Hello, welcome to the ICAA.
My name is Michael Dennis.
I'm an architect in Boston and an emeritus
professor at MIT where I was the director
of the post-professional urbanism program.
I'm also the author of Court and Garden:
From the French Hotel to the City of Modern
Architecture and two forthcoming books.
One is titled Architecture and the City,
it’s a collection of essays and articles.
And the other is called Temples and Towns: A Study of
the Form, Elements, and Principles of Planned Towns.
This lecture is about the language of urban form.
In other words, it's about cities, how to see or read them.
What is the most important thing about designing them
and what is architecture’s role in informing them?
The city is our most complex and important human construct.
It is the most efficient form of human habitation
in terms of energy consumption and carbon
production on a per capita basis.There are many
complex issues with cities, but the most important
issue - their physical form - is relatively simple.
The city’s urban elements have been the same for several
thousand years and across many different cultures.
Like members of the same family, cities are all
different, but they share important commonalities.
Also like families, there are some good, beautiful
cities and some not so good, especially today.
Traditionally, architecture was an integral
element of the city and the city was urban.
And this is important.
Today, however, most architecture is
anti-urban and cities are often defined by
population statistics, but are not urban.
For many reasons today, we need to relearn
about the civics and practice of urban life.
Number one, we need to relearn that
cities are about urban space, not objects.
We need to relearn to make urban
architecture and urban landscape.
Three, we need to learn that cities should
be lived in, not commuted to from suburbs.
This lecture is therefore a framework or an
outline for further exploration of urban issues.
It consists of an introduction to the major issues, some
illustrations of urban life, a detailed discussion of urban
elements, followed by illustrations of those elements.
So let's get started.
What you're seeing here is a restoration image
of the city, Greek city of Priene in Asia Minor.
It has all of the characteristics that we'll be talking
about of civic spaces, urban blocks, urban fabric, and
landscape.But to begin, we need to make a distinction
between what we now are forced to call the traditional city.
We used to call it simply “the
city” because cities were urban.
They are not all today.
So the traditional city - this is Rome, by the way,
an overview of Rome, Italy - it’s compact, dense,
walkable, and it has the lowest per capita carbon
footprint of any other form of human habitation.
It's composed of buildings, blocks, streets, squares,
gardens, parks, neighborhoods, and legible public space.
This is an aerial view of Abu Dhabi
and the city of modern architecture.
There is sprawl.
It's obviously not walkable.
It has a high per capita carbon footprint.
It's composed of freestanding buildings,
illegible open space, and vehicular circulation.
It's dominated by vehicular circulation.
You cannot walk anywhere in this
city, especially given the climate.
So what happened?
How did this happen?
Well, there are basically three things, three reasons.One of
those is that, in the 18th century, near the middle of the
18th century, architecture transformed from a kind of city
of public space where individual buildings formed background
buildings to the public space to a rise in individuality.
And that was reflected in the form of buildings.
The picture on the top is the Palais Royal in Paris.
The picture on the bottom is the city of
Mauperthuis - an ideal city of Mauperthuis - by Ledoux.
And if you look at it closely, you see that
each of the buildings has its own character,
like we each have our own character.
And Thomas Jefferson was in Paris
during this time, in the 1780s.
And he was quite taken by new classical Paris, the
beginnings of suburbia, if you will, because he saw in
it a way of having a civilized agrarian life in America.
From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright,
architects have had an antithetic relationship
to the city.So Jefferson saw in this neoclassical
ideal a way of having a civilized democracy.
The second thing is that, in the mid 19th
century, people began to move about cities.
The circulation became an important thing and streets
widened and city design reflected that movement.
Until about 1850 in Paris, people grew up and lived
in the same neighborhood in which they were born.
But beginning in the 1850s, people began to
work or go to school in different neighborhoods.
The rise of carriages available to the bourgeoisie
enabled this transportation.
And as you can see, they had their own traffic difficulties.
In fact, there are some that you don't see, but you
can imagine these horses relieving themselves on the
street and it presented a whole other kind of problem.
But basically, town planning changed and focused on
the street rather than spaces, squares, urban blocks,
and so on.The third thing is that, about the same
time in America, Frederick Law Olmsted, the great
American landscape architect, also did not like cities.
He thought that the central business
districts were necessary for commerce, but
that people should live out in greenery.
In other words, that they should
commute in and out to cities.
And this has infected American, urbanism and
town planning and towns and villages ever since.
