1st Urban Design International Congress - Isfahan

Oct 6, 05:18 pm

1st Urban Design International Congress, Isfahan, Iran

1st Urban Design International Congress: “Urban Design from Theory to Implementation”, Isfahan, Iran September 4-7, 2006

Presentation by George: Emerging Synthetic Urbanism

Both modernism and traditional planning seem unable to deal with the new sets of challenges presented by the 21st century.
The new field of Emerging Synthetic Urbanism is at the intersection of architecture, landscape and urbanism. This condition will be described in its multiplicity and ability to deal with programmatic mixing, relate to global interchanges, accommodate formal complexities and employ advanced digital and evolutionary processes.

•Programmatic Mixing: Complex interactive events unfolding in time and involve movement, connectivity and exchange.
•Global Interchange: Patches and corridors that form larger networks of nodes and paths that allow communication, interaction and adaptation.
•Formal Complexity: A radically horizontal, field-like urbanism, with infinite geometric patterns as spatial concepts. These topographies that are folded, warped, bent or striated.
•Digital and Evolutionary Process: A loosely structured frameworks that grows in and changes over time. These are immersive environments, diagrams subject to only partial control.

There is an element of unpredictability, a planned chaos, allowing for innovative use and chance encounters. Everything becomes part of an active system, which is multi-layered and multi-functional. Both the plan and the section are still the primary generators of program. Can we then talk about a plan and a section that is created by weaving, superposition and overlap, rather than stacking?
Characterized by frequent and systematic use of inflected forms to express grammatical relationships, this synthetic condition sustains a variety and richness. Much more than a formal model, architecture and urbanism are seen as models of a process. Cities are loosely structured frameworks that grow and change over time. They should be both multi-scaled and multi-dimensional.
In the era of electronic mediation, cities can only thrive if they embrace new digital technologies of production. Part of Synthetic Urbanism is invisible and immaterial as it is based on global telecommunications and information transmission. It exists in cyberspace. The physical existence of its parts is never guaranteed. It makes cities belong to a global network of dynamic shifts. The physicality of space is blurred with media related technologies and information feedbacks.
The resultant system is defining a new socio-cultural framework, revealing an uncanny and ambiguous landscape. The generation of form follows a morphological process in which geometry, coded with behavioral intelligence, becomes responsive to fields of influence: social, economic, cultural or political. The totalizing framework thus establishes gains of local specificity in its truncation through the anomalies of the confined field condition (or the “site”), thus creating a responsive and autonomous organism, susceptible to external forces (global infections and local differentiations).
Hyper-mobility and the neutralization of place are the new attributes of the emerging 21st century generic and global city. Despite this, globalization may prove to generate more diversity than originally thought. The encounter with globalization is fragmented.
The city has definitely become a condition and a non-place. Yet the “new” global city, like a surreal machine, reproduces its own new identity. The city has become an immense park, utopian, and endlessly reproduced. The emergence of this new condition is dependant on consumerism.
Used as design tools, new techniques of digital technology allow the modeling of forms as dynamic fields with forces and vectors, which either exist on a site, or are imported onto it. This interactive field allows the formation and deformation of the modeled space. Rather than attempting to contextualize or fit into, any intervention can now be the outcome of such forces within dynamic systems.
The new system is both image-based and operative, shifting from one to the other, from the picturesque to the industrial landscape. It is both physical and virtual. The virtual and the imaginary provides the extra dimension for speculative and morphing changes, necessary for its survival, similar to the effect on an algorithmic operation seeking efficiency and perfection for the survival of the fittest.
Subjectivity and intuition are still prerequisite components in a systematic approach to global and localized differentiations. This creates a new immersive experience and possibilities for new formal experiments, which, if done seriously and creatively, can trigger a breakthrough in the development of architecture, urbanism and culture in the 21st century. Within such a context architecture may employ evolutionary design and morphogenetic processes. Starting from actions and the “intuitive”, architecture re-imagines, redefines or reinvents.