Читать книгу Resilience - Sandrine Robert - Страница 24

From an early date, observations of persistence were linked to the idea that manmade forms had a greater capacity to withstand the test of time than natural forms, simply due to the role played by human rationality in their creation. For N. Bergier, ancient roads survived primarily due to the role of human reason:

The form of the great highways is artificial, consisting of an assembly and arrangement of the aforementioned materials in a certain order, invented by human industry through the use of reason: not only to create them, but also to preserve them as long as the craftsmen’s art and the nature of the materials themselves would permit.³³ (Bergier 1622, p. 135)

Bergier’s whole work was devoted to the development of an ideal model of the ancient road, which he presented as a veritable architectural order (Robert and Verdier 2014, pp. 11–71). He created a classification of highway-building materials using a scale of values, from the least useful natural deposits to the most sophisticated man-made materials, such as “Tiles [...] formed not by the hazards of time, but using rule and compass”³⁴ (Bergier 1622, p. 193).

The same type of opposition resurfaced three centuries later in the work of Lavedan, who suggested that towns could be split into two categories: “spontaneous towns, born of chance and which grew up gradually, and artificial towns, created in a single day by the will of one man”³⁵. In the first case, he considered that towns “left to chance, or to nature, the task of grouping the component elements around the generating element” (road, watercourse, relief, etc.), while artificial towns were “constructed following a predetermined plan”. He added that the latter represent “the specific object of study of a history of urban architecture: not always works of beauty, but always works of art, or in other terms, intentional creations of human ingenuity”³⁶ (Lavedan 1926a, p. 5). Lavedan established a hierarchy of plans based on their independence with respect to the natural dispositions of the host site and on their geometric complexity: from the “inorganic village, in which dwellings seem to have sprung up at random” to “the checkerboard plan, with a grid pattern which is now the boast of many cities of the New World, from Buenos Aires to Chicago”³⁷(Lavedan 1926a, p. 31). The artificial form as a work of art, particularly the regular geometric plan, was seen as a product of human rationality forging a structure with the capacity to slow the decay of forms under the influences of time and nature (section 1.2.5). Thus, while M. Poëte emphasized the role of natural sites and of the location of towns within a network of transport arteries in the context of urban planning, P. Lavedan developed an esthetic vision independent of geographic realities. This approach left an indelible mark on the study of urban morphology, both in architecture and archeology.