1、 Title: The Poetics of City and Nature: Toward a New Aesthetic for Urban Design Journal Issue: Places, 6(1) Author: Spirn, Anne Whiston Publication Date: 10-01-1989 Publication Info: Places, College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley Citation: Spirn, Anne Whiston. (1989). The Poetics of City and N
2、ature: Toward a New Aesthetic for Urban Design. Places, 6(1), 82. Keywords: places, placemaking, architecture, environment, landscape, urban design, public realm, planning, design, aesthetic, poetics, Anne Whiston Spirn The city has been compared to a poem, a sculpture, a machine. But the city is mo
3、re than a text,and more than an artistic or technological. It is a place where natural forces pulse and millions of people live thinking,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
4、 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
5、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 sin
6、gular 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,
7、 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,
8、 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 毕业设计外文资料翻译 unimaginable to societies of the past. Our perceptions of nature, the quality of its order,an
9、d 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 forms buildings, streets, and parks that are often deferred to as precedents not only reflects a response to cultural processes and values of the time in
10、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 w
11、hich 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
12、 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
13、towns and cities, our habitat was ordered primarily by natures 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 annua
14、l 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 earths age in terms of thousands of milli
15、ons 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
16、, 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 natures order and human order prompts contemplati
17、on of what if means to be human. Design that resonates with a places natural and cultural rhythms, that echoes, amplifies, clarifies, or extends them, contributes to a sense of rootedness in space time. Process,Pattern,and Form Great,upright, red rocks,thrust from the earth,rising hundreds of feet,
18、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
19、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 毕业设计外文资料翻译 many hun
20、dreds 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 kn
21、ow 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 natures processes and recorded in patterns in the land. The amphitheater aff
22、ords 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 sens
23、e 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 spac
24、e 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
25、 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 with
26、in which the sap rises are patterns that mirror the branching arteries and veins through which our blood courses. Patterns formed by natures processes and their symmetry across scales have long been appreciated by close observers of the natural world. Recent developments in science afford new insigh
27、ts 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. The
28、ir 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
29、 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
30、 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
