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Figure 4.4
Fosse Street, Dartmouth, Devon.The tight
urban enclosure enhances the social experience of
shopping for residents and visitors alike in this seaside
town. Note how the vista is terminated by the tower
of the parish church.
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The design planners’ workshop convinced us of the
urgent need for this kind of information – fronts and
backs and public rooms – as the foundation for more
elaborate concepts. The participants were hungry for
the knowledge and eager to develop and refine their
skills. Within a few hours of intensive work these
non-designers were creating some quite sophisticated
designs with clear spatial ideas (see Figure 4.8). The
drawings were basic but sufficient to communicate
the spatial arrangements, and the important thing to
grasp here is that careful drawings like these begin to
deal with three dimensions in terms of anticipated
building height and widths of spaces. These three-
dimensional qualities can be explored further in sec-
tion, a vertical slice through the buildings and site
that delineates building heights and ground levels.
One doesn’t need to draw perspectives to design in
three dimensions. Urban designers do so, either by
hand or computer-generated models, to develop a
design more thoroughly, but for non-designers, the
section can establish many key qualities of public
space, scale and building massing (see Figure 4.9).
Sometimes, basic urban design is as simple as this:
size the buildings correctly and locate them in space
so that public space is clearly defined. In real life it’s
usually more complex and subtle, and urban design
isn’t simply a pragmatic affair of common sense tech-
niques. It has deeper levels of meaning and operation,
and the different ways of working noted earlier can
be traced back to key philosophical concepts in west-
ern thought: typology to rationalism, picturesque
urbanism to empiricism and designing for the social
use of space to pragmatism. We’ll begin our review of
urban design methods with typology, a basically
simple but often misunderstood notion.
Typology
Knowing the dimensions of various types of build-
ings is the first move toward working typologically,
CHAPTER FOUR
●
SOURCES OF GOOD URBANISM