Ionita, C., 2012, Metafore pentru o viziune organică a orașului contemporan, in: Dabija, A.-M., ‘Provocări în spaţiul construit. 120 de ani de învăţământ superior de arhitectură’, Editura Universitara “Ion Mincu”, Bucharest
- Author : Ionita, C.
- Year : 2012
- English Title : Metaphors for an organic vision of the contemporary city
- Published in Book : Provocări în spaţiul construit. 120 de ani de învăţământ superior de arhitectură
- Pages : 7-21
- Abstract in English : Ever since Vitruvius, architects used nature and the natural as powerful metaphors for architecture and the city. The architects of the Renaissance have sought in them the legitimacy of a superior order as nature represented the divine harmonic and well-balanced constructions that had to be mimicked in order to ensure the guaranty of beauty. Modernity adopted also this vision but by following the functional features and not the formal ones as in the past. After a period of absence, today, along with the study of the natural phenomena, the organic vision returned into the concern of the architects with a radical turn towards the complexity theories. Thus the contemporary interest in using nature as a metaphor migrated from the appreciation of nature's formal equilibrium and harmony towards its processes and its behaviour described as chaos, multiplicity and non-linearity. If the classics and the moderns used the order and the hierarchy as mechanisms to achieve the natural ideal, the contemporary architects seem to seek tools and metaphors that facilitate the understanding but moreover the management of the city as a semi-chaotically system. The ways in which the organic vision (the scientific and philosophical one) is employed in architecture and urbanism expand from a metaphoric use to a method of interpretation and even creation. The connotations of this vision can refer to: the image - a natural look of a building integrates it in the nature; the organic thought, as a doctrine that advances the model of organisation of an organism; the Metabolists as a group of architects, designers and planners from the 50's who were imagining the city of the future as a mega-structure, flexible and expandable, created and developed through processes similar to the organic growth; the incremental growth through time and bottom-up action having the dwellers as main factors that influence the evolution of the settlement (Almere New Town); or, more recently, to the corporal bio-evolutionist nature of architecture (Greg Lynn, Marcus Novak, parametrical architecture and planning) that is explored now through experimentation.