History of Urban Design

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Preface: All of these jpegs are slides created by one of my professors, Doug Allen.  Brief bio to give him credit and credibility:

Bachelor of Landscape Architecture, University of Georgia
Master of Landscape Architecture with honors, Harvard University

He has written many books, including The Plan of Savannah (2009) and Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Changing of a Landscape (1979).

He is very well known in the country and guest lectures just about everywhere.  He has served on the board of AIA, the American Institute of Architects, and ASLA, the American Society of Landscape Architects.  He has taught at several schools, including Harvard, and now serves as the Senior Associate Dean of the College of Architecture at Georgia Tech, the school that produced John Portman.  He works alongside other notables such as Ellen Dunham Jones (Retrofitting Suburbia and the former Director of the Architecture Program at Tech after serving as a professor at both UVA and MIT…she spoke in Jacksonville at a ULI event not too long ago).

Ok, now on to the first presentation.  I am skipping 90% of the slides and I am completely skipping all ancient civilizations that built settlements or cities all the way through Medieval Europe.  Classical Rome is a really interesting study (my favorite, and actually Rome was more advanced and closer to being like the U.S. today than any other civilization until the 1800s).

We start with Florence.  The city originated around 200 BC and briefly became a Roman colony (municipium).  It is interesting to note the Romans had a very generic design for all of their cities not unlike the American township created in the late 1700/1800s by the Government Survey method of dividing land into perfect equal size squares.  An American Township was 6 miles square and had 36 Sections.  Usually Section 16 was the courthouse.

Well the Romans had an East-West road called a Decumanus that intersect a Cardo (N-S) road at a 90 degree angle to form the town’s center.  Below you can see the ancient Roman Cardo and Decumanus still survived along with where the walls once stood.



Florence had lots of wealthy families (the Medicis) and lots of artists, and so in the 1400s the wealthy families basically hired the artists/architects to redo the city.  They wanted better connections between the points of interest.  This would begin the first modern day and on a major scale “city planning” effort.



It was about this time that perception and scale were being discovered in art, and this eventually translated to physical form, as well.



Notice the difference in the paintings: 1400s on top, 1300s on bottom.



People were experimenting with the State as a form of Art.  Here you can see a mix of ages recreated through art in the form of an urban environment.



Scaled 3-D castings on a doorway, one of these is by the famous Ghiberti (more on him later).



Recreating physical space to be like that of a form of art.







Now about Ghiberti: We all know that Florence has a huge domed cathedral begun in 1296 and consecrated in 1420 (just Wiki Florence if you don’t know the Basilica di Santi Maria del Fiore).  Well a dome hadn’t really been built since Roman times.  The Romans knew how to pour concrete, which the Pantheon in Rome is poured concrete that was originally covered in cast bronze plates (the Romans were very technologically advanced…Rome just retired an old Roman sewer that functioned perfectly well until not too long ago).  Well there was a competition held by the wealthy families to hire the best architect for expanding the cathedral and building a dome.  Ghiberti claimed he could do it and had a plan and Brunelleschi also claimed the same (Brunelleschi is basically the father of the “principle of the second man” and of the Renaissance and of Florence as we know it today.  Ghiberti won and enlisted Brunelleschi’s help.  Well Ghiberti tried to take all the credit, but it was Bruni that was doing all the engineering.  Finally Bruni played sick and left Ghiberti on his own to build the dome.  The dome collapsed and Ghiberti had to publicly admit only Bruni knew how to build this non-wooden framed dome.

And now briefly about Brunelleschi: He designed the Foundling Hospital of 1419-1424.  It was really the first true Renaissance building, with an arched arcade.  He had envisioned the plaza on which it stands as completely enclosed by similar buildings, but he never got to see his dream come to fruition.  A couple generations later another architect designed and built 2 very similar buildings in almost exactly the same design (the last side was a church).  It is the second man who determines whether the creation of the first man will be carried forward or destroyed.

