Urbino & London; Italian lessons and British Context

“Make of a house a small city and of a city a large house”

Attributed to Alberti and Aldo Van Eyck

The city of Urbino in Marche, Italy is often taken to be perhaps  the perfect Renaissance city. The architectural highlights of this city include the Ducal Palace, with its courtyard by Bramante, the Duomo Cathedral and the Sanzio Theatre with its subterranean ramp.   This is a walled, multi-levelled city. You enter through one of the city gates ( three or four I recall) ascending a steeply inclined street/ramp. This leads you through the city fabric to the two main  piazzas of the city from where you can visit the main city monuments.

                                                Plan of Urbino

Urbino  establishes an almost perfect balance between architecture and nature. Everyone who lives inside it lives in an apartment with no access to a personally owned garden. However, residents  can easily walk into the surrounding countryside. When we look at a plan it is clear that the overall footprint of the walled historic city is about 400m by 1000m. A person walking at 3 miles an hour covers almost exactly 400m in five minutes. Hence the  journey time a pedestrian will take to reach the countryside will only be in a matter of five or ten minutes. Despite the fact that, in its overall footprint, it is approximately the size of an English village, it feels like a city, largely due to its buildings being four to six stories high.  For various reasons, probably largely economic, it never grew as a city. Its high density environment has remained largely unchanged exuding a strong feeling of being frozen in time. After the last war a decision was taken to greatly expand the university leading to the appointment of the architect Giancarlo de Carlo in 1956. Some of the city centre buildings have been converted to academic uses. A large cluster of academic buildings have been created on the other side of the next hill.

It is illuminating to compare the example of Urbino with  London. Going back to the example of Urbino, we can see that London once occupied a similarly scaled footprint, when it’s size did not much exceed its Roman/Medieval boundaries. When it began to expand, at first basically into Westminster, the pattern of growth began to change. The growth of London can  illustrated by showing precise maps at different stages in its development.

           London during the time of Queen Elizabeth I (Reign 1558-1603) 

Queen Elizabeth I tried to limit the growth of London by issuing a proclamation in 1580  forbidding  the construction of any new buildings within 3 miles of the city walls and also established the principle that no more than one family should live in each house.  In her time, London meant what is now basically perceived as the City of London, what is now the  financial district, plus a small part of Southwark. The demographics of London meant that this decree was eventually unenforceable. West London, what is today Westminster, was the home to many estates owned by aristocrats, convents and monasteries, hospitals and lawyers i.e. important  households set in mostly open land. Gradually, bit by bit, this land was developed into the built fabric of London we see today. The Monarch’s attempts to control development did bear  fruit in the sense that the Government established a system whereby developments could only go ahead if a licence was granted, prefiguring today’s  planning system. A license was often only granted if a development was seen as being of sufficiently high quality.  For example, in the case of Saint James, the estate was divided up;  the Tudor palace of St James was preserved along with a small amount of open land, what today is St James Park. An enterprising developer, the Earl of St Albans was allowed to develop the northern part of the estate  into a mixed-use neighbourhood comprising a square, housing and eventually the church of St James in Piccadilly designed by Sir Christopher Wren. This, in fact, was the pattern of development for the expansion of London: neighbourhoods  with a mixture of uses i.e. some housing plus other functions such as a church or market and  including some open land. This polycentric pattern of growth ultimately culminated, in the context of the 18^th Century,  in  the Georgian city of the Hanoverians recorded in  John Rocque’s plan of London.

 

                                   John Rocque’s plan of London in 1746

The ancient City of London had virtually no green space within its boundaries. It did not need to, being so small. Seeing that its street pattern has never really changed, this absence of green space remains even today. As the great estates of west London were built on, it was always felt wise to reserve some of the green space as a park. This is the ultimate origin of west London’s great series of parks.

We are used to seeing sections through  buildings and even cities to illustrate how spaces relate to each other. We also need sections through peoples’  lives to see the dwellings and towns or cities they choose to live in at that  point in their lives. When I visited New York I remember talking to someone who described the life pattern of many young Americans. They live in an apartment when young but latter, when they are often married with children, they choose to move away to a house with a garden. It is also worth remarking how an area like the City of London has almost entirely changed over the centuries from a mixed-use neighbourhood, where people lived as well as worked, to an almost entirely mono-functional area consisting of offices. Perhaps this can be taken as a classic symptom of a city which has been allowed to become too big. There are, of course, developments such as The Barbican which might be taken as an attempt to re-introduce mixed-use back into the City of London. Perhaps the most obvious lesson is, to return to the quotation which began this piece, is that high density works best when a city is at quite a small scale.

The Georgian city recorded in John Rocque’s plan did not, of course, mark the end of the city’s growth. If a city’s growth patterns are formed by its transportation patterns then, of course, further plans could be presented:  the age of the railways, i.e. the Victorian age and the age of the early motor car, i.e. the 1930’s leading up Patrick Abercrombie’s plan of 1945; the decision to limit the growth of London by a green belt and direct new growth to eight satellite towns.

