【正文】 lotment gardens lie within the Alhambra and Generalife. The gardens rest within a highly organized framework of walls and terraces, and enliven the scene rather than detract from it. They plement the formal gardens and courtyards,where vegetables and nut and fruit trees are planted among flowers and vines. There is no arbitrary separation in this Moorish garden between ornamental and productive, between pleasurable and pragmatic,between sacred and secular.It is possible to create urban landscapes that capture a sense of plexity and underlying order,that express a connection to the natural and cultural history of the place, and that are adaptable to meet changing needs. The solution lies in an understanding of the processes that underlie these patterns, and there are some principles that can be derived for urban design:establish a framework that lends overall structure—not an arbitrary framework, but one congruent with the deep structure of a place, define a vocabulary of forms that expresses natural and cultural processes, the encourage a symphony of variations in response to the conditions of a particular locale and the needs of specific people. The result should be a dynamic, coherent whole that can contine to evolve to meet changing neeeds and desires and that also connects the present with the past.The Fens, in Boston, is such a place. As originally conceived and constructed in the 1880s and 39。s meander is intensified. Though set in a tight,evenlyspaced row along the banks of the river, the individual trees assert their own quirky growth, which is seen more clearly in contrast to the regularity of their placement.The interplay of different processes is also a subject of current research on chaos. Computer drawings illustrate the patterns that result when several rhythms, such as radio frequencies or planetary orbits, e together. Perhaps this is the contemporary version of the music of the spheres. They resemble a topographic contour map,prompting the realization that land form results from a similar interplay among multiple forces and processes, including gravity, water flow, and weather. Cultural processes also engage natural processes on the land。 its beauty lies in smooth, clean, ideal shapes. It is a geometry based on the belief that rest, not motion, is the natural state。s processes and their symmetry across scales have long been appreciated by close observers of the natural world. Recent developments in science afford new insights into the geometry of form generated by dynamic processes, be they natural or cultural, and point to new directions for design.The forms of mountain ranges, riverbanks, sand dunes, trees, and snow crystals, are poised, jelled, at a moment in time, the physical embodiment of dynamic processes. Their beauty consists of a peculiar bination of order and disorder, harmoniously arranged, and the fact that their forms are at equilibrium, at any given moment, with the processes that produced them. Such forms and the phenomenon of their symmetry across scales of time and space, have recently been described by a new geometry,fractal geometry, which one of its originators, Benoit Mandelbrot calls the geometry of nature—pimply,pocky,tortuous, and intertwined. A sensibility steeped in classical geometry perceivers these forms as too plex to descibe.However, as fractals, such patterns can be described with simplicity, the result of repetitive processes, such as bifurcation and development. The variety of forms that stem from the same process os the result of response to differing conditions of context, of to the interaction with other processes.Strange and wonderful forms, mirroring those of nature, have been created by repeating a single puter program. Early in the process, the resulting form, as seen on the puter screen appears chaotic。s processes and recorded in patterns in the land. The amphitheater affords not only a view of the city, but also a prospect for reflecting upon time, change, and the place of man and city in nature.When we neglect natural processes in city design, we not only risk the intensification of natural hazards and the degradation of natural resources, but also forfeit a sense of connection to a larger whole beyond ourselves. In contrast, places such as Red Rocks Amphitheater provoke a vivid experience of natural processes that permits us to extend our imagination beyond the limits of human memory into the reaches of geological and astronomical time and to traverse space from the microscopic to the cosmic. However permanent rock may seem, it is ultimately worn smooth by water and reduced finally to dust. The power of a raindrop, multiplied by the trillions over thousands into plains. The pattern of lines etched by the water in the sand of a beach echos the pattern engraved on the earth by rivers over time.These are the patterns that connect. They connect us to scales of space and time beyond our grasp。s natural and cultural rhythms, that echoes, amplifies, clarifies, or extends them, contributes to a sense of rootedness in space time.Process,Pattern,and FormGreat,upright, red rocks,thrust from the earth,rising hundreds of feet, strike the boundary between mountain and plain along the Front Range of the Rockies. Red Rocks Amphitheater is set in these foothills, its flat stage dwarfed by the red slabs that frame it and the panoramic view out across the city of Denver, Colorado and the Great Plains. The straight lines of the terraced seats, cut from sandstone to fit the human body, and the tight curve of the road, cut to fit the turning car, seem fragile next to the rocks39。s age in terms of thousands of millions of years and have developed theories of the earth itself. The human life span now seems but a blip, and the earth but a small speck in the universe.The perception of time and change is essential to developing a sense of who we are, where we have e form, and where we are going, as individuals, societies, and sp