So if you want to see the results of all of this social
and formal transformation, you can look at both ends of
that great East/West axis in Paris, with, on the left
hand side, the Louvre, and that great axis extending
out to the tall buildings in the background, La Défense.
And on the right hand side, La Défense itself.
In other words, those neoclassical isolated
buildings from the 18th century that had a
character reflecting the personality of the
owner, let's say, have become mute objects.
It's like, it's not a city.
It's like a junkyard for Androids from outer
space, leftover Androids from outer space.
There's no legible public space.
There are only a series of pretty banal or goofy buildings.
And if you look at what has happened to architecture in
the meantime, you need just a random sampling from the
internet, you know, if you look at only one of these
things, you might go, “Oh wow, that's interesting.”
But if you look at them in terms of whether they
can make a city or not, they obviously cannot.
They're narcissistic, navel
gazing, architectural toy making.
They're not urban buildings.
They're buildings designed to get your firm on the cover of
the Rolling Stone or on the cover of Architectural Record.So
three conditions are required for a city to be urban.
As I said before, most cities are defined
today by population statistics, a hundred
thousand people, I suppose, is a city.
But most of the time, they're not urban.
To be urban, people must live in the city.
In other words, that Olmsted idea doesn't work.
That's not really an urban condition.
Buildings must almost, they must either touch
or almost touch and align on the streets
to define the public spaces of the city.
And three neighborhoods must be multifunctional.
They're not single function zones where you - Leon
Krier, the well known urbanist, described single
function zoning as saying “today, I will only eat
peas, tomorrow I will only eat meat,” et cetera.
Neighborhoods need a full diet.
They need to be multifunctional to enable people
to live in them.Now, historically, there have been
a lot of iconic detached freestanding buildings.
One of the most famous ones, of course, is the Paris
opera house by Tony Garnier, an icon of enormous beauty.
But in fact, it's absorbed into the fabric of the city.
Now, there were lots of complaints about Baron Haussmann's
design of the Plaza around the Paris opera house.
But, despite the arguments, it is an
integral part of the urban fabric.
It aligns on this avenue and the streets around it pour
into that and support the importance of that civic building.
There are other important buildings.
This is the Pantheon in Paris, which in this case,
there’s not a grand boulevard leading up to it,
but a tree-lined pedestrian street with cafes
and statues and so forth along the edge of the
square.There are fantastic urban parks in Paris.
This is in the Palais Royal, which was built in the 1780s.
It's a very popular place today.
And there are streets that are normative streets where
people live and buy groceries and go to restaurants.
In this case, it's a street in the Marais section of
Paris, and there's a marketplace going on in the street.
And I would remind you again that, until the 1850s,
most people never went more than a few blocks
from where they were born in their neighborhood.
This is a scene along that market.
There were all kinds of different things going on there.
And this is the Champs-Élysées, the famous avenue in
Paris, the very wide one.And you can pretty much tell from
this picture that there's an integration of architecture
and landscape and urban design and social interaction.
And finally then, you don't really need all of
these things, of course, to have civic life.
This is a scene alongside the Seine River
of six people having a picnic lunch.
But it is enabled if you live here and if you have
a whole repertoire of urban events and forums.
So I think this is maybe the most important point
of this presentation, which is about the difference
between urban design and architectural design
or town planning and architecture, if you will.
And the best example that I know of to explain it is to
say that if you are an architect and you're designing
a piece of a city that is too big for you to design all
the buildings, then you should switch gears and rely
on town planning, not designing the buildings.These
are three principles from the urban geographer M.R.G.
Conzen.
He said there are three elements: the town plan, which
is made up of streets, blocks, and public spaces.
And this is Priene down below,
the early Greek Panhellenic town.
In other words, you can see the
blocks and the public open space.
That's the primary thing that town planners,
landscape architects, and architects design.
The second is the land use pattern, which
is the parcel divisions of the blocks.
And they will say more about this later.
You don't always design the parcels, but it's
a good thing to be aware of parcels and the
building types that are going to occupy them.
This is what town planners do on the
left hand side of this dotted line.
The building fabric, on the other hand,
the building design, is what architects do.
They flesh out that plan by building the buildings in
three dimensions.And I would reiterate again that most
architects think urban design is large scale architecture.
They are colossally wrong.
It's a separate discipline, and it's
articulate from the making of architecture.
So to dive into the language of urban form, the
basic urban elements are buildings, and we'll
go into these - not in complete detail, but some
detail - blocks, streets, squares, urban fabric,
neighborhoods, gardens, parks, and civic structure.
