Parametric Modeling of Urban Landscape: Decoding the Brasilia of Lucio Costa from Modernism to Present Days

Abstract

The paper presents the case study of the Pilot-Plan of Brasilia, important example of modernist urban design protected as human heritage. Discusses a methodological process to promote visualization of maximum envelops of urban volumes, organized in a set of rules and scripts which structures urban parameters in a logic of volume constructions. Applies City Engine - ESRI facilities to construct and visualize the urban rules. It has the goal to promote characterization, analysis, proposals and simulation of urban parameters in order to support decision making in land use transformation. The research deals with the difficulties of management urban pressure of transformation and the maintenance of urban cultural heritage. The methodology defends the change from authorial urban design to the decoding of collective values and goals. The 3D modeling and dynamic visualization promotes the composition of the whole, which means to work in a relative mode, and not in an absolute sense. Although it had been developed for a particular case study, the protected historical area of Brasilia, it presents methodological processes of how to structure rules of three-dimensional modeling to simulate the maximum constructive authorized by planning legislation (maximum envelopes), so that it can be reapplied in any other situation of definition of parameters in urban master plans and in laws for land use and occupation.