土木工程-外文翻译-外文文献-英文文献-城市与自然的诗学-走向城市设计新美学.doc

毕业设计外文资料翻译 Title:The Poetics of City and Nature: Toward a New Aesthetic for Urban DesignJournal Issue:Places, 6(1)Author:Spirn, Anne WhistonPublication Date:10-01-1989Publication Info:Places, College of Environmental Design, UC BerkeleyCitation:Spirn, Anne Whiston. (1989). The Poetics of City and Nature: Toward a New Aesthetic for UrbanDesign. Places, 6(1), 82. Keywords:places, placemaking, architecture, environment, landscape, urban design, public realm, planning, design, aesthetic, poetics, Anne Whiston SpirnThe city has been compared to a poem, a sculpture, a machine. But the city is more than a text,and more than an artistic or technological. It is a place where natural forces pulse and millions of people livethinking,feeling,dreaming,doing. An aesthetic of urban design must therefore be rooted in the normal processes of nature and of living.I want to describe the dimensions of such an aesthetic. This aesthetic encompasses both nature and culture; it embodies function,sensory perception, and symbolic meaning; and it embraces both the making of things and places and the sensing, using, and contemplating of them. This aesthetic is concerned equally with everyday things and with art: with small things, such as fountains, gardens, and buildings, and with large systems, such as those that transport people or carry wastes. This aesthetic celebrates motion and change, encompasses dynamic processes rather than static objects and scenes, and embraces multiple rather than singular visions. This is not a timeless aesthetic, but one that recognizes both the flow of passing time and the singularity of the moment in time, and one that demands both continuity and revolution.Urban form evolves in time,in predictable and unpredictable ways, the result of complex, overlapping, and interweaving dialogues. These dialogues are all present and ongoing; some are sensed intuitively;others are clearly legible. Together, they comprise the context of a place and all those who dwell within it.This idea of dialogue, with its embodiment of time, purpose, communication, and response, os central to this aesthetic.Concomitant with the need for continuity in the urban landscape is the need for revolution. Despite certain constants of nature and human nature, we live in a world unimaginable to societies of the past. Our perceptions of nature, the quality of its order,and the nature of time and space are changing, as is our culture, provoking the reassessment of old forms and demanding new ones. The vocabulary of formsbuildings, streets, and parksthat are often deferred to as precedents not only reflects a response to cultural processes and values of the time in which those forms were created. Some of these patterns and forms sill express contemporary purposes and values, but they are abstractions. What are the forms that express contemporary cosmology, that speak to us in an age in which photographs of atomic particles and of galaxies are commonplace, in which time and space are not fixed, but relative, and in which we are less certain of our place in the universe than we once were? Conceiving of new forms that capture the knowledge, beliefs, purposes, and values of contemporary society demands that we return to the original source of inspiration, be it nature or culture,rather than the quotation or transformation of abstractions of the past.Time,Change,and Rhythm"For the artist," observed Paul Klee," dialogue with nature remains a conditiosine que non. The artist is a man, himself nature and part of nature in natural space." Before humans built towns and cities, our habitat was ordered primarily by nature's processes. The most intimate rhythms of the human body are still conditioned by the natural world outside ourselves: the daily path of the sun, alternating light with dark; the monthly phases of the moon, tugging the tides; and the annual passage of the seasons.In contrast to the repetitive predictability of daily and seasonal change is the immensity of the geological time scale. From a view of the world that measured the age of the earth in human generations, we have come to calculate the earth's age in terms of thousands of millions of years and have developed theories of the earth itself. The human life span now seems but a blip, and the earth but a small speck in the universe.The perception of time and change is essential to developing a sense of who we are, where we have come form, and where we are going, as individuals, societies, and species. Design that fosters and intensifies the experience of temporal and spatial scales facilitates both a reflection upon personal change and identity and a sense of unity with a larger whole. Design that juxtaposes and contrasts nature's order and human order prompts contemplation of what if means to be human. Design that resonates with a place's natural and cultural rhythms, that echoes, amplifies, clarifies, or extends