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LECTURE NOTES
The City Shaped
Introduction
- The City as Artifact
- Urban form and process
In the tradition of:
- Camillo Sitte
Joseph Stubben
Gordon Cullen
Kevin Lynch
Rob and Leon Krier
- Dimensions:
- 1. Theories and actual town-making
2. Socio-economic change vis-à-vis the persistence of the artifact (buildings)
- How and why did cities take their shape?
- - Form as a receptacle of meaning
- Cities are consciously shaped
- Need understanding of cultural conditions
- What is meant by PROCESS - 2 senses
- 1. people, forces, institutions
- - Who designs cities?
- What procedures and laws do they use?
- 2. Physical change through time
- - physical traits of the urban landscape
- how do certain forms come about?
- Affiliates of Method
- Lewis Mumford, The City in History - a sequential narrative
Kevin Lynch, Good City Form - city self-perception
- Cosmic
- Monumental axis
Enclosure and protected gates
Dominant landmarks
Reliance on the regular grid
Spatial organization by hierarchy
- Practical model
- Colonial towns and company towns
Speculative grid towns
- Organic model
- Boundary and optimum size
Cohesive
Balanced state
Olmsted, Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford
Urban morphology
- - M.R.G.. Conzen
- 1. the town plan itself
- street system
plot pattern
building arrangement
Edmund Bacon, Design of Cities
- 2. the land use pattern
- uses of ground and space
- 3. the building fabric
- three-dimensional mark of physical structures
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Pre-industrial
- Small size - 100,000 max population
No land use specialization
Two social classes
Center is government, religion, and houses of the elite
- Industrial city
- Prefigured by capitalism
Land as source of income
- Socialist city
- No capitalist ownership of land
Dominance of central planning
Neolithic settlements:
- Jericho, Catal Huyuk
- Mesopotamia (between Tigris and Euphrates):
- About 3500 B.C.
Nile valley about 3000 B.C.
- Millennium later - Indus Valley
New World
Main points:
- not a diffusion
uneven over space and time
Chicken vs. egg problem
- - Jane Jacobs
- Defense
- No single causative factor
- Early City Form
- 1. city as "art"
2. city as "civitas"
- Greek polis
- What is a City?
- 1. Wirth, Mumford
2. Kostof:
- a. Energized crowding
b. Clusters
c. Physical delineation
d. Specialized work differentiation
e. Source of income
f. Written records
g. Connected with countryside
h. Monumentalism
i. Buildings and people
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Chapter 1
The City Shaped
Organic Patterns
- Planned vs. unplanned cities
- Planned
- Premeditated
overseeing authority
- Spontaneous
- determined by history
geography
life of citizens
- Can also have the "planned organic"
"Disintegration" of rational order
- 1. Freeing of movement from geometric order
2. Reorganization of the blocks
3. New public spaces
Evolution of organic patterns
Physical determinants of irregular city forms
vs.
Social determinants
- Physical determinants:
- Cities as organisms
Topography
Land division
Synoecism
- Social determinants:
- The law and social order
Order vs. disorder
- Origins of the planned picturesque
- Alberti, early Renaissance architectural theorist, De re Aedificatoria:
Were the irregular effects of some cities PLANNED?
