Created on 2022-09-23 21:43
Published on 2022-09-27 14:15
TOWN PLANNING PRINCIPLES BASED ON ANALYSES OF TRADITIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN THE GREEK ISLANDS OF THE CYCLADES, APPLICABLE TO 21ST CENTURY ARCHITECTURE
1. SIGNIFICATION. The architectural or urban plan must be charged with more signification, based on a complex organization.
"To name an object is to eliminate three quarters of the enjoyment of the poem, which is derived from the happiness of discovering little by little: suggest it... that's the dream." Stéphane Mallarmé
"I prefer objects rich in meanings to those which have a clear meanings." Robert Venturi
2. DYNAMISM. The urban space has to cease being static, by introducing into it broken lines and curves.
"Oblique and elliptic lines are naturally dynamic, their emotional influence is a thousand times greater than that of vertical or horizontal ones. No dynamic architecture can exist without them." Filipo Tomaso Marineti
3. EXPRESSION. The constructed environment must favor participation in social life, through an adequate arrangement of common spaces founded on the concept of the square.
“In today’s cities ... the streets, after the advent of the automobile, have completely lost their “room-like” quality, I believe that town planning can begin when people will become conscious of this loss and will try to reintegrate the street … in its role of community room." Louis Kahn
4. ENERGY. The urban space has to be more than a simple addition of architectural objects. A dynamism must be transmitted from several built compositions by the breaking up of monolithic volumes and their replacement by many small volumes. Therefore, the urban aesthetic unity finds its coherence in plurality of the perspective parts.
"Buildings which have a relationship to those which are around them are more imposing than those which do not." Robert Stern
5. FUSION. Urban space must reinforce its unity by overlapping the notions of "interior" and "exterior". A group of architectural elements (doors, stairways, arcades, etc...) is constructed in a dispersed order and in a regular, functional, and surprising way. In such an environment, the union of architecture and nature creates an harmony that results from the meeting of the artificial and the natural.
"The architect's role is to set up a series of environments which will give to the inhabitant the possibility of communicating with everything that surrounds him, through a series of surprises which make him more conscious of the place where he is." Charles Moore
6. SENSUALISM AND BRILLIANCY. Volumes obtain a "provocative" grace of lines and surfaces, and so they can be seen as having a sensual quality. This architecture is covered with a white veil, color of suggestion and purity, perfect background upon which bright colors can be carefully applied. If is finally flooded, saturated with light.
"The notion of volume once again fakes on the importance it had at the dawn of our civilization: it becomes a living, moving element." Siegfried Giedion
"White is full of living possibilities... It rings like a silence that suddenly can be understood." Wassily Kandinsky
Alexandre Mimoglou
Architect & Town Planner (Paris, France), Diploma of Advanced Studies in Aesthetic and Sciences of Art (D.E.A. Sorbonne University)
Text in bold: © Alexandre Mimoglou. All citations belong to their respective authors and copyright holders.
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