Two urban theorists discussed in this blog are among my favorites. They have been the most influential on my views of the good city. If one wanted to examine the sources for my city visions, this is the place to start.
Why do people come from all over the world to visit the medieval
European city? This city remnant of the past is usually an unplanned
urban core frequently containing castles and churches, and occasionally
bounded at least in part by a surviving defensive wall. It is usually
surrounded by a more modern city. What makes this ancient city so
attractive? Why do people so enjoy walking itsr streets, plazas, parks
and pathways? What is the secret? Camillo Sitte believed he had found the answer.
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| Camillo Sitte |
Camillo Sitte died over a 100 years ago, yet his insights into
city patterns supportive of the urban environment still have value
today. He is best known among urban planners and architects for his
1889 book, City Planning According to Its Artistic Principles.
He strongly criticized the prevailing emphasis in European city
planning of the time on broad, straight boulevards, public squares
arranged primarily for the convenience of traffic, and efforts to strip
major public or religious landmarks of adjoining smaller structures
that were regarded as encumbering such monuments of the past.
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| Medieval Maastricht, Netherlands |
Sitte proposed to follow the design objectives associated with the
streets and buildings that shaped medieval cities. He advocated curving
or irregular street alignments to provide ever-changing vistas. He
pointed out the advantages of what came to be know as "turbine
squares", civic spaces served by streets entering in such a way as to
resemble a pinwheel in plan. His teachings became widely accepted in
Austria, Germany, and Scandinavia. In less than a decade, his style of
urban design came to be accepted as the norm in those countries.
The 1920s avant-garde, on the other hand, emphatically rejected Sitte’s
theory. The Ville Contemporaine plan by Le Corbusier exemplified this
rejection of all that Sitte believed. The centerpiece of this plan was a
group of sixty-story cruciform skyscrapers that housed both offices and
the flats of wealthy inhabitants.
The skyscrapers were set within
large, park-like green spaces. The pedestrian circulation paths were
segregated from the roadways, which glorified the use of the automobile as a means of transportation. As one moved out from the city
center, smaller multi-story zigzag blocks set in green space and set
far back from the street housed the workers.
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| Corbusier's Ville Contemporaine |
Much development from the middle of the 20th Century that followed
Corbusier's urban philosophy met the wrecking ball as the century's end
approached. The dystopian environment associated with much of public
housing from those years only ended with this cleansing destruction.
The reception to Sitte's ideas continued to be ambivalent until the
1970s, when architects and urban planners rediscovered the importance
of the Viennese theoretician. This development culminated in the "new urbanism" movement which counts Sitte’s magnum opus as one of its primary historical references.
Plazas
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| Piazza della Signoria, Florence |
- Public squares should be enclosed (streets not function as the enclosure) by buildings;
- Buildings & monuments located along side of plaza, not the center;
- Plaza shape unsymetrical (irregular plaza shapes stimulate interest);
- Plaza center open (craze for isolated buildings a foolish fad);
- Streets enter at angles;
- Avoid plazas open to too much traffic;
- From any point in plaza, only one single view out of plaza possible at a time (hence only a single interruption of the enclosure as a whole);
- A plaza too small does not give due effect to monumental buildings / If too large, even the mightiest seem dwarfed in relation to it.
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| Piazza del Duomo, Florence H Graem © 2017 |
Plaza groupings can create special effects that result from walking about from one plaza to another in a cleverly grouped sequence. Visually the frame of reference changes constantly, creating ever new visual impressions.
Streets
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| Baker and Lyon Streets, San Francisco H Graem © 2006 |
Most city streets today violate this principal. An interesting exception would be in the case of hilly cities (such as San Francisco) where the rise or drop of the street on the hill in effect creates the enclosure. As shown in the photo to the right, sometimes the hills are so steep that the street becomes stairs and the enclosed sense at pedestrian scale becomes complete.
Parks
Parks should be hidden gardens, connected with others, guarded from the
wind by the enclosing facades of high buildings (from whose windows
many eyes act as protective watchers).Public parks today are usually surrounded by well traveled streets that take away the sense of enclosure, except where the streets disappear from the view of the park user due to large park size, tree cover, and indulating topography.
Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, Balboa Park in San Diego and Central Park in New York being examples of the latter situation.
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