Sometime last year this website attracted the attention of several members of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism, an organization sponsored by the Prince of Wales Foundation in order to support and renew traditions of construction. While this organization does great work to preserve the techniques of traditional building cultures, they have yet to define what the traditional urbanism of their name really implies. The importance of such a definition I believe to be primordial.

There is a scene early in the 2006 mockumentary Radiant City that provides the key explanation to the morphology of suburban sprawl. Our favorite writer James Howard Kunstler sits on a bench in a community bike trail that is enclosed in two rows of chain link fence in order to, I presume, secure it from the high-capacity arterial road that runs alongside it. The experience is vaguely what it must have been like to patrol the Berlin Wall, had it been encircled by an expressway.

From The New Geography magazine.

There are two methods for producing fractal geometry. The first method, the decomposition, is the most easily understood. In a decomposition we apply an algorithm that breaks up the geometry of some starting point into several parts. We then re-apply this algorithm to the smaller parts created, obtain many more, even smaller parts, and continue this reiteration until we have reached the complexity limit at the smallest scale of object we can possibly make. This is how an architectural design proceeds because it reflects the way that building proceeds.