England starting 1750:
- - picturesque gardens
- John Nash's Regent Street
- Gothic Revival
- A social agenda
- recovery of village life
- Early industrial model villages:
- - Port Sunlight, 1887
- Bourneville, 1890's
- Picturesque suburb:
- - Bournemouth at Dorset, 1830s
- In U.S., planned picturesque = non-urban
- - Andrew Jackson Downing cottages
- Glendale, Ohio, 1851
- F.L. Olmsted
- Riverside, IL, 1869
- Garden City paradigm
- Howard, 1898, To-Morrow, A Peaceful Path to Social Reform
1902, Garden Cities of To-Morrow
Garden Cities = planned picturesque
- Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, Letchworth, begun 1902
Rejection of block system of land division
Beaux-Arts urbanism (town square) and organic
- Garden cities
- Unwin/Parker:
- Letchworth, first garden city, begun 1902
- Louis de Soissons:
- Welwyn Garden City
- Barry Parker:
- Wythenshawe, outside Manchester, 1930
Influence of Radburn (Stein/Wright), neighborhood unit, parkway
- Less acceptance in U.S.:
- - communal ownership not possible
- traffic issue
- Garden suburbs
- Unwin/Parker:
- Hampstead Garden Suburb, 1907
New Earswick, outside York
Ealing Tenants' garden suburb, 1906-10
- Henri Sellier
- 16 cites-jardins around Paris, 1916-1939
- Krupp family/Georg Metzendorf
- Margarethenhohe, near Essen, 1912
- In U.S.:
- Country Club District, Kansas City
Forest Hills Gardens, Queens
- Both started before 1915
Both early examples of restrictions by consent
- Yorkship Village, Camden, NJ
Radburn, 1928
- American Parker and Unwin: Clarence Stein and Henry Wright
- Effect of Radburn after WW II:
- FHA, organized in 1934, official pamphlets:
-- "planning profitable neighborhoods"
-- favored curvilinear adaptations of street grid
- Conservation
- Grand Manner vs. preservation
Camillo Sitte (1843-1903): The Art of Building Cities: City-building according to artistic principles
- Urban space
The outdoor room
- Patrick Geddes
- Modernism and the Planned Picturesque
- Ernst May, Romerstadt, near Frankfurt, 1927-29
Martin Wagner (1885-1957); from Berlin
- After WW II, rejection of:
- historic picturesque of European (continent) cities
Garden cities and their offshoots
- Counter-reaction to modernist ahistoricism
- Historic Preservation
"Townscape" of Gordon Cullen, 1961
New Urbanism
- Rob Krier, Urban Space (1975)
Colin Rowe, Collage City (1978)
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Chapter 2
The City Shaped
The Grid
- The nature of rectilinear planning
- equal distribution of land
easy parceling
defense
surveillance of population
- Basic issues
- 1. size and shape of blocks
2. open spaces and their distribution
3. accommodation of public buildings
4. nature of the street grid
5. termination of grid
6. relation between grid and topography
7. effect of grid in 3-dimensions
- hybrid versions of the grid:
- loose approximations
gridded extensions
grids combined with other geometric principles
curvilinear grid of the modern residential development
- Egalitarianism is not “natural” to grids
- Not intrinsically democratic
But there are examples
- 2 main purposes of grid:
- 1. facilitate orderly settlement or colonization
2. to modernize
- Different motivations
- 1. military
2. religious ideas
3. capitalism
4. industrial planning
- critics:
- grid is too timid
grid is dry, mathematical
- The grid in the ancient world
- Pre-classical antiquity:
- - Mohenjo Daro and Harappa
- Babylon
- 5th c., Hippodamus of Miletus
Roman Grids:
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- Large, square blocks
- Standardized fort plan
- New towns in the middle ages
- Grid re-emerges 1100
- - new towns
- extensions
- 1,000 new towns in 3 areas:
- - Southern France
---The Bastides
- Switzerland, Austria, Germany
- City states of Italy – Siena, Florence
- Rise of Bastides
- - defense
- economic policies
- religion
- The Renaissance in Europe
- Around 1600:
- - Bastions
- Baroque urbanism
- Passage to America
- L’Enfant vs. grid
Laws of the Indies
- L.A., San Antonio
“pueblos”
Classical inspiration (Vitruvius)
Continuation of bastides:
- -- two main axes intersecting
-- public square at intersection
-- The plaza is the key
- England in the New World
- Williamsburg (settled in 1633)
Jamestown, 1607
Charleston and Savannah, 18th century
- 1785, National Land Ordinance
- - establishes grid as standard
- 1811, Commissioner’s Plan of New York
- - new meaning of grid
- “Closed grid” vs.“Open grid”
- Grid dominates in Western U.S.
- - Spanish vs. American system
- The speculative grid
- Railroad companies adopt grid
- Laying out the grid
- Role of topography
Surveyors and theorists
- Groma used to determine right angles
- Hippodamus of Miletus
- rational arrangement of buildings and circulation
Theoretical geometry, rather than empiricism of surveyors
- Roman surveyors
- Used arithmetic, geometry, law
- The Town Planner as Artist
- Florentine towns of 14th century
- trigonometry
Beyond practical surveying
- Virtruvius, 1st c. B.C.
