Ron Eglash / African fractals in villages and braids

Tigersoap

The Living Force
I've stumbled into this video by Ron Eglash about his study of African villages which are built upon fractal geometry.

_http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n36qV4Lk94

(it's 16:51 Minutes long)

I found interesting to note that many villages are built around some circle idea or spiral, even though the building themselves are sometimes square.
The spirit and spiritual dimensions seems interelated to the shape of the villages and even the design within the buildings themselves, making a connection to the idea of cycles and infinity.

In his research he discovered that only African villages were built upon fractal geometry (note:I don't know if he had for example looked into megaliths structures if he would not have made the same discovery ? what do mathematics inclined people think ?)

From his interview with locals he discovered that the design were more based on intuition than by design but some of them are based on complex algorithm.

There is also the Sand divination technique which is based on a binary code, which was brought into Europe under the Geomancy form where Leibnitz turned it into the known 0 an 1.

In his conclusion, he talks about self organizing patterns and stresses out how we should apply the same techniques than the Africans but in a non-destructive way.

There is the web page about what he discovered here :

_http://www.rpi.edu/~eglash/eglash.dir/afractal/afractal.htm


I found it very interesting because I had never heard about this Africa/fractal link before and to me it shows some traces of ancient knowledge linked to a more in-synch approach with the universe.
 
student of architecture says: :O... So many courses and studios that viewed Africa from different angles and not a word on this aspect... that I remember at least :-[

Of course the rockhewn churches of Lalibela, great Zimbabwe and plenty more on African architecture were mentioned in university, but not this underlying knowledge that seems to be at the core of its(Africa's) different cultures.

Thanks a lot TS! :)
 
Just like in what is known actually Algeria, the nomadic village of Abd el Kader was mirroring the cosmogony in it"s organisation. No tents were placed for no good reasons.
Thanks for the link
 
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