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Figure 6.25
Infill housing, Victoria, London.
This infill housing from the late 1980s/early 1990s
manages to insert a new, larger building into its
context by carefully matching the ground floor
proportions and cornice heights.
Figure 6.23
Fifth and Poplar apartments, Charlotte
city centre, LS3P architects, 2003 The projecting
entryways to the ground floor dwellings of this
perimeter block contrast with recessed balconies on
the floor above to create a lively street scene while
protecting residential privacy.
Figure 6.22
Atherton Heights, Dilworth, Charlotte,
NC, David Furman, architect, 1998. This low cost
housing organizes the proportions of its façade by
tying together different sized openings with
patterned brickwork on a predominantly solid wall.
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was broadly harmonious in aggregate. This does not
mean that designers should force a series of false
façades onto large buildings (far from it!) but that the
building wall should be carefully articulated. This
sense of balance between order and variation is more
easily achieved through vertical proportions and
rhythms than through horizontal, and even when
urban areas are built in large increments, like the
squares and terraces of eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century London, the use of repetitive vertical porches
projecting from a uniform façade serves to communi-
cate scale and human presence (see Figure 6.29).
This London example offers a multitude of build-
ing entrances, but in situations where entrances are
less frequent, every attempt should be made to locate
them no further than 150 feet apart. This enables
pedestrians to move in and out of the buildings at
several points, thus generating the activity that helps
to energize an area, and also humanizes an otherwise
CHAPTER SIX
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URBAN DESIGN IN THE REAL WORLD