience.

Salingaros published substantive research on algebras, mathematical physics, electromagnetic fields, and thermonuclear fusion before turning his attention to architecture and urbanism. Salingaros still teaches mathematics, and is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is also on the Architecture faculties of universities in Italy, Mexico, and The Netherlands.

Born to Greek parents, Salingaros is the only child of the popular composer Stelios Salingaros; he is also the nephew of the operatic baritone Spyros Salingaros (Greek: Σπύρος Σαλίγκαρος).

Salingaros began working in the arts as a painter, but soon switched to the sciences. He obtained a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Miami, Florida. He took his Master's in 1974 and Doctorate in 1978 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1982, he started a long-term collaboration with Christopher Alexander, becoming one of the editors of The Nature of Order, Alexander's four-volume masterwork on aesthetics and the geometric processes of nature.

Salingaros joined the Mathematics faculty of the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1983, where he remains today. In the 1990s, Salingaros began to publish his own research on architectural and urban form. In 1997 he was recipient of the first award ever by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for research on architectural topics. In 2003, he was elected to the Committee of Honor, International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism (INTBAU), and to the INTBAU College of Traditional Practitioners.

Salingaros' writings helped to introduce two key concepts in urban morphology, fractals and networks. His book Principles of Urban Structure has been compared to that of Michael Batty (United Kingdom) and Pierre Frankhauser (France) in describing cities as giant fractals, and the separate efforts of Paul Drewe (Holland) and Gabriel Dupuy (France) in describing cities as giant networks. His work links urban form to new concepts such as the small-world network and the scale-free network. Michael Batty, Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London, wrote about Salingaros' contribution: "He shows how networks which evolve from the bottom up lead to ordered (scaled) hierarchies that are both efficient and well adjusted. … This is the theory of the small world, but contained within, there is the germ of an idea which has barely been exploited. In connecting elements in cities, there is a natural ordering from many short links which aggregate to a lesser number of longer links which, in my view, could be linked to small worlds, to scale-free networks, to power law distributions and, more significantly, to changes in transportation technology. Salingaros is the first to hint at this."

A Theory of Architecture, a collection of previously published papers, describes a set of guidelines for design, giving scientific principles that link forms to human sensibilities. In it he describes a practical architectural system in a form that any practicing architect can use. The work incorporates Salingaros' observations of the greatest buildings of the past, which he defines as those that are the most responsive to human sensibilities. While this method and its theoretical underpinning support traditional architectural typologies, Salingaros emphasizes that architects should be free to adapt their ideas to particular situations, leaving decisions to be influenced by the environment and needs of the project. He explores questions such as: How can ornament be justified, and why is it necessary? What are the ratios and hierarchies that promote neighborliness and beauty? What is it about our biological nature – perhaps even about the nature of matter itself – that makes us feel one thing in the presence of one kind of structure and something else in the presence of another? Speaking as a mathematician, he proposes a theoretical framework to answer these questions.

Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction is a collection of essays written as a polemic against contemporary "star" architecture, and its supporters within architectural academia and the architectural media. It is an impassioned indictment against the "bad architecture" that he argues has been promoted by their actions. Salingaros defines "bad architecture" as that which makes people uncomfortable or physically ill, and which pursues formal or ideological concerns instead of adapting to nature and to the needs of ordinary human beings.