Archaeology and nature: hyblean cultural landscape and territorial ...

In truth, we are witnessing today - and we are in a condition to be able to supply ample documentation on
these lines - the propulsion and wealth of design-concept thinking, strongly dynamic, in which a robustly
expressive freedom moves instinctively in interpreting the place, nature, environment and landscape.
Cities, without setting any brake on progress and development of our civilization, must emerge with
determined intensity and succeed in the intention to allow favourable opportunities to the true concept of
innovation in the processes of versatile creative fertility.
In this sense, we must apply local understanding to the developments of those territorial models and those
architectonic morphologies that may give vitality and renew the productive life and processes of
communication, on which the carrying out of our activities depends.
One possible response may be found in the composite expressions of form, generated by iterated and matrix
systems, the indisputable locus of complexity theory.
Certainly, it would not be utopian to think of programming the growth and transformation of the city as in a
morphogenetic systemic unity, which is self-regulating and that moves through procedures of calculation
consisting of genetic algorithms that entail generative processes and selective criteria.
And so the domineering character of the production of doing architecture emerges.
We are in the presence of strong, well-defined signs and concepts in which sinuosity and undulation,
fragmentary forms and broken lines define the lines of force of morphologic complexity.
In all this, there is also the concept and closeness to digital liquidity and fluidity of the designed forms that
are inevitably linked to the stylistic trend of parametricism that, albeit moving in the direction of the nonrigidity
of forms, in the non-serial repetition of elements, in the search of complexity as varied order, seems
however to have failed to relate to the physical and ergonomic nature of the human being.
“Whereas all architecture of the last 2500 years was constituted from the arrangement of a small number of
ideal geometric figures – cubic volumes, cylinders, hemispheres, and pyramids – Parametricism rejects
these figures in favour of splines, blobs and NURBS surfaces. All the elements of architecture become
parametrically malleable. (…) Innovation in architecture proceeds via the progression of styles (…) The style
consists of methodological rules: some tells us what paths of research to avoid (negative heuristics), and
others what paths to pursue (positive heuristics). The negative heuristics formulates structures that prevent
the relapse into old patterns that are not fully consistent with the style, and the positive heuristics offers
guiding principles and preferred techniques that allow the work to fast-forward in one direction”. [9]
In the hope we may arrive at the theorization of the variability in real time of the order of the material-spatial
configuration without further delay, bringing into play the automatic malleability of the constituent material, we
are witnessing today, with greater determination, increasingly evolutive processes, in which composing in
terms of architecture moves through systemic elaborations of complexity. It is the outcome of iterative
procedures, wherein the fusion between the shapes of architectonic work is achieved through different
modes of spatial interconnection, blurring, opportunely and softly, the borders between the forms of the
versatile unity of the design-concept imagination.
Fig. 9: Morphologies of parametric research. Zaha Hadid, BMW Central Building, Leipzig, 2001-2005.
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