Alberti’s De Re Aedificatoria, published 1485
Cataneo and Scamozzi’s treatises also
Alberti, Early Renaissance
Ichnographic plan
- 2-dimensional record of solids and voids
- Cities in diagram
- Pietro Cataneo’s I Quattro primilibri di architettura, 1554
Vincenzo Scamozzi’s L’idea della architettura universale, 1615
- Coordinated Systems of Town and Country
- Columbus, OH
David Rusk – Cities without suburbs
Roman land survey (centuriation)
Spanish in the New World
- Town in the middle
Common lands reserved around the town
- English in North America
The Jeffersonian gridding of America:
- The National Survey: 1785
Determined the placement of many towns
The square township system
“Freehold” vs. “Leasehold”
- Gridded extensions
- Amsterdam
- - Creative extension plan
- Compare with other extensions
- - Uncoordinated patchworks
- The Closed Grid: Frame, Accent, and Open Spaces
- The Walled Frame
- - Spindleform plan
- The walled grid:
- - Roman foursquare castrum
- Bastions
- Street Rhythms
- arrangement of streets
creation of strong center
open spaces interspersed
creating a focus:
- 2 axes cross at middle
- The Distribution of Squares
- French, English, Spanish bastides:
- 1. single block in the middle
2. market sits at the crossroads
- American court house square types
The grid could also be multi-centered
Centrality/hierarchy vs. provision of public open space
- Savannah
Philadelphia Plan (1683)
- When control is lost:
- - Encroaching on parks
- Crowding of blocks
- Block Organization
- grid vs. modern urban densities
3-dimensional form
- size and density of blocks
size and shape of blocks
- The burgage plot in Europe:
- - deep parcel
- narrow street frontage
- outbuildings
- becomes either slum housing
- or monotonous rows of identical houses
- parallels in U.S.
Philadelphia:
- From “green country town” to row houses
- New York City:
- 2,000 blocks created in 1811
by 1850, tenement housing covered 90 % of site
Tenement House Act of 1879
- “ dumbbell tenement”
New law in 1901 required building on 2 city lots
- Grids ease transition to larger building types
In Paris, radical surgery
Less traumatic at city edge
- Otto Wagner’s scheme for edge of Vienna, 1910
James Hobrecht plan of Berlin, 1860
- Mietskasernen (tenenments blocks)
Ildefonso Cerda’s Barcelona plan
- The Grid in the 20th Century
- From 1880s to 1920, the perimeter block
Berlage’s Amsterdam plan, 1915
- Early reformers try to transform grid
- Traditional grid seen as oppressive
- Solution
- inturned superblock
surrounded by major traffic arterials
- Chicago City Club, 1915
Then, superblock planning becomes aligned with modernism:
- C.I.A.M., 1933, “Athens Charter”
maxigrid
- The completely modern city:
Chandigarh and Brasilia
- Le Corbusier (1887-1965)
- Chandigarh, founded 1951:
- Influence of Ville Radieuse plan (The Radiant City, 1933)
analogy of human body
fragmentation
planned class segregation
- Problems with the modernist city:
- Oversimplification
About replacement, not modification
Decontextualization
Le Corbusier
-- Reduction of society to clockwork order
- Milton Keynes, founded 1967
- Modernist grid
Last of the English New Towns
- Key point about modernist grid:
- The traffic arteries delimit the boundaries of urban districts
Rather than define blocks
- Final assessment of grid (by Kostof):
- Ceaseless usefulness
Free of ideological posturing
The grid is what you make it
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Chapter 3
The City Shaped
City as Diagram
The inflexible city
contrast to the organic and the grid
- Circles and Polygons
- Arcosanti
- Soleri's interpretation of the city of the future
5,000 people in a solar-powered megastructure
- Palmanova
- Laid out 1593, completed 1623
military town
In center, a hexagon with 6 streets radiating out
Scamozzi
- Ideal cities change:
- "squaring of Circleville"
- Utopias and Ideal Cities
- geometric shapes - circles and squares
rigid centrality - radial convergence
Utopias:
- Thomas More's Amaurot, the capital of Utopia
- Ideal cities:
- specific physical context
- Other sources of geometric order:
- Terpen
Cosmology
Specialized Environments
- The Design of Regimentation
- Military camps
- Roman castrum
Spanish presidio
- Monasteries
communitarian socialism, 19th c.
