The Death of Urbanism. Marcus White
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Le Corbusier’s concept of civilised humans planning cities with a 2D orthogonal grid in contrast to the unplanned, pack-donkey-organic layout echoed the thoughts of the British historian, Francis Haverfield, whose paper ‘Ancient Town Planning’ (1913) suggested the orthogonally planned grid distinguished the civilised from the ‘moral inconsistency’ of the barbarian. He argued that Rome’s greatest gift to Europe was the definitive form of the town’s rectangular grid. According to Haverfield ‘The savage, inconsistent in his moral life, is equally inconsistent, equally unable to “keep straight”, in his house-building and his road-making’.
The Roman design approach of ordered, gridded street layouts (aspects of the design paradigm), expressed the Empire’s urban desire to reflect their accomplishments as a civilisation, with the physical form of cities appearing ordered and therefore ‘civilised’. Another urban desire that influenced the orthogonal grid approach relates to efficient movement and city defence. The grid was believed to be useful for military access for defence from attacks and protect the city from uprisings from within, to keep under watch a restless population for surveillance, control and even repression (Kostof, 1991).
The layout of the Roman grid was possible because of technological advancements in design procedures, the understanding of scaled drawings and implementation (set out tools) such as the ‘road measurer’ or hodometer conceived of by Vitruvius, and the groma‡ which allowed the setting out of straight lines and right angles for gridded streets found in military camps and Roman settlements.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe reverted to the irregular, unplanned growth around the spiritual and physical focus of the Church reflecting the social milieu. Gridded cities appeared again in the new towns in France and England (around 1100 AD) due to another change in society’s prominent urban desires - the rekindled need for protection, fortified communities designed to counter each other’s ceaseless raids. The revived interest in the grid plan was continued into the Renaissance, particularly after the rediscovery of the work of Vitruvius. Designers adopted the grid to create a new paradigm in the treatment of public spaces and amenity while maintaining political and military prerequisites.
The 2D grid would continue to be used for colonial settlements throughout the world. With the rise of the commerce agenda, 2D grid plans became speculative, used in part due to the ease in which real estate could be divided up and sold.
Each lot, being of uniform shape, became aunit, like a coin, capable of ready appraisaland exchange (Mumford, 1940).
The 2D grid method of planning was adopted all over the world. It was sometimes applied over sites regardless of topography resulting in areas of street grid too steep for a car to drive up. Notable examples are San Francisco California (the home of the movie car chase)§ and Wellington, New Zealand which was designed in England using 2D site plans without topographical information by a designer who had never visited the site.
‘A city made for speed is made for success’(Le Corbusier, 1929).
The rational nature of the grid and illustration of universal reason and human equality was appreciated by the Modernists who adopted the grid but began to give some streets prominence over others (Taylor, 2001). The idea of street hierarchy was elaborated on by German Modernist architect and urban designer, Ludwig Hilberseimer (1927) who argued that the hierarchy of major (wide) roads and narrow (minor) roads would satisfy the urban desire for safer streets for children, whilst increasing the overall speed of circulation of vehicles. This system was adopted by the Modern masters – Lucio Costa with Oscar Niemeyer in their built city, the capital of Brazil, Brasilia, as well as Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh in India. The grid also reflected the classical tendencies of Le Corbusier’s town planning (Laurence, 1993). A mutated version of Hilberseimer’s street hierarchy occurred through the 1960s almost putting an end to the grid with serpentine street layouts for residential subdivisions. This proliferation of the highway, feeder and cul-de-sac system will be discussed later in the book.
The pretty city: a new perspective on the city
Though the gridded city resurfaced in some areas in Europe during the medieval period, organic town growth continued in other areas. Towards the end of this period, advancements in the artistic representation technique by Giotto (Giotto Di Bondone), and Masaccio (Tommaso Cassai) began to have an effect on the representation of cities. ‘Bird’s eye view’ drawings of cities in a pseudo perspective (somewhere between 2D and 3D) allowed for an overview of cities (Rowland, 1966). Though there was some idea of depth, the buildings shown in these drawings were not proportional, complying with the gothic tradition of using scale to set up a hierarchy of importance of figures and themes, not depth [Figure 4 and Figure 5].
Figure 4: ‘Eunuchus’, an early 2D / 3D drawn representation of urban setting, (Ulm, 1486).
Figure 5: Lithograph reproduction of Marco Polo’s departure from Venice on his journey to China (CEA+, 1344).
In the early 1400s, prominent architect of the Italian Renaissance, Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated the geometrical method of perspective by using a painting of the baptistry with a hole in it, standing in front of the building facing away from it holding a mirror [Figure 6]. The understanding of perspective was later formalised by the author, artist, architect, poet, linguist, and philosopher, Leon Battista Alberti in Della Pittura, a document that explained the procedure. This is noteworthy for two reasons. Firstly this is a clear example of the advantage of an architect being directly involved in developing their own design and representation procedures, a concept that we pursue in later chapters, and secondly, the new technique would lead to a new understanding of cities as potentially an urban composition, in turn, influencing society’s urban desires.
Figure 6: Sketch of Brunelleschi’s verification of geometric perspective technique, by White, M. based on illustration by Jim Anderson in II Duomo: Brunelleschi, a Man of Many Talents (Atkins, 2008).
The new understanding of the perspective procedure led to the city being represented with more accuracy as a whole, which helped to affect the public’s understanding and informed urban aspirations for the city. These new desires, in turn, affected the urban design paradigm.
In the second half of the 16th century, theurban setting became a collective concern…a large number of perspective city viewsin which a great deal of information wascombined in a realistic rendering. For thefirst time the entire heritage of the Europeancities was precisely represented accordingto the tenets of Renaissance visual cultureand given general circulation. The populationbecame accustomed to the syntheticperception of parts of the urban organismand the relationship between the city andthe geographical setting. Perspective,the tool used to create these images wassubsequently and continuously employed forthe rectification of urban settings. The newrectilinear avenues became more frequentand longer, and better emphasised the viewof the vanishing point (Benevolo & Ipsen,1993).
This application of perspective as an urban design technique impacted city design through the Renaissance and into the Baroque periods. During the 1400s the urban aspirations of the inhabitants of Rome varied from their predecessors. A new desire for an emphasis on the Church and the path of pilgrims was reflected with urban interventions – straight axial streets terminating in vistas marked by ‘wayfinding’ obelisks and religious buildings (Bacon, 1974). This urban design paradigm reflected the melding of the current urban aspirations and the new design technique – perspective.
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