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Figure 5.7
Street in Benwell, Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
1970. Typical workers’ housing on the banks of the
industrial River Tyne in northeast England used the
‘Tyneside flats’ – terraced houses divided into
upstairs and downstairs apartments – to increase
density. Front gardens and setbacks were non-
existent, back yards were miniscule (just large
enough to hold the outside lavatories and a short
clothes line) and recreational spaces such as parks
or playgrounds were never considered. Every piece
of space was devoted to maximizing profit for the
developer.
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than merely applying information from abstracted
tables and formulas. This means a return to the
examples of Riverside and its successors. This used to
be the way America designed its suburbs, and these
places work as well today as when they were designed
one hundred or more years ago.
But there is more to the lineage of design-based
codes than historic examples from early suburban
America, important as they may be. The incorpora-
tion of design codes and guidelines into ordinances
covering urban redevelopment has a long history.
Their purpose, whether used by a public agency or a
private developer, has generally been to ensure the
build-out of a master development plan at a consistent
level of quality and detail. An important secondary
use has been to control the appearance of new devel-
opment in relation to the historic urban fabric of an
area. Both these ambitions are relevant to our task
today.
In Paris, for example, during the reign of Louis XIV,
building regulations required that all new buildings
respect the street alignment, and specified details such
as the solid-to-void ratio of building façades, the conti-
nuity of eaves lines from one building to the next, and
the depth of courtyards in the building plans (Ellin: 
p. 46). While this level of aesthetic control has
remained common (to varying degrees) across several
European countries, American urban development has
historically been far less constricted. As we have noted
several times earlier, in America the powers of govern-
ment to control private development have been much
more limited than in European countries, and have
rarely extended beyond the zoning of land according
to use. Issues of what passes for design have generally
been restricted to specifying the placement of build-
ings in relation to parking lots, the location of drive-
ways, and tree planting requirements.
But American urban history does include some
notable exceptions to this condition, and one of the
earliest examples of design affecting zoning ordi-
nances dates from 1916 in New York. These regula-
tions followed German models in constraining the
bulk of skyscrapers rising directly from the line of the
street by limiting their height and mandating set-
backs at specific levels above ground level, in order to
ease the overshadowing of public streets and adjacent
buildings. The architectural illustrator Hugh Ferris
rendered these ordinances into three-dimensional
forms in his famous series of drawings, ‘Zoning
Envelopes: First through Fourth Stages,’ first published
in the 
New York Times
in 1922. This zoning law was
not replaced until 1961, when new ordinances were
enacted based on different design ideas.
The 1961 New York ordinance was based on new
modernist design concepts of a tower set back from
the street and surrounded by open space. Models for
this new ordinance – buildings like the Seagram
Building by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson
(1958) – were simple vertical boxes positioned well
away from the sidewalk with an intervening plaza.
Residential ordinances in the city followed the same
pattern, and these regulations became a prototype for
similar codes in cities across the USA.
These codes virtually eliminated the traditional idea
of the street as a linear public space defined by the
walls of buildings, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that
cities like New York, Pittsburgh and San Francisco led
a revisionist trend in urban design, bringing back
requirements for streets and plazas defined by continu-
ous ‘street walls’ of building façades. One of the stimuli
for this movement was Jonathan Barnett’s book