Appunti Culture of Urban Design

Culture of Urban Design

Urban Design

• Designing and shaping cities, towns, and villages.
• Contrast to architecture - focus on individual building.
• UD - deals with larger scale of groups of buildings, streets, public spaces.

Interdisciplinary subject.

Goal - Making urban areas attractive and functional.

Art of relationship - Purpose: take all the elements that go to create the environment (buildings, trees, nature, water, adornments) and weave them together.

Livable Streets

Street pattern and urban design.

• Road - vehicle movements (cars).
• Streets - urban streets.

Wells - Anticipations, 1902

• The railways will spread the cities over their boundaries.

Mumford - The culture of cities, 1938

• Not only railway but cars too.

Historical Street Pattern

Heart of urban life set on the main road.

At the origins of URBAN DESTRUCTIONS (1900) Henard

• What happened to cities after automobiles

~1900

After the Haussmann openings

• Henard ➔ transformation of the roads - more technical
• Technological Revolution

Airplanes, mechanical ➔ Le Corbusier

Technology main elements that could success streets have to become technology elements

1909 ➔ Chicago Daniel Burnham

Metropolitan vision of the city

• ➔ looks in a wider way also the country side (lake, house)

Columbian Expo for Chicago

Vision for a city made of gypsum plaster

• ➔ Americans were amazed because they could build a monumental city only in one month

• Lots of cities are built on this models (New Classicism)
• Grid + plan made of knots, arterial streets
• Interaction: railways + freeways
• Opens big boulevards ➔ destroys building

Approach ➔ you have to fit the urban shape to automobiles needs.

Main focus ➔ open space, not buildings

Different dimension = different use

Not focused on buildings - all look like the same

Dreamy vision for the future of the city

• Main problem: lot of traffic

PRIVATE

• flowers entrance by the garage
• main couple intimate crowd

C. Buchanan

It was said that a Venetian configuration emerged from Buchanan study for the road network of

Pattern book

a set of intimacy - in Venice there is always people

in this world you can often find the streets empty

Venice works where Modernist layout have failed

READING

• Urban planning and street design history
• Hall P. (1988) Chapter 9
• The city on the highway in Cities of Tomorrow
• Blackwell Publishers Oxford

Los Angeles 1953

Construction of "The Stack" -> 1^st four level interchange

Taxonomy of Suburban Construction

• Edge Nodes
• Drive through
• Strip
• Boomburbs
• Cluster world
• Low density
• Sit com suburb
• Leapfrog
• POD
• Privatopia

Key idea: Complete segregation between pedestrian movement and automobile traffic

Basically a "Nehenah" Configuration -> for the radical renewal of Tottenham Court (C. Buchanan)

Strade come canali e tutta la vita cittadina si svolge su "isole" sopraelevate

• Cellular organization of urban settlement
• Hierarchical pattern

6) CRITICISM

• According to Christopher Alexander - Patterns
• How does this manifest on a built form?
• Local accelerated build-out vs incremental growth
• Super human scale

7) CONCLUSIONS

• Democracy? - No public consultation after ship incidents
• Developing for whom? Financial interests first - local interests second

JANE JACOBS

Illustrations the scenes that illustrate this book are all about us, for pedestrians. Please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might as well listen, linger and think about what you see.

GREENWICH VILLAGE, MANHATTAN

• Working distance between Jacob's house and Washington Square Park - 0.7 miles (13 minutes) & "children's playground"

LETTER TO MAYOR WAGNER

• Criticism to the plan to run a highway through the centre of Washington Square.
• She thinks that it is a scheme to wreck the city, unthinkable.

CRITICISM TO 4 Radiant garden city beautifiers

GARDEN CITY - HOWARD

CITY BEAUTIFUL - BURNHAM

VILLE RADIEUSE - LE CORBUSIER

"ALL WAS FAILURE"

MUMFORD'S Culture of Cities -

Conditions for city diversity:

• Generators of diversity
• Need for primary mixed uses
• Need for small blocks
• Need for aged buildings
• Need for concentration
• Myths about diversity

CONDITIONS TO GENERATE EXUBERANT DIVERSITY IN A CITY'S STREETS:

1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible must serve more than one primary function, preferably more than two.

1980-87

• Improve the image of the Docklands
• Attract private investments
• Public sector found renewal is too slow
• Improve roads and public transport

1991 → Royal Ulster Bank, Boston → located its headquarters

2000 → Transport system completed

Picers

Urban Design Proposals

• 1988 David Gosling and Gordon Cullen
• Preparation of a "Guide to design and development opportunities"

Objectives of the Guide

1. Define the existing character of an area
2. Emphasize the potential of the area through an awareness of sketch proposals → Local point of view
3. Embed flexibility in order to ensure the site of Docklands lasting economic revival

Not a rigid masterplan

Design

Planning

Square of public space — to propose plural public courts and market place guidance

• Transport → Roadways and garages
• Physical characteristics

Cesar Pelli → Obelisk form for the 1st tower

• Docklands Monorail, sheer size overwhelmed the small scale industrial buildings on Heron Quay

Plan: was to bring 50,000 jobs → just a business district

Did not provide housing scheme → diversification of use suggested → only for the ground floor

Norberg Schultz

• Personal and community identity defined by three modes of dwelling
• Exchange (collective dwelling) → settlement
• Agreement (public dwelling) → institution
• Ownership (private dwelling) → house
• Embodied the identification with the local environment

World rooted in material reality physical world of physical identification experienced and given meaning by memory and history

Luigi Snozzi - Monte Carasso

Triangular shape

How to reinforce a community?

• Construction of a new city centre
• Consolidation and densification of the residential historic fabric
• Redefinition of urban edge.

Restoration of the former Augustinian convent 1979-1993

New primary school.

New civic centre

Many uses to different private owners for a big area

Iconic building to reinforce the idea of community.

Recreate courtyard all around the building

Problem: the building is enclosed between other buildings.

Wide public "agora" wasn't built.

The result creates a real square.

2^nd floor new step open to the ground building.

It completely changed the building but it does it

to make it useful: the small rooms of the convent could

not be used class rooms

An entire level of the "loggia" was closed classrooms

outside the school there is still the problem of

Connections gym underground.

Consolidation and densification of the residential historic fabric

• Marisch House 1988-91
• Accommodation for the parish 1990
• Guidotti House 1991
• Repetto House 1987-90
• D'Andrea House 1991