the 1920s to the DPZ reworking of the same type in
the 1990s.
Picturesque Urbanism
In contrast to the rationalist basis of typology, the
‘townscape’ or picturesque approach to urban design
is more ‘empirical.’ It’s based on the specific impact
particular compositions of urban form and space
make on the senses and emotions of the observer,
rather than relying on pre-existing, generalized con-
cepts of form. Empiricism provides one of the other
great founding
principles of Western thought, articu-
lated most clearly by Englishman John Locke. In his
1687
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
, Locke
argued (in opposition to Descartes) that everything we
know about the world is amassed through sensory
experience – sight, sound, smell, touch and so forth –
and then from reflection upon our experience
(Broadbent p. 80). This philosophical worldview
translates directly into urbanism, through the work
of Gordon Cullen, for example, with his principles of
townscape and ‘serial vision’ – comprehending the
city as an orchestrated sequence
of visual experiences
in the tradition of the English picturesque landscape
garden, and orchestrating these experiences into a
three-dimensional mental map of the city as a series
of connected places.
The reader will recall from earlier discussions that
this method of design derives specifically from the
work of the Austrian urbanist Camillo Sitte at the end
of the nineteenth century, and was also much used by
Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker in their designs for
the early Garden Cities and garden suburbs before the
World War I. The illustrations of Oaklands Park, in
Dawlish, on the Devon coast in southwest England,
illustrate the creation of spaces as a series of vignettes,
composed for pictorial or ‘romantic’ effect,
a quality
heightened by their emphasis on vernacular imagery
and allusions to local building styles and materials.
The spatial arrangement is specifically based on the
views that a pedestrian, or a motorist at slow speed,
can appreciate as a meaningful and attractive sequence
(see Figures 4.13–4.15).
Sitte’s 1889 text emphasized the emotional experi-
ence of being in urban spaces, and
City Building
According to Artistic Principles
is an impassioned argu-
ment against one sort of typology, as manifested in
the unimaginative uniformity and repetitive formulas
of the nineteenth Austrian developers’
architecture in
Forster’s heavy-handed
Ringstrasse
plan around
medieval Vienna (1859–72). But Sitte’s own work,
based as it was upon countless empirical visual analy-
ses of historical European plazas, was paradoxically
typological to some degree. He studied historic
examples not as models to copy, but to identify
underlying principles of artistic composition from
earlier periods that were transferable to his time (see
Figure 4.16). It’s not hard to extend this search for
principles into a classification of types of different
arrangements for piazzas and squares,
based on vari-
ables such as the relationship of major buildings to
the space(s), the location of points of entry into the
space, a hierarchy of major and minor spaces and
their connections and so forth. Rob Krier’s exhaustive
typological studies in his 1979 book,
Urban Space
,
follow this approach and explicitly refer to and
extend the work of Sitte.
At the same time, Sitte was primarily concerned
with the visual organization of spaces, and it was this
attribute of his work that Unwin and especially
Cullen developed further. While there is no evidence
of any direct link between Sitte and Cullen (Gosling’s
definitive book on Cullen’s work barely mentions the
Viennese author [Gosling, 1996]) the townscape
method of designing from eye level –
based on a
pedestrian’s visual experience of moving around the
city – is the natural three-dimensional development
of Sitte’s two-dimensional analyses.
The primary articulation of space in Cullen’s
vocabulary is the distinction between ‘Here’ and
‘There.’ ‘Here’ is where one stands, in a space that is
known and understood, occupied at least temporarily
by the user. ‘There’ is a different space, divided in
some way from the first. It may be revealed to the
observer in a direct manner as in a framed view
through an arch, or it may be concealed and only
hinted at by means of partial closure of the view, or
the manipulation of the opening,
or by a change of
level. By a coherent sequence of transitions from a
succession of ‘heres’ to a series of ‘theres’ Cullen
builds his technique of ‘serial vision,’ a means of
comprehending, enjoying and designing the public
spaces of a city by creating memorable visual con-
trasts and images. He seeks to manipulate the ele-
ments of a town or city to achieve an impact on
human emotion (see Figure 4.17). The urban place
comes alive ‘through the drama of juxtaposition’
where all the elements that combine to create a par-
ticular environment, buildings, spaces, materials,
trees, water, traffic and so forth,
are woven together
in ways that release the drama of urban experience
CHAPTER FOUR
●
SOURCES OF GOOD URBANISM
85
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(Cullen, 1961: pp. 10–11). There have been several
variations of Cullen’s ideas, notably Ivor de Wofle
and Kenneth Browne’s
Civilia
, and Francis Tibbalds’
Making People-Friendly Towns
(1992). Most recently
a series of articles by Andres Duany and others in
New Urban News
(2002–03) on urban composition
derive directly from Cullen’s seminal work.
Cullen’s examples, like those of Camillo Sitte and
Raymond Unwin before him, were drawn from the
vernacular urbanism
of European towns and cities,
places where the urbanism was organic rather than
monumental. These urban places had been assem-
bled over time as a result of many individual deci-
sions rather than laid out at a single stroke in the
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
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