130331 p480 chcmoraitis

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Reversing urban centrality: former examples and emerging design possibilities i K. Moraitis Professor, School of Architecture - National Technical University of Athens Address: 8A Hadjikosta Str. 11521 Athens, Greece Email address: mor@arsisarc.gr – tel. No: 00302106434101

Abstract Urban identity seems to be related, conventionally, to the central importance of buildings. However we may describe city structure in relation to open public spaces, urban parks and even to urban voids left unintentionally amidst building mass. Such a reverse interpretation seems to wear down the notion of urban “centrality”, in favour of the “peripheral” natural reserves. Thus we may even speak nowadays of the invasion of the peripheral urban landscape in the central city areas; of an invasion that has to de-stabilize the conventional margins of urban territories. However this tendency has not only to do with the form of our space structures. Moreover, it transforms the “margins” of our contemporary culture and science, reorienting them towards an environmental and landscape friendly direction. It is because of this cultural and scientific reorientation that we have to speak about a contemporary “epistemic” reversal towards a natural paradigm. Keywords: Centrality, romantic landscape, green porosity, landscape formations, topology and parametric design.

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INTRODUCTION: LANSCAPE NEXT

Following up the last remark of the preceding abstract, we may state that a way of thinking, analogous to our contemporary nature friendly tendencies, was already been detected in western societies during late 18th and early 19th century; at a time that environment and landscape sensitive movements influenced both governmental decisions and reforming urban design thought. Under this socially extended cultural impact western societies not only changed their urban strategies but moreover assimilated in their design, principles such as the reevaluation of nature, introduced by European Romanticism half a century earlier. In this way contemporary urban design tendencies, as landscape urbanism for example, appear to be epigones of previous efforts interrupted by a building oriented urban design period of the late 19th and the 20th century. Nowadays however, the extended environmental and economic crisis imposes the priority of sustainable principles, focused on the decrease of urban density. Peripheral natural reserves are accepted as the non-central tissue that must be connected with the central civic areas by augmenting the “green porosity” [1] of the urban field. In this way the importance of the urban center is reversed in favour of the surrounding environment. What is more the natural paradigm seems to be inducted in the majority of cultural domains, concerning theoretical or scientific approaches, constructional techniques, artistic expression and everyday life as well. In particular, in the field of architectural and urban design the landscape paradigm seems to replace conventional structural proposals, insisting on contemporary avantgarde folded or green “landscape formations” [2]. Topological and parametric approaches seem to point out that in the future, architectural and urban design have to familiarize with a landscape language, relative to the constant change of the natural environment. In this way Next Urban Landscape has to do not only with environmental sensitivity in general, but also with the new


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