Cities and Space. Not many years ago, the word ‘space’ had strictly geometrical meaning: the idea it evoked was simply that of an empty area. In scholarly.

Cities and Space

Not many years ago, the word ‘space’ had strictly geometrical meaning: the idea it evoked was simply that of an empty area. In scholarly use it was generally accompanied by some such epithet as ‘Euclidian’, ‘isotropic’, or ‘infinite’. And the general feeling was that the concept of space was ultimately a mathematical one. To speak of ‘social space’ therefore, would have sounded strange.’

Henri Lefevre, The Production of Space,1974

Lefevre on Space

Failure as functionFailure as politics and social organisationFailure as symbolFailure as physical fabric

Planning as a technical operation onlyRationalism without humanitySubmitting the city to the needs of the carDestruction of memory

The failure of the Modernist ‘functional’ city

‘Optimo city has its zones, but they are organically related to one another.’

‘The square ceased to be thought of in nineteenth century America as a vacant space: iy became a container or (if you prefer) a frame. A frame, so it happened, not merely for the courthouse, but for all activity of a communal sort. Few aesthetic experiments have produced such brilliantly practical results …Optimo acquired something to be proud of, something to moderate that American tendency to think of every town as existing entirely for money-making purposes.’

‘The Almost Perfect Town’ J. B. Jackson 1952

‘When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities. A city cannot be a work of art …

‘Why have cities not, long since, been identified, understood and treated as problems of organized complexity? …The theorists of conventional city planning have consistently mistaken cities as problems of simplicity and disorganised complexity.’

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961

Westway, LondonVision and reality, c.1967

The Bauhaus Exhibition and a commentary, September 1968

‘We are trading the humanity and richness of the living city for the conceptual simplicity which benefits only designers, planners, administrators and developers. …The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is entrusted to it. … If we make cities which are trees, they will cut our life within to pieces.’

Christopher Alexander ‘A City is not a Tree’ 1965

Christopher Alexander: Semi-latticeversus a Tree

1968hippies, Martin Luther King, Student and worker riots Paris in May, Russian tanks in Prague August, anti-

Vietnam War riots London, October

Derived from the Greek word typos, type refersto ‘model’, ‘matrix’ or ‘mould.’ The body of antecedents provides types against which new design concepts can be modified or evolved. Typology refers to the distillation and classification of existing building types and urban forms as prototypes in terms of function and efficacy.

Analytical typology describes the various elements of a building or a city and how these elements compositionally fit together. The study of typology can provide a platform on which to base possible design decisions and, depending on the situation, generate new design types.’Tom Porter, Archi Speak,2004

Typology

Critique of Naïve FunctionalismWe have indicated that the principal questions that ariseIn relation to an urban artifact - among them, individuality, locus, memory, design itself. Function was not mentioned …this explanation is regressive because it impedes us from studying forms and knowing the world of architecture according to its true laws.’

Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 1966

‘The complex structure of the city emerges from a discourse whose terms of references are still somewhat fragmentary. Perhaps, the laws of the city are exactly like those that regulate the life and destiny of individual men. Every biography has its own interest, even though it is circumscribed by birth and death. Certainly the architecture of the city, the human thing par excellence, is the physical sign of this biography, beyond the meanings and the feelings with which we recognise it.’

Lucca, from Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City,

1966/1982

James Stirling, project for Derby Civic Centre, 1974

Covent Garden protest, 1970

Florian Beigel, Half Moon Theatre, Mile End Road, 1984

Liberal humanist theory - values the individual and their ‘agency’. Rational means of creating change. ‘Modernism’Structuralism - based on anthropology.Emphasis on the structures of society that operate without people being aware of them, including religious belief about the world. Seen in Rossi, Rowe and RationalismPhenomenology - based on unmediated experience of the world rather than intellectual constructs - includes HeideggerPost-Structuralism - takes Structuralism’s pairs of opposites and muddles them up, because the world is contradictory and impure.

Analogies between urban theory and literary theory

Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City, 1975

Civilized mind versus savage mindBricolage ‘the process by which people acquire objects from across social divisions to create new cultural identities, for example punks using safety pins as jewellery.’ from Wikipedia

‘imperial Rome… illustrates something of the ‘bricolage mentality’ at its most lavish – an obelisk from here, a column from there, a range of statues from somewhere else’Collage ‘a technique for using things and simultaneously disbelieving in them.’

‘When typical forms are selected from the past of a city, they do not come, however dismembered, deprived of their original political and social meaning. The original sense of form, the layers of accrued implication deposited by time and human experience cannot be lightly brushed away… The technique or rather the fundamental compositional method suggested by the Rationalists is the transformation of selected types - partial or whole – into entirely new entities that draw their communicative power and potential critiera from the understanding of this transformation.’

Anthony Vidler, The Third Typology, 1978

1978 and 1994

From Delirious New York

Dali and Le Corbusier

conquer New York