Here's some rather crude diagrams.
There are three kinds of buildings, basically.
Not buildings, but architectural types: freestanding
buildings, attached buildings [part of what
we call party wall buildings], and composite
buildings, which have characteristics of both
freestanding buildings and attached buildings.
Blocks have three different forms: long rectangular
blocks, square or near square blocks, and irregular blocks.
Size matters, and we'll talk about that in a moment.
Streets, there are several different
kinds: streets are traditionally a place.
It doesn't conjure up ideas of
automobile circulation.It's a place.
And it depends on the proportion of
the street of the plan and the section.
An avenue is a major, broader street
that goes from point to point.
In Boston, you'll see Commonwealth Avenue, which
goes from one monument to another monument.
A boulevard is a traffic street, generally
speaking, that is articulated into a
series of lateral zones across the street.
It's a tree-lined street, and you'll
see examples from Paris and Boston.
A drive, technically speaking, is a one-sided street.
It's a drive along an open space
next to a park or an open landscape.
And squares also have three general types.
One is a unified square that has closure
and is legible and you can see what it is.
Second one is a composite one where there's a kind of
balance between the open space of the square and a dominant
building, in this case in the corner.And the third kind
is like a medieval square with a cathedral in the middle.
This happens to be Florence, Piazza del
Duomo in Florence, where it's the figurative
building that gives the character of the space.
And it's almost as if it was carved
out of the city and placed in it.
Urban fabric is basically like any kind of fabric.
It's made up of blocks and streets, and it
is not a neighborhood in its own right, but
it’s basically the pattern that repeats.
The urban pattern that can repeat
enough to become a neighborhood.
Neighborhood recorders on the cartier, on the other
hand, are bits of urban fabric that have a kind of
civic structure of streets and squares within them.
They tend to have three characteristics: a clear
center, a consistent fabric, and a clear edge.
Not all of these are always present.If you go to
New York City, for example, you don't see clear
edges, usually, to the various neighborhoods.
But if you ask residents of those neighborhoods,
they will tell you exactly where the border
is between one neighborhood and the next.
Gardens
are unique places.
They’re usually bounded.
They have specimen landscape elements and
traditionally they were the mediating element
between the city and the open countryside.
In other words, historically, cities were considered
to be sacred and the open countryside, wild and
profane, and gardens mediated between those two things.
So in - typically - gardens, you will
find in Italy and France, you will find
grotesques and demons from another world.
They're like caricatures of life.
Parks are, on the other hand, generally informal.
They're large.
They may have an irregular shape, or they may have a
regular shape.They are usually picturesque, but not always.
Historically there were formal parks, hunting parks,
but in the 19th century, they were transformed, most
places, into more picturesque English landscape elements.
Finally, then the civic structure is elusive, it’s
an elusive idea, but it's really the figurative
sequence of important spaces and buildings.
And a way to think about it is like the human anatomy
and you have an important line around the outside of
your body, but you also have a sequence of anatomically
important things like lungs and stomach and so on.
And you can apply that then to cities as a way of being
able to diagram them and comprehend what's going on.
So let's take a look.
Here are the three examples of freestanding,
attached, and composite buildings.
This is the Christian Science Church in Boston.These
are houses along the edge of Beacon Hill.
You can see they’re all party wall houses.
They're relatively narrow.
Boston was planned fundamentally on a 25
foot module, but that varies considerably.
And then finally the state house, which on the front
has a gold dome, which you see from all over Boston.
It has a very prominent classical building
by Charles Bulfinch facing the Boston Common.
It has two wings that were added to frame it and
provide additional functions in the 19th century.
And then it has a kind of workaday behind,
which appears to stick into the urban fabric.
So it's simultaneously part of the fabric.
If you walk around this building, you don't know
that you're going around an important civic building.
You think you're just going around a larger building
than the houses on the side.So if you look at it from
the aerial view, you can see all of these buildings here,
rather bad buildings and a rather bad urban condition.
It's not a great place to be.
But freestanding modern buildings.
Here are all of the attached buildings, relatively
narrow parcels, which have the characteristics
that we have of an axis, that is, a vertical axis.
That's the axis of our body.
So as we walk along the street, we have a kind of
anthropocentric relationship to our environment.
And then finally, the, again, the State
House, looking down through the Boston Common.