them, contributes to a sense of rootedness in space time.Process,Pattern,and FormGreat,upright, red rocks,thrust from the earth,rising hundreds of feet, strike the boundary between mountain and plain along the Front Range of the Rockies. Red Rocks Amphitheater is set in these foothills, its flat stage dwarfed by the red slabs that frame it and the panoramic view out across the city of Denver, Colorado and the Great Plains. The straight lines of the terraced seats, cut from sandstone to fit the human body, and the tight curve of the road, cut to fit the turning car, seem fragile next to the rocks' awesome scale and magnificent geometry. Denver is a city of high plains, Nestled up against these foothills, it rests on sediments many hundreds of feet deep, their fine grains eroded from the slopes of ancient mountains that once rested atop the Rockies, their peaks high above the existing mountains. The red slabs are the ruined roots of those ancient mountain peaks, remnants of rock layers that once arched high over the Rockies we know today. As the eye follows the angle of their thrust and completes that arc, one is transported millions of years into the past. This is the context of Denver, a context in space and time created by the enduring rhythm of nature's processes and recorded in patterns in the land. The amphitheater affords not only a view of the city, but also a prospect for reflecting upon time, change, and the place of man and city in nature.When we neglect natural processes in city design, we not only risk the intensification of natural hazards and the degradation of natural resources, but also forfeit a sense of connection to a larger whole beyond ourselves. In contrast, places such as Red Rocks Amphitheater provoke a vivid experience of natural processes that permits us to extend our imagination beyond the limits of human memory into the reaches of geological and astronomical time and to traverse space from the microscopic to the cosmic. However permanent rock may seem, it is ultimately worn smooth by water and reduced finally to dust. The power of a raindrop, multiplied by the trillions over thousands into plains. The pattern of lines etched by the water in the sand of a beach echos the pattern engraved on the earth by rivers over time.These are the patterns that connect. They connect us to scales of space and time beyond our grasp; they connect our bodies and minds to the pulse of the natural world outside our skin. The branching riverbed cut by flowing water and the branching tree within which the sap rises are patterns that mirror the branching arteries and veins through which our blood courses.Patterns formed by nature's processes and their symmetry across scales have long been appreciated by close observers of the natural world. Recent developments in science afford new insights into the geometry of form generated by dynamic processes, be they natural or cultural, and point to new directions for design.The forms of mountain ranges, riverbanks, sand dunes, trees, and snow crystals, are poised, jelled, at a moment in time, the physical embodiment of dynamic processes. Their beauty consists of a peculiar combination of order and disorder, harmoniously arranged, and the fact that their forms are at equilibrium, at any given moment, with the processes that produced them. Such forms and the phenomenon of their symmetry across scales of time and space, have recently been described by a new geometry,"fractal" geometry, which one of its originators, Benoit Mandelbrot calls "the geometry of nature""pimply,""pocky,""tortuous," and "intertwined." A sensibility steeped in classical geometry perceivers these forms as too complex to descibe.However, as fractals, such patterns can be described with simplicity, the result of repetitive processes, such as bifurcation and development. The variety of forms that stem from the same process os the result of response to differing conditions of context, of to the interaction with other processes.Strange and wonderful forms, mirroring those of nature, have been created by repeating a single computer program. Early in the process, the resulting form, as seen on the computer screen appears chaotic; gradually an order unfolds. Such experiments are the subject of a new field,coined Chaos by its pioneers, who feel that they are defining a new paradigm. Their subjects are diverse, their objective is to identify the underlying order in seemingly random fluctuations. Many of those working in field have expressed their aesthetic attraction to the mathematics of fractal geometry in contrast to what they term the "Euclidean sensibility."This is a geometry foreign to that of Euclid, with its lines and planes, circles and spheres, triangles and cones. Euclidean geometry is an abstraction of reality; its beauty lies in smooth, clean, ideal shapes. It is a geometry based on the belief that rest, not motion, is the natural state; it describes three-dimensional