Archive for the 'architecture' Category
Recently, whilst reading the Sunday supplements I came across a holiday advertisement for Ontario with the by-line ‘The Towering Beauty of Ontario’ the accompanying photograph shows a benign public park with a trellis of trees supporting the skyline. The image, I presume, is meant to portray an iconoclastic representation of the modern city. But what attracted me to the photograph is how the skyline, although augmented with trees its vista clearly opens up to show Ontario’s communication tower. The ‘Communication Tower’ became a ubiquitous symbol of technological virility in the 1960s and 70s. Cities from Moscow to London erected these modern day obelisks. East Berlin, in particular, gave the west ‘the finger’ when it erected its 365m tower in 1969 (its observation platform swivels to this day).
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I propose one simple caveat urban design should strive to implement:
“Good urban space optimises Diventity” *.
Diventity is a concept that links diversity, density, and identity, and I define it as such:
Diventity allows identity to recursively emerge from the density of diversity, when that density reaches a critical mass.
Readers interested in the “new sciences” of complexity, chaos theory, self-regulation, emergence, and so on, and in the worldview some call the post-Cartesian worldview (I have called it the Quantum paradigm) - will recognise in this definition notions of great relevance to living organisms, in particular to contemporary cities.
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“With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities
1972)
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