An important church on this corner, that's also part
of the urban fabric and part iconography.So if we
then look at three examples, this Greek temple on the
left hand side, from about 400 BC, this freestanding
Renaissance church in Italy, and then the New York Public
Library, one of those Beaux-Arts buildings that was
produced in the 19th and early 20th centuries when the
number of and kind of civic buildings began to expand.
It is a freestanding building, but
it's also part of the urban fabric.
You would see on the side, it aligns on
the street like these other buildings.
So it's both an icon and part of the fabric of the city.
If you then look at a series of party wall
buildings, you've seen these houses before,
in Back Bay, these houses are butted together.
They're party wall buildings with a whole series, a
whole language of bay windows and entrances and stoops
and landscape in front that make a kind of unified urban
ensemble.In fact, it's becomes sometimes very difficult
to tell which part of the thing is the actual building.
It's like a large building that has variety.
These buildings - this is New York City - Harlem
on the left hand side and Paris on the right
hand side, are even more blended together.
This is difficult to do today, of course, because
people want to, every building owner wants to
scream loudly, to profess his importance in
the city and express his or her personality.
But if you look at these, here's a building,
it's five bays wide from here to here.
Here's a hotel from here to here, another hotel.
This was our window when we were staying there.
And these provide a kind of unified idea of the
street and a kind of common building height.
Other buildings, where you can argue that it's
difficult to see the individual buildings in
this crescent, the Royal Crescent in Bath,
England, because it has a highly unified facade.
If you look closely, however, you can see the
doors, the entry points along the crescent.
On the backside, it's shaggy and ad hoc.
People have added on pieces like this.
And the same thing with the circus in Bath.
This is a building on another square,
which is designed like a giant palazzo.
But in fact, if you look closely at the entrances,
it's made up of a series of smaller party wall
buildings.I have arguments with a friend of mine about
this, but the buildings don't actually have to touch.
It's usually better if they do, but here's
a scene of the Grand Canal in Venice, where
the buildings do not touch, but they're close
enough that you get the identity of the street.
You can read the street - in this case
a canal - and it functions equally well
to define the public spaces of the city.
Moving on then to the composite
building types, here are three examples.
This is the Piazza Signoria in Florence.
There is the Palazzo Vecchio.
Actually, I should have said, this is the Palazzo Vecchio.
It’s in three parts: this part, this part, and this part.
So that on the Plaza side, it's an
icon, it's a dominant kind of building.
But in fact, it's nestled in, it's melded into the
building fabric.This is the Hofburg Palace in Vienna.
It's really a composite of several buildings,
which we'll see in just the next slide.
And there's another view of the State House in Boston.
Here's a plan of the Hofburg.
This is what you saw a moment ago, there's that courtyard.
And there's the building defining that space in Vienna.
And it goes on around like this, and then finally back out.
So it really performs a number of
urban tasks in the city of Vienna.
Remarkable building.
Moving on to the idea of blocks.
There are two major characteristics to
blocks: form types and size and parcel size.
Form types are long rectangular blocks,
near square or square, and irregular.
Here are three aerial views from blocks in Boston.
A long rectangular block, it’s about 240 feet wide.
In this case, 250, I'm sorry.
It has an alley down the middle, very
narrow alley, and spaces for gardens and
car parking and so forth in the center.
Here's a square block with an alley through it.
And then finally an irregular block with
a very expensive hotel here on the corner
and a series of irregular buildings.
These were all built at different times.
These are 18th century buildings.
They're quite small.
This is a beautiful, beautiful, part of Boston.You should
note that there's the idea of an urban block is that there's
a continuous legible public exterior, and often a private
interior to the block, no matter what the configuration is.
And the size is important as are the parcels.
This is a New York City block, which was planned in 1811.
They're 200 feet wide by four, six and 800 feet long.
They're divided into parcels that are
25 feet wide by a hundred feet deep.
Now these vary of course, because people buy
sometimes more than one and they vary slightly.
So every one of these parcels is about 2,500 square feet.
It's kind of interesting that in the classic Greek
planning, the blocks were about a hundred feet with a
kind of very small street and another hundred foot block.
And the parcels are about 50 by 50.
In other words, they're the same area - 2,500 square
feet - as a New York City block.And you'll note
that the New York City block does not have an alley.
The size of blocks is a big argument.
If you - it's a polemical and a matter of principle
that you have blocks that range in size from
in this case of Timgad, the Roman city in North
Africa, the blocks are about 60 feet square.
In Turin, Italy, this is a composite plan of the Roman plan
of Turin and the contemporary plan of the present day city.
