Research On Natural Form Urban Design Methods Combining With Digital Processing

Urban design is an indispensible task to express the architect's envisage for the organization of future city's material space in"graphic"language. Modeling in real life often follows the principles such as simplicity, regularity, and top-down order, and emphases center, grid, axis, the order of hierarchy and dominance; which underestimate the complexity of human settlements and contribute debility in artificial cities. Sustainable city design thus needs a new modeling method, which cherishes vitality, diversity, complexity, equality and implication.Some traditional towns have shown us form both reasonable and elegant. Some contemporary architects have also tried to model in more natural manner. Design works such as"fiber city"have emerged, as well as design methods"collage","multi-layers-composite", and"syntactic generation".Associative parametric design, which was introduced to architecture by Frank O. Gehry and Nicholas Grimshaw in 1990s, may present far-reaching consequences to natural urban modeling. There are two layers of understanding, which separately are computer technique to draw complex shape, and design philosophy for complexity phenomena.The dissertation narrates how to give form to 3 main factors:"nature environment in city's cite","architect's artistic creation"and"resident's mass customized choices"with four examples. The dissertation may be divided into 3 parts:The first part is a summary on natural form urban design theory research and practice, which includes 4 chapters:In chapter 1"research background, the significance of objects, the framework and innovative", Definitions of multiple concepts as"urban form","natural form", and"parametric design", as well as the research's theoretic and practical meaning, have been given.In chapter 2 "Urban morphological theory of round-up" , the predecessors in the urban form of research were summarized and analyzed.In chapter 3"Natural form in urban design and its source", concepts, skills, and practices of natural design with various scales have been analysed and summarized.In chapter 4"the traditional natural-shaped city", characters and formations of various traditional natural-shaped settlements have been discussed, which are separately medieval Christian city, the Islamic city, traditional Chinese city, etc.The second part is on the theory of parametric design, including the first chapter 5, 6. Chapter 5"geometric basis of natural-shaped city design"is to explore the geometry base of city form, including methods based on differential geometry, fractal geometry, and topology geometry,etc. Chapter 6"(associative) parametric design"is a research summary for parametric design, about parametric philosophy's evolution, concepts of"software ecosphere of (associative) parametric design", and various software.The third part is on how to solve special problems in natural city design, including chapter 7, 8,9, and 10.Chapter 7"combination of traditional and parametric design method"narrates how to use digital sketch, and how to digitize complex curvilinear handicraft model.Chapter 8"digital expression and analysis of natural terrain and relative design method"discusses how to express and treat 3 dimension terrain of the city. With the height design of Qingdao Science and Technology University as an example, the chapter discusses the application of geometry information system software in natural terrain design.Chapter 9"urban natural form optimization based on computed simulation and analysis"studies how to explore natural rules of urban communication, environment, etc. Practical methods are studied in Holcim design project.Chapter 10"natural shape of public participant community"discusses how to shape the form of a community with mass different opinions, it takes vernacular dwelling redevelopment design competition of Yingxiu Town as an example.These four cases, are quite different in design methods, processes, as well as software, which may have shown that the natural-shaped urban design"has law but no fixed law". Architects need to learn by analogy, adjust the methods and processes in accordance with practical problems.Natural shape of urban design supported by parametric design method, may give architects the possibility to make future city more elegant, more economical and more humane.