What lessons can be learnt  here on the subject of a city’s growth?  Firstly, it is clear that a city grows in a process similar to cellular sub-division. New neighbourhoods are added to existing neighbourhoods. What constitutes a neighbourhood might be understood as an area with a mixture of uses which can be easily traversed. In the age of Urbino it was determined by the walking distance of a pedestrian. The lesson here is that man as the measure of all things i.e. the pedestrian scale, is the correct scale by which to gauge the development of the polycentric city. It is also true that attempts to mitigate the effects of excessive urbanism by the use of the typology of the house with garden can be inadequate. The third lesson might be that it is possible to argue that an excessively urban design environment cannot be mitigated by  more neighbourhoods with this type of the housing and that to the lessons of mixed-use and pedestrian scale  must be added the notion that the entire size of a   city can actually be allowed to become too big.

Clearly the growth of a city can be seen as requiring a major strategic rethink once it has acquired a certain size. What is needed is a solution that goes beyond simply more houses with gardens. Offering suburbia as a solution to the problem of city growth can be rather simplistic.  In itself suburbia does not really constitute an urban design proposal since it only deals with one function of the city, housing. The early urban design proposals of Le Corbusier may have been ludicrously simplistic, no more than over-scaled diagrams. However, Le Corbusier did reduce a city to simply four functions and not just one. The Athens Charter included work, leisure and circulation along with housing as the four basic functions of the city.

 

In this description of the growth of London, I am indebted to Rasmussen’s book, “London: The Unique City,” possibly the finest book ever written on the growth of a city and certainly, in my view, perhaps the finest book on London. All I can say is read it in its entirety.

(Thanks to Rob Bourke for plan of Urbino.  All other images are either by author,have had copyright ownership traced as far as possible or believed to be in public domain )

Prince Charles and John Ruskin: a Tale of Two Cultural Conservatives

“While your divine intelligence and will, Imperator Caesar, were engaged in acquiring the right to command the world,…..I hardly dared , in view of your serious employments, to publish my writings and long considered ideas on architecture, for fear of subjecting myself to your displeasure by an unseasonable interruption……I began to write this work for you, because I saw that you have built and are now building extensively, and that in future also you will take care that our public and private buildings shall be worthy to go down to posterity by the side of your other splendid achievements. I have drawn up definite rules to enable you, by observing them, to have personal knowledge of the quality both of existing buildings and of those which are yet to be constructed. For in the following books I have disclosed all the principles of the art.”


The Ten Books on Architecture: Vitruvius  (80-15 BC)
 
The Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius, the only text on the subject to have come down to us from ancient Greece and Rome, provides not only a manual of Classical architecture but  also provides a clear insight into the nature of the politics of the time. The fact that Vitruvius not only dedicated the book to Caesar but claimed that his book “disclosed all the principles of the art” provides, for me, also  a certain amount of humour since today, no architectural theorist would claim to have settled, finally and irrevocably, all theoretical controversies surrounding architecture. However, while no two architectural theorists can agree on everything, one British architectural theorist, namely Prince Charles seems to have acquired a quite remarkable level of certitude in his own beliefs.
Prince Charles first  intervention in the debate on architecture came  in the 1980s. This  consisted of  a  television program and a book, both entitled  “A Vision of Britain.” In the television program he examined a drawing, illustrating the  primitive hut of classical architectural theory, a group of tree trunks which fortuitously grew close together with branches strewn across the top forming rafters and beams. 

From this he seemed to   conclude that the Classical style of architecture, since it derived from nature was  therefore  eternally relevant, seemingly appropriate in all times and places. Since that time he opened the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment and founded the village of Poundbury. He has also conducted high-profile interventions into developments such as the Chelsea Barracks site effectively torpedoing the design by Rogers Stirk & Harbour, insisting his preferred design “relates to nature.” 

Leaving aside the issue that deliberately scuppering an architectural project does raise very real constitutional issues, he insists he does not advocate simply a style such as Classicism. In a speech he gave to The Royal Institute of British Architects in 2009 he  stated:
 
“I am sorry if I somehow left the faintest impression that I wished to kick-start some kind of “style war” between Classicists and Modernists; or that I somehow wanted to drag the world back to the eighteenth century.”

His approach, it seems deals not with style but with social issues such as “bottom-up” planning, architecture which deals with problem solving. The antithesis of this might be seen as those obsessed with form and Prince Charles admits classicists can be as guilty of this as modernists. He states:

“I propose to speak of “organic” rather than Classical or Traditional architecture .”
And this, he partly explains is:
 
“one which is informed by traditional practice, and by traditional attitudes to the natural world”
 
But here, he seems to have embraced a rather circular form of reasoning.