Industrial villages
- Saltaire, Yorkshire - creation of Sir Titus Salt
Nadelburg, Vienna
Pullman, Chicago
Port Sunlight, Liverpool
Krupp works, Essen
- 3 parts to industrial town:
- factory or plant
church
worker's housing
- Saltaire, 1851, completed 1860
- Holy Cities
- religious symbolism:
Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat (Cambodia)
- spatial structure of heaven
- The Political Diagram
- Centrality - monocentric
Linear systems
- Beijing
New Delhi
- Laid out by Edward Lutyens
British symbolism - King's way, Queen's way, Government House
- spatial structure based on:
--- Race
--- Occupational rank
--- SES
- Modernism and the power diagram
- Brasilia
Dedicated in 1960
quintessential modern city
- Corbusian influence
Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer
Monumental axis
Uniform superblocks
- Centralized systems
- Concentric organization
- Tokyo
Town-planning mandalas
- Progressive social declension
Radial organization
Concentric space and street rays that join center to edge
Unknown to Greeks and Romans
Renaissance began to see radial design
- Humanistic perfection
Leonardo da Vinci diagram
- Sforzinda's Example
By Filarete, designed 1460-64
significance:
- archetype for humanist city of High Renaissance
- Versailles
- Radial concentric together with an axis
Widespread in 17th and 18th centuries
- The Functional Diagram
- The Logic of Defense
Traffic and radial-concentricity
Canberra
- Walter Burley and Marion Mahoney Griffin
1912
constellation of stars
- Ebenezer Howard
To-Morrow: A peaceful path to social reform, 1898 (later Garden Cities of To-Morrow)
The Reality:
- Suburban decentralization
Edge cities
New circulation systems
- Loss of monocentricity due to:
- Automobile
Cheaper suburban land
highway interchanges
Suburban labor pools
- The Secular/Socialist Diagram
- City design and ideal social relations
Panopticon - extreme example of surveillance
Social classes in harmony
Better bond with nature
Communitarian socialism
3 leading figures:
- Ebenezer Howard
Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
Robert Owen (1771-1858)
- Final assessment by Kostof:
- - "In the end, all ideal city-forms are a little dehumanizing"
- "The city as diagram, in the end, is the story of dreamers who want the complexity and richness of urban structure without the problems, tensions, volatility."
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Chapter 4, Part 1
The City Shaped
The Grand Manner
- Washington, D.C.
Major Pierre L'Enfant, 1791
- Baroque planning in U.S.
McMillan Committee, 1901 - restoration of plan
Columbian Exposition of 1893
- Influence of Burnham
- Classical city vs. city of commerce
Civic patriotism vs. poverty and disease
Components of Baroque Aesthetic:
- 1. focal points
2. topography, links
3. landscaping
4. vistas
5. public spaces
6. dramatic effects
7. superimposed
- Historical Review
- Antiquity
Pergamon - 3rd and 2nd centuries, BC
- terraces and platforms
no master plan
- Ancient Rome
- Avenues and public open spaces
public buildings and monuments
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- European Baroque
Capital cities
- Absolutism
- Roots in:
- Renaissance
- 14th century in Florence
- Counter-Reformation
Authoritarianism
Astronomy
New conception of space
- Contribution of Baroque:
- continuous plane
uniform facades
- First articulation of Baroque urbanism:
- master plan of Rome under Sixtus V (1585-90)
architect Domenico Fontana
succession of long, straight streets
piazzas and central obelisks
Geometric order for its own sake
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- Grand Manner outside Italy
French baroque: State-sponsored urbanism
Specific contributions:
- Tree-lined streets
Residential square - continuous uniform facades
- City Beautiful in U.S.
Totalitarian regimes - Hitler, Stalin
Baroque and modernism
- Planning in the Grand Manner
- Not based on utilitarian need
Based on magnificence
Topography
Artificiality
Geometric abstractions
- Edward Lutyens, New Delhi
- Expansiveness
Redesign of London after 1666
- Christopher Wren
John Evelyn
- Grand Manner vs. City Diagram
- Visual vs. political symbolism
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- The Grand Manner as Theater
Progression:
- •perspective, Italian paintings, early 15th c.
