Читать книгу Resilience. Persistence and Change in Landscape Forms онлайн

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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.ssss1 (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”ssss1 (Bergier 1622, p. 193).