Why imagine that they brought no thought or skill to arranging their cities? Camillo Sitte has a very different view from Morris and has no doubts as to the purposeful nature of medieval city design:. Except for some towns constructed at one stroke and according to a regular plan during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries [i.
So the pattern of their streets was in no way arbitrary; it was the result of events or of orientation, and it complied with the configurations of the terrain. To either side of the principal roads a profusion of narrow alleys with less intensive traffic made up the rest of the town plan.
Its area was not very much cut up by these channels of communication, and the built-up lots often were larger in size than they are today. Thus many houses opened onto inner courtyards, which were not always the pits of infection that is commonly supposed; indeed they often had a certain amplitude and actually formed gardens, planted with trees. Morris says, "In the baroque order, the city, confined by its fortifications, could only grow upward in tall tenements, after filling in its rear gardens.
It is otherwise difficult to account for the stunning results; they could not have arisen by chance. He has lately concerned himself with the generation problem, that is, with the design sequence applied to urban areas. He believes that the sequence of design, especially on-site design, greatly affects its outcome. This may be an extremely important finding by Alexander. This incoherence, however, refers only to the shape of the space. Is this any basis for damning the medieval construction as "incoherent" in the first place?
Quite the contrary. Zucker seems almost obsessed with symmetry; he apparently cannot imagine any basis for urban design that does not rely on the symmetrical location of a fountain in a square.
He claims that the absence of symmetry during medieval times arises because "the concept of symmetrical organization in town planning did not yet exist. In medieval space, everything is much more fluid, and the law of symmetry is not in play. This in no way makes the medieval spaces random or "incoherent. Zucker even goes so far as to admit that: Medieval squares owe their beauty to the growth through centuries, each epoch adding its specific architectural values, but never to the intent of conscious planning.
I find this very strange, and I suspect that it arises from the Modernist disease, which has The Great One casting his pearls before the swine. Renaissance During the Renaissance relatively few new towns were established, but existing towns grew rapidly. Many of these extensions were planned works based on a regular grid. Completely new towns were, however, founded in Sicily, Scandinavia, and the New World. Most of these towns were fully gridded, and many included a square near the middle.
The area south of Wall Street remains a web of irregular streets. Some of the Scandinavian towns took a radial form. In the introduction to his chapter on the Renaissance town and its square, Zucker says: From the fifteenth century on, architectural design, aesthetic theory, and the principles of city planning are directed by identical ideas, foremost among them the desire for discipline and order in contrast to the relative irregularity and dispersion of Gothic space.
The results are often stunning at first glance, but most of these spaces lack a satisfying sense of evolution. Spaces designed by a single hand in the Renaissance manner are usually stiff and cool. Consider the city of Ferrara, which has a large intact medieval district adjoining a similarly-sized Renaissance district.
People still seem to prefer the older part of town, with its curving narrow streets. What consequences did Renaissance ideas have for the design of urban spaces? Morris says that the preoccupation with symmetry, and the creation of balanced axial compositions were central motifs.
This was sometimes carried to extremes, as in the Piazza del Popolo, with its matching churches flanking a central street. However, this space is not rectilinear and is not even fully symmetrical, the twin churches notwithstanding. Also of great importance was the placement of monumental buildings, obelisks, and statues at the ends of long, straight streets. Buildings were wrought into coherent ensembles by repeating basic features.
Morris goes on to say that the "primary straight street" was the basis of Renaissance urbanism, and that new, direct routes to facilitate carriage travel were laid.
The other major influence was the expression of Renaissance aesthetics and ideas in street design. Definite laws and rules directed the limits of space and volume. Purity of stereometric form was in itself considered beautiful. See also Alberti, Book Four, part 5. Alberti actually contradicts himself in the same paragraph: "When the road reaches a city, and that city is renowned and powerful, the streets are better straight and very wide, to add to its dignity and majesty.
Within the town itself it is better if the roads are not straight, but meandering gently like a river flowing now here, now there, from one bank to the other. Even Zucker, who has a strong preference for regularity, ultimately concedes that the "continuous repetition of a stereotyped pattern of a square bespeaks the mechanization of an idea. In the end, he concludes: Strangely enough, the most famous Renaissance squares in Italy do not follow the scheme of the typical closed squares of this period.
Neither are their layouts and appearance derived from the rationalized intellectual solutions of Gattinara, Valletta, or Palma Nuova. They owe their final shape rather to a gradual development from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, when they took on the characteristics which made them the heart of their cities. And yet, the combination of Piazza, Piazzetta, and the third smaller square at the northwest [sic, northeast] corner of St.
Finally, perhaps, he starts to understand his own "intuition rather than systematization inspired these crystallizations of the human spirit in space. The Renaissance changes merely continued the unfolding of a form that had been laid down centuries before. Why are some people so reluctant to acknowledge the brilliance of intuition? What is wrong with deep understanding that it should be papered over by shallow order and regularity?