The blocks are about 240 feet square.
In Barcelona.
The Cerdà portion of Barcelona, which we'll see
in a moment, the blocks are 372 feet square.
That's a very big block, but in China, that is not
uncommon to find blocks that are 1,000, 3000 feet long.
As you walk down this street in Barcelona, you get
the idea of these spaces at each intersection and
the blocks don't seem so big, but as the blocks get
bigger, there's a question about what you do on the
interior.So this is a little bit crazy, I will admit,
but Rome is a classic example of irregular blocks.
And if you have ever tried to do this, you will find that
it's virtually impossible to design an irregular pattern.
Rome is a composite city that's grown up over the
centuries, and these are the irregular blocks.
You can see all of the squares.
These are the Pantheon, quite a beautiful square here.
And the Piazza Navona over here.
If you make a kind of a transparent drawing, an
x-ray drawing and you put in the semi-public spaces
of the courtyards, this is the pattern that you get.
And if you then go further and put in the
buildings, the public buildings, semi-public
buildings, this is the pattern you get.
So you begin to get a feel for the
texture and the nuance of the city.
It's got a great range from small to large
spaces and buildings.And then finally, if you
turn the x-ray machine up further, you got the
pattern of the architectural buildings inside.
You could never design any one of these
four things, I think, sitting from scratch
because it's built up over hundreds of years.
Now, streets are probably the primary
element of urban design and urban planning.
And typically they have been, historically,
they've been the primary means of integrating
architecture and civic space or urbanism.
On the left hand side, these are the buildings,
this is the building regulation, the building
law after the great fire in London in 1666.
And in order to rebuild, if you were building on a small
street, you could build a two story house with an attic.
If you were building on a slightly bigger street, you could
and had to build, not you could, you had to build a building
at least three stories with an attic and so forth and so on.
Finally to the major streets
reflected on the right hand side.
In Manhattan, the building regulations, the building
code of 1916, it was called a step back zoning
ordinance, which said that if a building is a
hundred feet wide, it can be only 150 feet high.
And that's a good proportion because if you're going
to define the space of the street, you need to have
at least a one to one proportion to define the space.
The further you move the buildings apart from each
other, the weaker the spatial definition, and the
less you tend to read the space to the street.
So they invented this thing called a sky plane.
It starts in the middle of a hundred foot wide
street and goes up to the 150 foot point right here
and everything above that line has to step back.
So when you look at Manhattan, you look at the
buildings on, on the West side of Central Park,
you can just literally see the reading.So this
makes a kind of amazing, kind of an amazing thing.
It defines the fabric of the city at
the lower level of the city and allows
skyscrapers to emerge from that urban fabric.
So let's look at a few streets across the world.
This is a 10 foot wide street in Venice,
Italy on the very left hand side.
And in Barcelona, those large 370 foot wide
blocks are sometimes divided in the middle.
And when they are, the street is about 23 feet wide.
In fact, in Boston, you can find and in
Providence, Rhode Island, you can find beautiful
streets that are 20, 25 feet wide, 30 feet wide.
The third one over the 30 foot wide street is in
Barceloneta in Barcelona where you'll see it in a moment,
the buildings and the streets are roughly 30, 32 feet
wide.This is where my office was in downtown Boston.
It's a major street, it's 60 feet wide.
And finally then, two views on the left,
an Upper East Side Manhattan street.
All of those streets are 60 feet wide.
The sidewalks vary slightly, but they're
quite beautiful residential streets.
And on the right hand, in the right hand image, that's
the view of the Paris opera house and those, the
Haussmannian apartment buildings lining the avenue,
leading down to the building, integrating that iconographic
object or a civic building into the fabric of the city.
I love this painting, by
Blanchard.
It’s a late 19th century Paris painting of
the boulevards that Haussmann developed.
You can see that the street is quite wide
but it's reinforced by these lines of trees.
The landscape is integrated into the idea of the
street, which creates a people space between the
building and the trees and separates the pedestrian
zone from the traffic of, in this case, horses and
carriages.So it delineates the various lanes of activity.
You should also notice that pedestrians are
mixing it up with carriages and horses and so on.
This is precisely the system of the
avenue de Champs-Élysées in Paris.
Here it is leading from the Louvre
back out to the Arc de Triomphe.
It is 230 feet wide, but it's articulated
into smaller spaces by the trees.
And this is Commonwealth Avenue.
This part right here is Commonwealth Avenue in Boston.
