Urban Form Balance in Landscape's Folds

If soil is architecture (TVK 2021) and territory is a palimpsest (A.Corboz 2001) city is an artefact whose sustainability depends on the intense dialogue with its land. Urban form witnesses interrelationships between soil, water and air which condition and orientate mutations over time.
This contribution highlights soil, water and building systems that have been the basis of historical morphological readings, able to restitute a living character to urban fabrics. Soil-built units allow us to study the city as a porous and hybrid adaptive system.
Fabrics, often considered frozen, are however testimonies of human capacity to adapt to natural systems. Structures of cities are parchments from which to learn how to live with soil’s original conditions. As narratives, these are now tools for relearning sustainability. Landscapes’ obliquity, continuities and openness can be ways to think and transform sites: in re-establishing deep relationships with land, caring for the soil, going through it and living in all its movements, folds and reverses. This understanding of natural environments is a thick condition still readable in urban forms. Re-learning them brings architecture closer to its substrate to make it a unique organism where ground and built can live in dialogue.
This pursues reflections on obliquity (C. Parent, M. Corajoud, P. Virilio), and the ability of architecture inscribing itself in the ground, into its folds and becoming continuous space, porous, not delimiting lands. Re-engage spatial relationships on obliquity and porosity of structures can still give cities a sustainable cohesion.
This contribution questions readings/designing experiments on adaptive fabrics more attentive to their geomorphological reasons.