I cannot offer an answer, but I do urge that the intuitively-correct solutions be given a chance against intellectually-"brilliant" designs created on paper. Baroque We turn now to the Baroque. While some consider it a part of the Renaissance, it is a distinct era of its own. At the very least, the expression of Renaissance ideas received a different impulse. Baroque notions remained influential into the 20th century. The changes in the practice of city design during this era were not so vast as those which occurred during the shift from medieval to Renaissance designs.
Paper plans and straight lines continued to dominate, as a reflection of Cartesian logic. Transport concerns became steadily more important as cities grew.
The increasing power of nation-states and their absolute monarchs finds expression in Baroque design. It is not, of course, necessary to be a monarch to gather this much power--Robert Moses of New York had a similar reach and willingness to use it, alas with often disastrous results. The Baroque is the era when plans began to be imposed on a site. No longer would topography stand in the way.
Kostof says that while local features were to be accurately ascertained, "these shapes were a challenge: they were to be dramatized where useful to the intentions of the planner, suppressed where they were not. Kostof says this willfulness was even "cherished. Morris says: The avenue is the most important symbol and the main fact about the baroque city.
Not always was it possible to design a whole new city in the baroque mode; but in the layout of half a dozen new avenues, or in a new quarter, its character could be re-defined. In the linear evolution of the city plan, the movement of wheeled vehicles played a critical part: and the general geometrizing of space, so characteristic of the period, would have been altogether functionless had it not facilitated the movement of traffic and transport, at the same time that it served as an expression of the dominant sense of life.
Kostof later says that "It can be demonstrated that a principal motive for the widening and straightening of streets in the Age of Absolutism was to ease the passage and parking of coaches in the old urban cores. This is characteristic of Baroque planning. There is no question regarding the depth of the commitment to straight streets. The City Museum in Lisbon exhibits several plans developed for the Marquis de Pombal after the devastating earthquake.
The Baixa, a flat area sloping gently up from the Tejo Tagus River, had always been the heart of the city, and it was levelled by the shake, tsunami, and ensuing fire. It had developed the usual web of streets converging on the principal square. Pombal, driven by exigencies, chose the rectilinear version from among the proposals, and this plan can still be seen in much the same form today, as here on the Rua Augusta.
The rigidity of the plan is relieved by the varying distance between parallel streets and the differing widths of the streets themselves. It is interesting to note that Pombal elected to retain the old street plans in the hills on either side of the Baixa, where the destruction was only partial, and this, too, is still visible today.
Straight lines dominated Renaissance design from the start, so what distinguishes the earlier part of this era from the Baroque period? Baroque aims at a different effect. It wants to carry us away with the force of its impact, immediate and overwhelming. Its impact on us is intended to be only momentary, while that of the Renaissance is slower and quieter, but more enduring, making us want to linger for ever in its presence.
This momentary impact of baroque is powerful, but soon leaves us with a certain sense of desolation. Alexander complains: It must be stressed that a center does not get more life merely according to the number of its subsidiary centers. Such an idea would only lead to the fallacy of baroque architecture which piles on detail, but which never reaches a very intense kind of life. But perhaps the situation with the Baroque is not so simple.
Zucker found two distinct Baroques: What is historically called baroque is divided aesthetically into two tendencies. On the one hand, there is the baroque derived from Michelangelo, exaggerating and contorting the more placid forms of the High Renaissance, accentuating individual parts within a whole, dramatizing and emphasizing volumes and masses. On the other hand, during the same centuries there was manifested the classicistic approach, based on Palladio and the Vitruvian Academy, leaning heavily on ancient examples, regular, reticent in expression, sometimes of a certain dryness which often leads to the reproach of "academicism.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries both tendencies ran parallel. Some of this work has real heart in it. The principles of Baroque planning have fallen in and out of favor over the past four centuries. Industrial Era The "modern" era was already well under way by the time industrialization began to influence cities. However, "Modern" architecture arose about a century after the start of industrialization, in part as a response to it.
Indeed, industrialization jolted urban planning and design. High-grade, standardized materials became widely available at low prices. Unfortunately, the effect of industrialization on city design was mainly adverse. To begin with, the production of the materials themselves came at terrible costs. The countryside was ravaged to supply hitherto inconceivable quantities of raw materials. Forests vanished. Skies were darkened by smokestacks belching coal smoke.
The ecological costs of industrialization were, in many ways, worst at the beginning, when steam engines were inefficient, electricity was still generations away, and pollution controls were as yet unimagined. The blight that afflicted Britain, the first industrial nation, was horrific. This began the modern era, in which anything that could not be bought and sold was held to be of no real value. Jonathan Hale traces the steady decline in the design skills of ordinary people to the beginning of the industrial era.
What cannot be doubted is that living conditions UK cities declined sharply during the 19th century. The situation was not much better in other industrializing nations. The impact of industrialization was not entirely negative for cities, however. Inventions such as the railroad, water treatment, gas lighting, and electricity made larger cities possible and thus enabled the phenomenal growth in knowledge that continues to this day.
Zucker disparagingly refers to the 19th century as the "flat" century: Now, during the last third of the [18th] century, "neoclassicism" corroded [the feeling for three-dimensional expanse]. The susceptibility for the third dimension diminished till it finally vanished entirely at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the "flat" century which was interested only in two-dimensional design.