This is the Back Bay.
This is Beacon Street, and two other streets and
Commonwealth Avenue, which is actually 240 feet
wide, it's 10 feet wider than the Champs-Élysées in
Paris, but it has a beautiful part down the center.
So it's really like two streets put
together, two avenues put together.
Now streets are probably the most important ingredient
of town planning, but squares are also important.Because
of when we were born as a nation, we don't have
great traditional squares in the US but we have some.
In general, the whole history of squares is one
from a condition of stasis, let’s say, where there
are clearly defined squares that have closure to
ones where they begin to extend the idea of spaces.
This is a Baroque sequence of spaces.
And then finally the, the sequence at Versailles
where spaces extended finally to the horizon line.
And then in the 19th century, squares became
traffic circles because as that movement came
about in cities, squares began to disintegrate.
And then finally they disappear in
the 20th century with modernism.
Here's an example of one of the early ones.
This is the Ducal Square in Vigevano,
Italy, a small town outside of Milano.
It's very clear.It's not a medieval square.
It's very clear, it has clear
cornice around the outside edge.
The corners are closed, and it's quite beautiful.
This is another one in Florence, the Piazza Santissima
Annunziata, which this church is very regular with a
colonnade on one side and a colonnade on the other side.
And the church has a colonnade as well.
So it's unified, even though
there's a kind of dominant object.
This is a Piazza Signoria that we saw earlier with the
Palazzo Vecchio here, kind of a domineering sort of
building, uh, and then it's tucked into the fabric.
You almost can't tell where it
begins and ends on the other sides.
And there you see it from the ground level.
The Duomo in Florence, of course, is a medieval
cathedral, like the ones in France, uh,
with buildings jostling around the outside.
It's almost as if it was jammed into the urban fabric.
And parts of it are clear like this square
in front that has the Baptistry in it.
But back behind it reads as a kind of free
standing building kind of a centralized church.
Interestingly, New York City, Manhattan
has what is probably the best urban space
of the 20th century in Rockefeller Center.
And you notice in the plan, these blocks
are 200 foot blocks with 60 foot streets.
The avenues are a hundred, 125 feet across.
So there's this small LA-like space leading up to the plaza
of Rockefeller Center, which you can see here down below.
And in this case, the view towards the tall
buildings - these are all modern buildings, modernist
buildings, if you will - and there's a skating rink
in the winter time in the plaza of Central Park.
It’s magical at Christmas time, especially.
It’s one of the best spaces that we have.
And here, this really, you could print
this out now, but it's a series of blocks
from various places at the same scale.
Rockefeller Center you'll see down here on the lower
right hand corner and the Campidoglio in Rome is here.
The sequence of spaces at Nancy, France is over here.
And the Piazza Navona over here.
None of these spaces are gigantic spaces.
The Place des Vosges in Paris - what is today the Place
des Vosges - is about 450 feet square, 550 by 475 feet.
And that's getting on the larger size.
So size matters also for these spaces.
Historically the spaces like the Pompeiian Forum
were a little over a hundred feet wide.That's
the space of a street many times today.
So let's then look at a series
of several bits of urban fabric.
This is Barceloneta in Barcelona, obviously with
a market building here, and a series of blocks.
It's like a mini Manhattan.
These blocks are about 30, 32 feet deep, which
is kind of in many ways, an ideal of depth for
housing and the streets are about 30 feet wide.
So when you walk into this neighborhood, you hardly
realize that you're in a diminutive environment.
It's like a mini - you
saw the streets a moment ago - it’s like a mini Manhattan.
The other set of small blocks are the
so-called Spagnoli blocks in Naples, Italy.
These are about 60 feet square.
The streets are quite narrow, and you can see the contrast
to these other Naples blocks on the right hand side.
But it’s a vibrant, active neighborhood.Um,
and this is Back Bay in Boston.
Again, the streets, these blocks are 240 feet wide.
These are 250.
This is Commonwealth Avenue.
And the length of these blocks is very long
around 400 feet to around five or 600 feet long.
And they have alleys and spaces in the middle.
This is Barcelona, the Cerdà blocks, Alphonse
Cerdà, who planned the area 370 feet nominally
with 60 foot chamfered corners and various
ways of using the interiors of the blocks.
Cerdà originally wanted it to be a public space in
the middle, but in fact, as it reacted to development
pressures, they got filled in more and more.
