What You Didn't Know About African "Mudhuts"

Asante

All Star
Joined
Apr 3, 2014
Messages
1,867
Reputation
90
Daps
5,391
Benin City’s planning and design was done according to careful rules of symmetry, proportionality and repetition now known as fractal design. The mathematician Ron Eglash, author of African Fractals – which examines the patterns underpinning architecture, art and design in many parts of Africa;



notes that the city and its surrounding villages were purposely laid out to form perfect fractals, with similar shapes repeated in the rooms of each house, and the house itself, and the clusters of houses in the village in mathematically predictable patterns.

4-Figure2-1_zpsr33ss4qb.png




3e34cb383e54f953fccc2879e58e4102_zps5xrpqmui.jpg

labbazanga.jpg


2-Figure1-1.png

bild_pohl_gc3b6ran_biomimetics.jpg

Settlement structures of ancient Africa: a Soqota, Ethiopia, b a village in Ethiopia, c Hara, Ethiopia, d Labbezanga, Niger, e Old Zanzibar, f Old Marrakesh – Pohl, Göran. & Nachtigall, Werner. (2015). Biomimetics for Architecture & Design Nature – Analogies – Technology. 1st ed. 2015.

ron-eglash-af479219-0d2b-4c95-b1b6-f2b8df294dc-resize-750.jpeg

e6823b11040119e991c3b220efe200e6.jpg


As he puts it: “When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganised and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet."
 

CopiousX

Superstar
Supporter
Joined
Dec 15, 2019
Messages
11,512
Reputation
3,362
Daps
55,748
Given ancient people's obsession with the sky, im surprised all this complexity wasn't synchronized with a constellation or two.:patrice:





I'd love to map algorithms against the village designs and the sky for future study.
 
Top