The 1960s movement of Metabolism in architecture utilized, albeit critically,biological concepts and models for the design of built environments. Thearchitects of the group recognized architectural products as incompleteentities and with continuously changing elements similar to an evolvingpopulation of organisms. Their imagination led to the generation ofnew spatial systems and early forms of computational methodologiesfor architectural and urban design. As a figure closely related to themovement, Kenzo Tange’s model of vitality is a case in point and is at theheart of a visually coded urban design system he developed for Skopje. Vitality is organisms’ continuance of life and has both changeable and staticcomponents. For Tange, it was the key characteristic of continuous flowsof urban movement as well as the change and growth in how architecturaland urban systems respond to the dynamics of population, productionand communication. In many of his grand projects, Tange modeled thelinear development of urban flows. For Skopje, he formulated a codethat combined a simple shape vocabulary of urban space and rules formovement intersections. With reference to Tange’s personal notebooks,sketches and lecture notes from the archives, this paper aims to delineatethe systematic implications of biological models in the proposal Tange’steam prepared for Skopje. His discourse for a systems approach positionsTange in the history of computational architectural and urban design.
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