If you then take the idea of that urban fabric and
expand it to the idea of a neighborhood, which again,
may have all three characteristics, or at least some
of them: a clear center, consistent fabric, and a clear
edge.If you look at the idea of a Roman city, which
is roughly 1200 by 1500 feet, and can be, if you put
what we call a walking shed circle over this for a five
or a 10 minute walk, everything is a multifunctional
neighborhood within a five or 10 minute walk.
This is again, the plan of Priene, the Greece city.
It has a clear center, a consistent
fabric of all equal parcels.
And in this case, a clear edge because it was a walled city.
In Boston, the North End - Boston has a series of very
different neighborhoods that were connected to each other
until the late fifties, when the highway act came in.
And when they began to cut highways through
Boston, it exposed the edges of the neighborhood.
You can see here, this is the so-called Greenway today.
It was the crosstown expressway before, but it
isolated this portion of Boston, the North End,
which is now primarily the Italian section.
Uh, it has a main street, which is the center.
It has very fine grain fabric, and it has a clear
edge, both to the Greenway and to the outside,
to the Harbor on the outside.This is the overview
of Barceloneta that you saw just a moment ago.
It started as a fishing village and then
got built up to its present density.
It has one edge along the waterfront.
It has another edge along the bottom with
restaurants and so forth looking over the harbor.
Moving on then to the idea of gardens.
This is the public garden in Boston.
When I first moved to Boston 40 years ago, I didn't
understand there's a fence right along here, and there's
a sidewalk here and there's a sidewalk inside the garden.
Until I realized that if you're walking
along here, you're outside the garden.
Sounds stupid.
But if you walk along here, you're
in the garden and it's picturesque.
It has landscape specimens.
when there's not the COVID virus going on this lake,
which is only about three feet deep, has Swan boats,
that young teenagers paddle around for tourists.
A more characteristic garden, one that does mediate
between the city, the sacred and profane of the outside
landscape is that Boboli garden in Florence.Those are the
Pitti Palace with a gigantic palace facade to the city on
this side, a courtyard, and then a connection out to the
garden, which is planned like a city in its own right.
It has blocks and it has squares.
It has an amphitheater and so on,
and it has statuary and iconography.
And so on.
Parks are like less precise, less symbolically
loaded, in many ways less designed.
They’re made to appear less designed.
Rolling landscapes with trees, generally
speaking, not in alaise have a lot of
trees lined up, but picture as open space.
Informal, in other words, large
and irregular and open to everyone.
Not particularly urban, necessarily.
In Paris, there are a whole series of landscape elements,
not just boulevards, but parks that are urban parks.
They're often not even picturesque parks like this one, the
Buttes-Chaumont in what is Northeastern Paris.But in the US,
we have a huge park movement that began in the 19th century.
Again, Olmsted, who planned Central Park and Prospect
Park, which we'll see in a moment, didn't like cities.
He thought you needed them for business purposes,
but he made this park as a kind of alternative
universe so that you could go from the dense
compactness of the city into this park and be like
in a parallel universe, a parallel urban condition.
There you see a view of it.
And for most places in Central Park, you really
don't see buildings, which is part of the idea.
And it's certainly part of the idea for Prospect Park.
Here's the primary entrance to Prospect Park right here.
It's through a tunnel.
It's not that you walk in off of this public space.
You go through a tunnel and open out into
this great, what's called the Long Meadow.
Along these sides, you don't really get in.
There's a, there's a fence along this edge and
it's rough and scruffy so that you don't see into
the park and people in the park don't see you.
And in other words, on this side, you're in the city,
but when you go into the park, you don't see buildings
and you're in this alternative world, a respite from
the city.So to take a look at the idea of what is one
of the most difficult ideas of civic structure that
I know to pin down is an aerial photograph of Boston
with the harbor here and the Charles River over here.
This is Back Bay.
This is Beacon Hill.
This is the West End.
This is the North End.
This is the financial district.
Here’s Commonwealth Avenue, the public
garden, the Boston Common, the state house,
and City Hall Plaza or government center.
If you imagine that this is a person and an anatomical
drawing of a person, you have the outline of the
body, you have this primary access or primary figure
of public space that then connects to the state house
and down through this sequence to City Hall, and
then down through the North End and out to the sea.
This is called the walk to the sea.You have
other elements that are related to that primary
anatomy, but it is, this is sort of the image.
And this is a way that you can keep track of what the
city is about, about its form, even though it's complex.
So it might be fun after that somewhat
tedious description of urban elements to just
take a look at some of them and enjoy them.