On to Rome

The following slides show clearly the transformation from medieval to Renaissance.  The Roman City Hall and surrounding buildings were redesigned and reconfigured by Michelangelo in exactly the same styles originated in Florence.  Florence was the testing ground of city planning and Renaissance ideas, and Rome was where they were perfected.









AS YOU CAN SEE THIS AREA WAS “RETROFITTED”.  TIMES CHANGED AND THE AREA NEEDED A MAKEOVER/REDESIGN.  THIS IS WHY IT IS IMPORTANT TO PLAN TO BE ABLE TO RETROFIT AN AREA FOR A DIFFERENT USE, AND IT IS IMPOSSIBLE OR EXTREMELY DIFFICULT TO RETROFIT SUBURBAN DEVELOPMENTS AS THEY ARE BUILT TODAY.  THIS IS A PROBLEM THAT WE WILL PROBABLY FACE SOON.



This is the first statue of a “man on a horse”, Mr. Marcus Aurelius.  Here in Jacksonville Marcus Aurelius is disguised as Andrew Jackson.



See the scale and perception.



Here is Doug Allen giving students a lecture.



Here was Rome’s problem.  It had 7 “pilgrimage” sites for Christians, but none of them were connected.



Ah, Pope Sixtus V, deemed the real Father of City Planning.  He was only pope for 5 years (1585-1590), but he hired Fontana as his chief architect and initiated a huge public works plan to connect the pilgrimage sites.  Some argue that he really did not want a huge wave of urban development, and that he envisioned silences souls wandering between monuments, but what happened was the rebirth of Rome.

Rome reached a peak population of 1.3 million (the size of metro Jax) around AD 200-400, and the city was luxurious.  There was fresh clean water, modern covered sewage (not to be seen for until Industrial Revolution), poured concrete, all ethnicities of the time and all religions, cafes, stores, etc.  When Rome fell, the population plummeted to 50,000 people, so these 50,000 people had to support infrastructure made to support 1.3 million.  Ultimately they all crowded in one area and Rome fell to ruins over a millennia.





















Here there was a problem.  It was going to be difficult to continue this road because there was a very steep incline and some crooked terrain.  What resulted was the Spanish Steps, which brought the road up and took it on a jog over a short distance so that it could be continued.  This was the Renaissance equivalent of dynamiting through a mountain to build a railroad or highway tunnel, and this practice can be seen in San Francisco.  Some people say a grid is impossible on many terrains, but San Fran is a good result of it.  Instead of building a road with a 10 degree slope down a hill, they zig zag the road down and form Lombard Street.



















The entire plan.





Superimposed.

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What to take away:
-Development of straight street formations and blocks
-Development of gardens as public spaces
-Development of buildings as stone versions of landscaped gardens
-Development of individual housing in buildings
-Development of the city as a public works
-Development of land dedication from private to public use

Paris was a Roman city, too.




Aligned along the Decumanus laid out by the Romans.












Wealthy Parisians needed a place to “escape to”.  The river Seine was a cesspit of filth and there was not a crossing connecting the two sides, meanwhile the cathedral Notre Dame was in the middle, isolated by the river.  The king led the effort to create a new bridge that would also serve as a pump and carrier of fresh water to both sides of the city.  He enlisted architects to design the bridge and housing.

What resulted was the Ponte Neuf.  During this time because Rome was once again the “world capital” so to speak and the leader in design and planning, French, British, and Spanish architects all studied in Italy.  If you were a noble or Bourgeois, you would go off to college in Italy.  What these planners took from Italy was a loose copycat design.  Here we see Marcus Aurelius disguised as Henry IV.  And also notice how untrained and bad these architects were.  The whole design is off center.








Notice here in Place Vosges a new and unique form of housing: Individual Housing.  See in Italy buildings were continuous and subdivided on the interior.  Here in Paris you still did not get a yard, but you got an “individual house” within a building, demarked by separately inclined roofs and separate chimneys.




