Maybe they didn't want gun patterns for safety reasons :) But seriously, static patterns work better for medium that is architecture. I just find it so ironic that Wolfram thought this is homage to HIS work. Does he ever mention Conway in any of his texts?
He didn't say once in the entire article that he thought it was a homage to his work. He simply said it used his favorite rule. Everything he writes is about the beauty of this part of the 'computational universe', about giving the architects credit for choosing a pattern which blocks on average 50% of the light, about how they could potentially have extended the work to use more of the pattern. It's a very interesting article with very little of SW's infamous blow-hardiness in it.
In other words, no "Wow Cambridge honored me and my amazing automata!", lots of "These patterns I've loved for years are on a building and that is really exciting."
For "A New Kind of Science", here is the index entry:
Conway, John H. (England/USA, 1937- )
and arithmetic recurrences, 1115
and Game of Life, 877, 880, 949
and iterated run-length encoding, 905
and non-periodic tilings, 943
in Preface, xiii
and recursive sequences, 907
and universality of Life, 1117
