GENTLE ARCHITECTURE "FORM RESPONDING TO ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS"

Abstract

The dialogue between architecture and nature is as old as architecture itself. This dialogue took different forms according to the concepts and paradigms ruling each period. In the traditional period, nature represented strength, beauty and sacredness. Architects respected nature and they kept on relating their building forms with it physically and non-physically. Architecture was always linked with nature.

By the beginning of the modem movement, the relation between architecture and nature took a different form. Architects began to show their capability in taming nature using technology in order to reach comfort and physical satisfaction. This period was ended by what can be called 'Destructive Architecture'.

At the end of the twentieth century, architects kept on disturbing the environmental balance. This .participated in caus.ing many of the natural crisis. Standardization of forms and the• use• of rigid grids kept architectural products far from nature. By that time, there was a movement led by some architects as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Hassan Fathy looking for a new form of interaction between architecture and nature.

This movement was followed by several movements among which is 'The Green Movement in Architecture'. The pr-oblem was always how far should architecture respect natural factors.

Gentle architecture as a new architecture movement offered many solutions concerning the relation between architecture and nature. Architecture must be gentle in dealing with traditions and cultural heritage. It must be gentle in the energy consumption. Finally, it must be gentle in forms to offer the •maximum •success in dealing with nature without affecting the users satisfaction.

Architectural form should interact with nature and work as an element of the natural system. The discoveries of many of the secrets of nature, its geometry and order showed that nature is always in a state of conversion and it is shaped according to a set of forces which flow through endless number of coordinates. And to join this very complicated system architectural formation should respond to the surrounding forces and generate through its coordinates without being restricted with grids and the {X,Y,Z) coordinates. The form should occupy the sit-e and int-egrate with the environment. It must exist with a continuous interaction with the surrounding, being dynamic instead of being static. Since everything in nature .is in the state .of becom-ing.

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