2.0       Parametricist v.s Modernist Urbanism :

Le Corbusier’s first theoretical statement on Urbanism starts with a eulogy of the straight line and the right angle as means by which man conquers nature. The first two paragraphs of The City of Tomorrow contrast man’s way with the pack-donkey’s way:
“Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going; he has made up his mind to reach some particular place and he goes straight to it. The pack-donkey meanders along, meditates a little in his scatter-brained and distracted fashion, he zig-zags in order to avoid larger stones, or to ease the climb, or to gain a little shade; he takes the line of least resistance.”

Le Corbusier admires the urban order of the Romans and rejects our sentimental attachment to the picturesque irregularity of the medieval cities: “The curve is ruinous, difficult and dangerous; it is a paralyzing thing.”

Le Corbusier insists that “the house, the street, the town … should be ordered; … if they are not ordered, they oppose themselves to us.” Le Corbusier’s limitation is not his insistence upon order but his limited concept of order in terms of classical geometry.

Complexity theory in general, and the research of Frei Otto in particular, have since taught us to recognize, measure and simulate the complex patterns that emerge from processes of self-organisation. Phenomena like the “donkey’s path” and the urban patterns resulting from unplanned settlement processes can now be analyzed and appreciated in terms of their underlying logic and rationality, i.e. in terms of their hidden regularity and related performative power.

 

 Le Corbusier realized that although “nature presents itself to us as a chaos … the spirit which animates Nature is a spirit of order ”. However, his understanding of nature’s order was limited by the science of his day. Today we can reveal the complex order of those apparently chaotic patterns by means of simulating their lawful “material computation”.

Our parametricist sensibility gives more credit to the “pack-donkey’s path” as a form of recursive material computation than to the simplicity of clear geometries that can be imposed in one sweeping move.

Frei Otto’s pioneering work on natural structures included work on settlement patterns. He starts with the distinction/relation of occupying and connecting as the two fundamental processes that are involved in all processes of urbanisation. His analysis of existing patterns was paralleled by analogue experiments modelling crucial features of the settlement process.

He distinguished distancing and attractive occupations. For distancing occupation he used magnets floating in water and for attractive occupation he used floating polystyrene chips. A more complex model integrates both distancing and attractive occupation whereby the polystyrene chips cluster around the floating magnetic needles that maintain distance among themselves. The result closely resembles the typical settlement patterns found in our real urban landscapes.

                                        Figure 4: Case study : Frei Otto

1.2          Case study: Frei Otto, Occupation with simultaneous distancing and attracting forces,
Institute for Lightweight Structures (ILEK), Stuttgart, Germany, 1992
Analogue models for the material computation of structural building forms (form-finding) are the hallmark of Frei Otto’s research institute. The same methodology has been applied to his urban simulation work. The model shown integrates both distancing and attractive occupations by using polystyrene chips that cluster around the floating magnetic needles that maintain distance among themselves.

                          Figure 5: Frei Otto, Apparatus for computing minimal path systems,
                          Institute for Lightweight Structures (ILEK), Stuttgart, 1988.