Design and Planning

Plans and Layouts

Architectural Composition: A Systematic Method to Define a List of Visual Attributes

Composition has experienced multiple definitions over its centuries of background. Alberti defines composition as “the procedure in painting whereby the parts are composed together in the picture”. In architecture, Gaudet defines composition as “the combination of parts in a coherent whole”. Jon Brantingham, the composer of Hollywood, defines musical composition as “the process of making or forming a piece of music by combining the parts, or elements of music”. They generally emphasize the syntax of composition, which mostly concerns the orders and arrangements of the parts. From this perspective, a decent composition requires syntactical features. Despite considering various essential traits, the initial feature, as well as the final aim of composition, is mentioned deeply but concisely as “the achievement of unity”. As Blanc, Pontremoli, and Dews put it, the parts of good compositions are unified in such a way that any changes would not make it better, if not destroy it. From this viewpoint, composition is profoundly defined as “variety in unity”; “seeking variations within unification and seeking unity within varieties”. From another point of view, some theorists concern the semantic aspect of composition; they mostly concern the perception of a composition and focus more on content and artistic communication by visual elements. For example, Alberti defines “parts of a ‘history’ [painting] are the bodies, parts of the bodies are member, and part of member is the surface”. In an architectural plan as a composition, the rooms would be its parts; and for a building façade, the windows, roofs, railings and so on are their composition parts.

Planning Composition in Golden Ratio

In geometry, a golden spiral is a logarithmic spiral whose growth factor is φ, the golden ratio. That is, a golden spiral gets wider (or further from its origin) by a factor of φ for every quarter turn it makes.

Fibonacci spiral, which is constructed slightly differently. A Fibonacci spiral starts with a rectangle partitioned into 2 squares. In each step, a square the length of the rectangle's longest side is added to the rectangle. Since the ratio between consecutive Fibonacci numbers approaches the golden ratio as the Fibonacci numbers approach infinity, so too does this spiral get more similar to the previous approximation the more squares are added, as illustrated by the image.

Figure 74: Fibonacci spiral

Through connecting quadrants and centered point in the spiral that is connected approximately in the middle of the rectangle we can form a set of rotated rectangles. The connections are also connected to each other forming a compositional abstract image that can be planimetric formal layout of an architectural plan. Where as we can see the rectangular shape taking the blue color, while the yellow is parts are big triangles while the red is irregular polygon and the black are defined small triangles by leftover forms.

Figure 75: Compositional Implementation on Fibonacci Spiral

Figure 76; Resultant Composition from the connections

Master Plans and Urban Layouts

As briefly talking about planning on site or urban planning important notions comes from an urban scale in defining the notion of the planar composition and forming the industrial movement in being such fitting architecture, smooth and not forced and foreign, yet here comes on larger scale planning and designing how architecture fit and be site specific, this ensures the safe flow of the movement between the social classes and community.

As for specification of each urban morphology it’s important to know how time, location, scale and knowledge can affect the urban morphology and how economic classes play huge role on the living habitant in lifestyle, work, functional attributes in their architectural products. Thus, creating such excellent composition of urban fabric from the neo-industrial notions and properties that will accommodates a huge revolutionary architecture design in the architecture field.

As a conclusion for the book “Transparent & Opaque: The Neo-Industrial Movement” the idea of a revolutionary design principles that is inherited many previous design principles based on human needs, and added functions along the years it’s important to showcase many designs and case studies and to introduce new programs to advance this new rising movement and become more used and accommodated between societies.

As for social classes this new movement enhance the lifestyle of the habitants and is not qualified for specific economic class, this movement is open to all habitants who support the ideas that the book showcases and talk about, thus knowing more about treating the architecture in the best way that the human can get useful from, yet many architectural elements by time become outdated and new functions and program is being introduced in order to sustain the architectural evolution by the worlds that’s growing fast, knowing that architecture is a slow process such that immediate decisions must be taken into consideration in adding or removing elements in order to keep environment, community, social and economic sustainability up going. The importance of the new movement is to flow smoothly with the flow of the social classes, not being in acceptable nor hard to be applied as well as fit and become more used in the society due to its important impact on growing the society. As for the morphology and the formality that plays role in the outcome design, its important to conceptualize the project according to architecture, social, site, and economic properties, knowing that the movement move with the formality that the used materials produce naturally and not by forcing the material to be applied, yet the flow of the composing materials used to form the outcome create an organic design in terms of naturally using materials without adding or implementing any foreign additives to it, as well as being site specific, following the site topography and the urban fabric and not overwhelming the space or foreign to it, yet not following the shallow term of organic as the shape of the building “Curvy form” which is not a main theme for the industrial movement.