space but neglects time. That does not mean that we should avoid using Euclidean geometry in the design of landscapes. Indeed, such use may heighten our perception of the natural forms of rivers and trees and the processes that produce them, especially when it is employed as a visual counterpoint that both expresses and contrasts with those forms.In Dinan, France, a monumental are of poplars takes its inspiration from the sweeping out the irregularities of the river bank. The are represents the idea of that sweep. Through the abstraction and echo of the horizontal form in the vertical dimension, in what is clearly a line inscribed by humans on the landscape, the experience of the river's meander is intensified. Though set in a tight,evenly-spaced row along the banks of the river, the individual trees assert their own quirky growth, which is seen more clearly in contrast to the regularity of their placement.The interplay of different processes is also a subject of current research on "chaos." Computer drawings illustrate the patterns that result when several rhythms, such as radio frequencies or planetary orbits, come together. Perhaps this is the contemporary version of the "music of the spheres." They resemble a topographic contour map,prompting the realization that land form results from a similar interplay among multiple forces and processes, including gravity, water flow, and weather. Cultural processes also engage natural processes on the land; the rhythms of food production and transportation, for example, interact with the flow of wind and water to mold a landscape. The patterns that result vary in response to the specific context of natural environment, culture, and the idiosyncrasies of individuals.It is nature and culture together, as interacting processes, that render a place particular. Natural processes operating over time give rise to the initial form of the land and comprise the base rhythm to which the cultural processes respond, introducing new and changing themes, weaving an intricate pattern, punctuated here and there by high points of nature and art. Every urban landscape is a symphony of complex harmonies, which, although they can be savored at any given moment,evolve continually in time, in both predictable and unpredictable ways, in response natural processes and changing human purposes. It is a symphony in which all the dwellers of the city are composers and players.Making, Caring, Thinking, DwellingThe process of dwelling,an irreducible fact of every culture, is an aesthetic act, entailing being and doing, a correspondence between nature and culture. Through cultivation and construction, individuals and societies forge a place within nature that reflects their own identitiestheir needs, values, and dream. Making and caring for a place, as well as contemplating these labors and their meanings, comprise the aesthetic experience of dwelling.This concept, as explored by the philosopher Heidegger, has important implications for designers and planners of human settlements. A major issue for designers is how to relinquish control (whether to enable others to express themselves or to permit nature's processes to take their course) while still maintaining an aesthetically pleasing order. The pleasing quality of the allotment gardens of community gardens that are popular in both European and North American cities depends upon a gridded framework of plots. Each garden plot is a whole in itself, an improvisation on similar themes by different individuals. Yet all are part of a whole unified by materials, structure, and the process of cultivation.In Granada, Spain, allotment gardens lie within the Alhambra and Generalife. The gardens rest within a highly organized framework of walls and terraces, and enliven the scene rather than detract from it. They complement the formal gardens and courtyards,where vegetables and nut and fruit trees are planted among flowers and vines. There is no arbitrary separation in this Moorish garden between ornamental and productive, between pleasurable and pragmatic,between sacred and secular.It is possible to create urban landscapes that capture a sense of complexity and underlying order,that express a connection to the natural and cultural history of the place, and that are adaptable to meet changing needs. The solution lies in an understanding of the processes that underlie these patterns, and there are some principles that can be derived for urban design:establish a framework that lends overall structurenot an arbitrary framework, but one congruent with the "deep" structure of a place, define a vocabulary of forms that expresses natural and cultural processes, the encourage a symphony of variations in response to the conditions of a particular locale and the needs of specific people. The result should be a dynamic, coherent whole that can contine to evolve to meet changing neeeds and desires and that also connects the present with the past