This is an aerial photograph of Bordeaux.
There are quite a few slides here of Bordeaux, France.
It has the best wine in the world, and
it's quite a beautiful and sexy city.
This is an 18th century square
that opens to the Garonne River.
It used to be a working waterfront, but in modern
times it has had a landscape addition, one of the most
beautiful modern landscapes, I think that provides
a public front and a public amenity for the city.
In a moment, you're going to see a tram that goes
through here, and it also goes through this park
right here.There's what is called a water mirror.
It's an inch and a half deep of water on
these paving stones out of which steam
rises and people play and do plays in this.
The steam will subside and the
water will come back up again.
This is a view at nighttime as it reflects
the square behind, and there's the tram
going through it, quite an amazing thing.
And it's not a big deal to have an
integration of public transportation.
In this case, the tram: no fences, no guardrails.
The tram goes slowly, and they probably would
arrest you in and fine you if you got hit by it,
because you would be too dumb to be in the city.
But it's going through this public park.
Here's a view at nighttime in one of the squares.
Social life in public.
One of the really beautiful streets, a pedestrian street.
And there is also fun.
There are sculptures of cows all over Bordeaux.
I'm not sure whether they're permanent or not, but
I liked this one with a nice glass of Bordeaux wine.
And another view of city life.This
is an aerial view of Boston.
Of course, you can see this is a really
quite beautiful square in Beacon Hill.
If you have a few million dollars, you might
be able to buy one floor of a condo building.
And this is a view of that square, these brick row houses
and the park in the center modeled on English models.
This is Barcelona again with a logia on the side and the
square on the right hand side with a grid of palm trees.
And this is the famous La Rambla, the street that
goes up from the sea up the hill in Barcelona.And
this is Savannah, Georgia, planned as a grid town
with squares, a pattern of squares, all different,
in this regular pattern, and a big one here.
Here's a view.
They're all filled with these fantastic Live Oak
trees, which are not only amazing trees, but they're
tall enough - the canopy is high enough - that it
shelters you in the heat of the summer and allows
you to see the space of the square through the trees.
This is a square in Venice.
No trees, almost no trees ever in squares in Venice, or on
the streets, because among other things they're too narrow.
If you have to put trees in streets, then your
streets are getting pretty wide and a view, this
I just thought was such a stunning photograph.
I couldn't not show it.
It's the Piazzetta, the little square that leads in from
the water into the Piazza San Marco in Venice and the square
itself with Saint Mark’s at the end.This is Gaungzhou China.
It's the British plan section of the historic
town with, again, an integration of the buildings
along the side with the pedestrian circulation
and the landscape and the vehicular circulation,
and the same thing again, on the other side.
Quite a beautiful area of Guangzhou.
And another example of the integration of landscape
and pedestrian circulation and the buildings.
And then lastly, the kind of wacko, cacophonous view of
Hong Kong, where the architecture is almost unimportant.
It is unimportant because it's made by signs.
The signs and the cafes and shops on the
ground level give the street its character.
Another view where the signs sometimes
span clear, clear across the street.
They do the same thing that the trees in Paris do.
They define this people layer space at the bottom, the lower
level of the street.And that's what really matters more
than skyscrapers and the things that are higher than that.
Now, these are my drawings of cities.
This is Florence.
This is Rome.
This is another, other pieces of Rome.
I think one needs to look carefully at the city and draw
its elements and its components in the same way that
we draw and analyze buildings or in an analogous way.
And it's a tricky thing.
It's not easy, but it's the way you learned
about cities, of going to see them and
trying to figure out what the relationship of
architecture and landscape is to those cities.
And is it just to remind you - I do have - it’s a little
bit of a pitch for a book, which should be out in July.
The first essay talks about that sequence from
the Pitti Palace, through Vasari Corridor over
the river and into the Uffizi and into the Piazza
Signoria.And then finally down to the Duomo.
You can see the Roman grid right here, crooked,
kicked in, and it kinked at an angle to the river.
The point is that we need to refine the idea of
the traditional city, where architecture is a
contributing component to the fabric of the city,
not anti-urban, but a contributing component to it.
And the same thing for landscape.
This is crucially important today because the city
is the most efficient form of human habitation in
terms of energy consumption and carbon production.
If we're going to survive on earth through what many
people call the “sixth extinction” that we're in, we
need to totally, we need to have a revolution about
education and about architecture, about landscape.
So thank you very much.
I encourage you to think about these things and draw them.
