Emergent Urbanism

Rediscovering Urban Complexity

Natural Landscapes

Chaos re-emerges

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Sat, 01/24/2009 - 14:22, last updated Mon, 09/05/2011 - 21:47

1960's psychedelic art?

landscape-chaos

Or the American landscape?

Design, configuration and natural form

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Thu, 11/06/2008 - 20:37, last updated Mon, 04/09/2012 - 15:05

When did human creations stop being natural? We look at a tower block, a subdivision or a shopping mall parking lot and see the worst of industrial civilization translated into form. We tolerate them as necessary to achieve the material wealth of our civilization. Those human settlements that are still natural we grant special protections through UNESCO and historical preservation laws. We do not have a law that promotes the creation of new historic settlements because we are not quite sure how they are made.

The Urban Country: Holland

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Wed, 08/06/2008 - 21:17, last updated Mon, 04/09/2012 - 15:35

Rem Koolhaas once described the urban as pervasive. It took a tour of Holland for me to grasp quite what he meant. While Paris is mocked as a museum-city due to its protected urban tissue, in Holland it is the farmland that is protected, the rural tissue that cannot be modernized. This makes the experience of moving in the country, which is about the same size as the Dallas-Fort-Worth metropolis and has more people, utterly surreal.

Further comment

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