The triumph of reason became complete; architecture and city planning followed essentially structural concepts. A logical, almost functional approach rather than the desire to express three-dimensional imagination directed the creative process. Simplicity in contrast to richness and variety of expression became the ideal, and it was this ideal which writers and artists saw primarily in the works of antiquity. The beginning of systematic archaeological studies in Greece and the excavations in Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Accordingly, the straight line became predominant in architecture and hence rectangularity in city planning--in other words, the gridiron scheme. Thus, quite naturally, the street, conceived of as a continuous perspective, mostly of similar units, became more important than the square. In the opinion of this period, utmost clarity suggests to the mind structural truth and creates automatically therewith aesthetic pleasure, which now actually became identical with mere intellectual satisfaction.
Like Zucker, he finds that the importance and quality of squares declined sharply and that the feeling of space degraded: In modern city planning the ratio between the built-up and open spaces is exactly reversed. Formerly the empty spaces streets and plazas were a unified entity of shapes calculated for their impact; today building lots are laid out as regularly-shaped closed forms, and what is left over between them become streets or plazas.
Sitte complained: Straight lines and right angles are certainly characteristic of insensitive planning, but are apparently not decisive in this matter, because Baroque planning also used straight lines and right angles, achieving powerful and truly artistic effects in spite of them. An undeviating boulevard, miles long, seems boring even in the most beautiful surroundings.
It is unnatural, it does not adapt itself to irregular terrain, and it remains uninteresting in effect, so that, mentally fatigued, one can hardly await its termination. But as the more frequent shorter streets of modern planning also produce an unfortunate effect, there must be some other cause for it. It is the same as in the plazas, namely faulty closure of the sides of the street. The continual breaching by wide cross streets, so that on both sides nothing is left but a row of separated blocks of buildings, is the main reason why no unified impression can be attained.
Sitte continues to explain, using the example of an arcade, why the creation of enclosure had become impossible. It has simply to do with the breadth of the streets. Each block stands out distinctly; the repeating arches of the arcade can no longer create enclosure because they are separated by such wide streets.
The continuity required to create enclosure can no longer be developed. Medieval comfort has been sacrificed to transport requirements. The best that can be had is monumentality. Garden Cities A reaction to the 19th-century poverty comes with the Garden Cities movement, which responded to both deteriorating living conditions and the excessive width of streets.
Ebenezer Howard is the figure most closely associated with this movement, which arose when tuberculosis was burning through the overworked and overcrowded masses of poor people huddled in industrial cities.
Howard wanted to spread cities out across the countryside and provide each household with a decent house on its own plot. This spoke to the British soul, which had remained stubbornly pastoral--the aristocracy had its estates and mansions, and the working class deserved its own miniature versions. In English-speaking lands, echoes of this urge still prevail, and the suburban house standing on its own plot is still widely considered the most desirable form of housing in these countries.
The Garden Cities movement also gives us the great work of Raymond Unwin, whose deep appreciation of medieval forms is eloquently reflected in his Town Planning in Practice.
But then he rather strangely concluded that "to-the-acre" [about 30 to the hectare] single-family housing was the best contemporary solution. His views on cities contrast sharply with Renaissance thinking: [T]he characteristic beauty and picturesqueness of the Gothic town are due in no small degree to its irregular plan, combined with a style of architecture which displays great freedom in the proportion and outline of its masses, and a richness and picturesqueness in its details contrasting in a high degree with the Greek and Roman architecture, so much more stiff and limited in its lines, and consisting as regards is masses mainly of groups of cubes.
It would be all too easy to sketch an irregular plan that was superficially pleasing but that lacked underlying organization. Unwin recognized this danger. Referring to his German contemporaries, he says: Some of the irregularity in their work appears to be introduced for its own sake, and if not aimlessly, at least without adequate reason; the result being that many of their more recent plans lack any sense of framework or largeness of design at all in scale with the area dealt with.
Modernism took a perverse pride in breaking with thought and design from all prior epochs. It was based on a presumed need to completely reinvent culture to suit the dawning new age. The end of Modernism is placed by some at the demolition of the failed Modernist Pruitt-Igoe housing project in , but it can reasonably be argued that Modernism is with us still.
Paris rapidly developed during the industrial revolution.. Goes By: From the FREE shipping on qualifying offers. History of Urban Form: Before the Provides an international history of urban development, from its origins to the industrial revolution. This well established book maintains the high standard of. The city, as the noted urban sociologist Robert Park once wrote, is Download full-text PDF Join for free Industrial Revolution and population transformation, steel played a key role in This well established book maintains the high standard of Print book.
Urban form determinants - Natural and Man made have been analysed through content analysis of authors like Gallion, Lynch , Morris. London: Longman, Morris] on Amazon. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.. We will, therefore, be considering the history of the urban form in the context of street plans from antiquity to the present day.
Gridiron patterns vary quite a good deal. Sometimes, as in Manhattan, they are strictly regular above 14th Street , with perfectly straight streets and …. Unknown Binding, pages. Original Title. History of urban form…. History of urban form: prehistory to the Renaissance by Morris, A. Anthony Edwin James Publication date
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