order, chaos and beauty

snowflake3
Originally uploaded by Bill Kerr.

Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or the way human perception sees the world.

Gert Eilenberger, German physicist:

Our feeling for beauty is inspired by the harmonious arrangement of order and disorder as it occurs in natural objects - in clouds, trees, mountain ranges, or snow crystals. The shapes of all these are dynamic processes jelled into physical forms, and particular combinations of order and disorder are typical for them.

The above is extracted from Chaos, pp. 116-7, a book by James Gleick (1987)

My thoughts then turned to something else. Why do government schools, prisons and toilet blocks all have a depressingly similar architecture?