•stage scenery
•garden design
•city squares and streets
- Sebastiano Serlio, "L'Architettura"
- A dramatization of urban form
- Drama serves different types of regimes
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- The Grand Manner and Landscape Design
Strong links
Andre Le Notre (Louis XIV)
- Versailles, 1665
Power over nature
- In U.S:
- Grand Manner + English Garden
Grand Manner + Garden City
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- The Design of Heights
Platforms
Stairs
Ramps
- devices for suspense and human movement
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Chapter 4, Part 2
The City Shaped
The Grand Manner
- Baroque Elements
- The straight street
- 1. public order
2. shortest paths between 2 points
3. straights streets can express an ideology
- The "Baroque" diagonal
Accidental:
- 1) accommodating a prior stretch of road
2) coming together of 2 different sections of urban layout
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- The deliberate diagonal
Cut through grid with diagonals
- Came to be known as the "American grid"
- Daniel Hudson Burnham (1846-1912)
- trickle down urban development
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- Trivium and polyvium
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- Boulevards and Avenues
Starts with a defensive wall
- trees planted on ramparts (late 16th c.)
- Not intended as transportation arteries
- Avenue - origin is rural
- They were axes to an estate, a farm, a village
garden design = allee
- From allee to urban avenue
- Dutch tree-lined canal street
tree-lined avenue in Versailles
- Urban boulevard:
- 3 distinct strips
- sidewalks
roadway for traffic
rows of trees
- Very different from the traditional street
In U.S., tree-lined streets were not urban, but residential
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- Uniformity and the continuous frontage
Symbol of order and speed
Celebration of standardization and uniformity
- 18th c. = Age of Enlightenment, belief in human reason
- tall buildings
- Otto Wagner's 1911 Grosstadt
A modern reaffirmation of the Grand Manner
- Modernists hated this restraint of the skyscraper
What is the danger of uniformity?
- Can be excessive, and therefore boring
- Purpose of the vista
- Framing a distant view
- Markers and monuments
- freestanding monuments:
- Accent a vista
Fix the space of a formal square
Triumphal arches
Columns
Equestrian statues
- Ceremonial axis
- Grand Manner is about staging power
- Grand Manner taken over by modernism
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- Post-modern Baroque
A rejection of modernism
Ricardo Bofill
- everyday life takes center stage
- Seaside
- Baroque urbanism domesticated by the Garden City movement
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Chapter 5
The City Shaped
The Urban Skyline
- Skylines are urban signatures
Public vs. private skylines
- Tall buildings have existed throughout history
- These were public
Skyscrapers = private enterprise
- Primacy of public order over private interests is made palpable on the skyline
In modern times, the skyscraper is the pride of corporations, of capitalism
Before Industrial Revolution:
- Buildings of communal importance (religion or political power)
- After Industrial Revolution:
- Confusion of skyline priorities
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- The Skyline Portrayed
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- Often the artist's conception
Military might
Civic pride
Souvenir's
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- Skyline features
- Make impression by:
- 1. landscape (either flat lands or hills)
2. pre-eminent buildings
- sacred heights
- domes and belltowers
- Landmarks of the secular city
- Domes, belfries
Later, secular images
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- Skyline Principles
- Height
- A relative matter
Restrictions on highrises
NYC zoning ordinance of 1916
- Shape
- Abstract forms consciously removed from historicist towers
- Approach
- Previously, city was composed
Now hard to "read"
A matter of density - compact core vs. dispersal
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- The modern skyline
- The traditional public symbols of the skyline were overcome
Civic and religious could no longer be distinguished by height
At first, monumental towers
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- Forging the Stadtkrone (crown of the city)
- A symbol of communal life
Bruno Taut, 1919
Die Stadtkrone
The traditional city had:
- Organic collectivity
- Skyscraper = Monument to self-interest
First skyscrapers in 1880s in NYC and Chicago
1890 on, steel frames
- the skyline of business
- response for public buildings:
- classical monumentalism
- end of 19th c., in U.S., private enterprise valued at expense of public realm
willingness to find communal pride in office buildings
However, early skyscrapers were able to have connection to the street
Towers of glass
Modernism takes over
Who should be allowed to define the skyline?
- Private developers vs. community
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