****Another concept that developed in Paris that was different from how things were done in Rome/Italy was that land that was owned by royalty or nobility in Paris was developed by the owner and then donated as in a modern day “dedication” to the city and the public.  What follows are a couple of examples and later there will be some examples.  Public Grants were also arguably born in Paris (city gives property up to individual to be developed).










We’ll come back to landscaping, but here is a preview of what Paris initiated.






Now pay attention here.  Read the caption.  Cardinal Richelieu introduced above wanted to dedicate this land as a public fully designed “town”.  It was built and the destroyed, but it served as an example of a new and developing era of designing and planning towns and public spaces (and served as the influence for the design of Versailles).

There are two “ends” connected by greenspace, a gridded network of paths, and buildings.


See the two “ends”?


The former site of the palace-town, but as you can see the Cardinal was also responsible for planning and developing the adjacent town, with a grid-block system and two ends that would serve as focal points.




What was also new to the time (the Romans and Middle Easten cities had done this long ago) was mixed-use.  On the first floor were shops and up top were residences.


Versailles


Marcus Aurelius disguised as Louis XIV.


Briefly back to the original designed by Michelangelo in Rome in front of City Hall.


Now this is important in the history of urban design.  We have seen the gradual introduction of grids and formal gardens.  Versailles put them together.  Inside each toilerie (garden square) was a different function.  Some of the squares were encapsulated by landscaping to make private event space and entertainment space.  Each square served a different function and each was bounded on all sides by wide landscaped pathways.  Also note the continuation of the two “ends”.  There were two fountains that served as the endpoints for the main strip.








The town of Versailles took on the same design as the palace.  Notice the straight streets connecting endpoints.  Also notice the garden squares, but this time instead of being surrounded by landscaping they were surrounded by buildings.




The more advanced Toileries in Paris city proper.  These became public gardens and eventually the front doorway to the Louvre.


Endpoints.

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I really dig those ancient streetcar maps!

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The plan that would influence American Mid-Atlantic/Savannah planning.


And another influential plan.

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What is nature?  Is it the refined Parisian version?  (Highly manicured to show exposed growth)  Or is it the British version?  (constructed in an almost unaltered sort of form…we associate nature more with the British form nowadays, but are they really different?  Both landscapes include flora and fauna.

Parisian version






Nature in Paris becomes a manmade part of the city, serving a similar purpose as buildings.






British version…note that a town was once here, this is all manmade


The influence




The two differences side by side


A scene from Atlanta’s Piedmont Park on the lower right

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Bath was one of the first modern day "resort towns".  Very speculative and driven by RE.  Sounds familiar right?






John the Younger and John the Elder designed these Roman inspired speculative housing developments.  Neither had been to Rome to see the Coliseum, and as a result their interpretations are inside out.

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Way overcrowded and unsafe, these buildings routinely collapsed.


Filling in the sewage lake.






The focal points (endpoints) were a social men’s club and a monument to the people.  Before this expansion and redesign, the focal points of old Edinburgh were the castle (the crown) and the Bishop’s palace.  Now the city was more for the people than the leaders.


This used to be a sewage dump.  The castle above was turned into a museum when the crown became irrelevant at the same time as the redesign of the city.

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Note how Columbus used Roman names to describe Spanish colonial buildings.


A patterned street system was in place in the Incan cities long before Europeans arrived.


The Incans had streets with sidewalks!  (though they did not use the wheel for driving purposes)


What you see here are colonial buildings placed on top of the foundations of Incan buildings.  The Incan streets are still in place and in use.  Good planning stands the test of time!!

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New Orleans may be the most “American” city.  Here is a view down Canal St.  On the left is the French developed side and the right is the British developed side, and Canal St was a place where both could get along.  The overall city followed a very Spanish colonial plan.  There were French, British, Spanish, African, and several other cultures melting together at the time.  As a result many “American” foods and musical styles and cultural staples developed.  They were all a result of so many different people living together.

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The New England town was windy, rural, and consisted of the common, with civic buildings and the wealthy built around a large open space.

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One of the influences.  A London plan from the 1600s.

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