The idea that Classical architecture, self-evidently relates to nature is rather more contentious than Prince Charles seems to realise. The subject has been discussed down the ages, especially during the 18^th and 19^th Centuries  when the subject of the hypothetical origins of classical architecture in nature became a huge bone of contention between various architectural theorists. Leaving aside the views of Vitruvius on the origins of architecture, the primitive classical hut was basically an idea invented by 18^th Century  theorists such as Abbe Laugier in France and William Chambers in Britain. This led to a more rational conception of classical architecture; Laugier argued that the five classical orders were based on columns and hence should only be used as freestanding elements and never in relief.  In the 19^th Century, British architecture turned towards a revival of the Gothic. This style had never entirely died out, surviving in unlikely quarters such as  18^th Century notions of the picturesque, keeping the  style alive until its  19^th Century   re-flowering.   Augustus Welby Pugin, architect of the  Houses of Parliament would only countenance  a Gothic rather than Classical approach. Indeed, he believed Classical architecture was flawed from its very inception. A primitive timber hut may have been the inspiration behind the Greek Classical Temple. But these forms cannot simply be transposed from timber to stone. A key example of this were triglyphs. Triglyphs were the vertical channels on the frieze of a Classical temple which represented the ends of timber rafters. The features were considered to be representations since the frieze of a Classical temple was constructed in stone, not timber. And hence, this motif, when reproduced in stone, indicated that the architecture no longer truthfully expressed the structure. 

Pugin wrote:

 

“Grecian architecture is essentially wooden in its construction….never did its professors possess either sufficient imagination or skill to conceive any departure from the original type… it is extraordinary that when the Greeks commenced building in stone the properties of this material did not suggest to them some different and improved mode of construction.”

  The other great instigator of the British Gothic revival was John Ruskin who shared with Pugin a dislike for Classical architecture. Ruskin wrote the book “The Stones of   Venice”, on the  Italian city in the shadow of the Alps, which he regarded, rather strangely as the birthplace of Gothic architecture. Here, he describes the kind of architecture he admires in the great chapter “The Nature of Gothic.” Ruskin makes much of the savageness of the northern climate and the quickening of energy which must accompany endeavours, qualities which people of the north expressed in their architecture. Ruskin was a great advocate of architecture which “relates to nature,” and firmly believed that in the context of Northern Europe, Classical architecture was incapable of fulfilling this role.

Ruskin, evokes the  British climate and landscape with its heathland, ice, snow; language which  amounts to a sort of   word-painting.

 
“we should err grievously in refusing either to recognize as an essential character of the existing architecture of the North, or to admit as a desirable character in that which it yet may be, this wildness of thought, and roughness of work; this look of mountain brotherhood between the cathedral and the Alps;”


Evidently, he considered Gothic to be a sort of ' organic' architecture. For instance, he wrote in ' The Seven Lamps of Architecture' the following on piers in Gothic cathedrals:



'the resemblance in its shafts and ribs to the external relations of stems and branches.. . . necessarily induces in the mind of the spectator a sense or belief of a correspondent internal structure; that is to say, of a fibrous and continuous strength from the root into the limbs... ' .

 
Taking Pugin’s argument, that classical architecture was an essentially dishonest imitation of a timber hut, he argued that there could be no beauty in architecture without truth. In what is arguably the greatest book ever written about architecture, "The Seven Lamps of Architecture", Ruskin devotes an entire chapter to "The Lamp of Truth." Here he eloquently condemns all forms of untruth in architecture. The first is


"The suggestion of a mode of  structure or support other  than  the true one:”

 
However, he also states

  "The architect is not bound to exhibit structure; nor are we to complain of him for concealing it, anymore than we should regret that the outer surfaces of the human frame conceals much of its anatomy; nevertheless , that  building will generally be the noblest, which to an intelligent eye discovers the great secrets of its structure, as an animal form does, although from a careless  observer they may be concealed".

  He also condemns
 
"The painting of surfaces to represent some other material than that of which they actually consist (as in the marbling of wood)"

And

"The use  of cast or machine-made  ornament of any kind.”


He argues that

"For it is not the material, but the absence of human labour, which makes the thing worthless:"

He despised the sort of architecture that was being produced all around him by the industrial revolution. He was employed as a consultant to the architect Benjamin Woodward who was designing the Museum of Natural History in Oxford  but resigned when he realised that the building would have some similarities with  a Victorian railway station, with stone and brick used at the front and iron and glass  at the back of the building. The Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition of 1851 may have had a touch of Regency elegance about it, reminiscent of Nash, but Ruskin viewed it with similar disapproval. However, I would argue  that, as time went on, Ruskin began to have to have doubts about his rigid architectural conservatism.

 

 
In 1859, Ruskin produced essay on the subject of industrial materials, “ The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art &  Policy.” Iron, Ruskin states, can be seen in the British landscape in the form of ochrerous stains, that is oxidised iron or rust on hillsides or in streams. A conclusion that might be reasonably drawn from this is that metal, used as a material in architecture can relate to nature.

He states:

“what do you suppose dyes your tiles of cottage roof? You don’t paint them. It is nature who puts all that lovely vermilion onto the clay for you; and all that lovely vermilion is this oxide of iron.”



Whether he thought iron could produce appropriate forms for architecture can be gauged by the following statements. Architectural writers were so pre-occupied with the academic approach that there was much controversy over whether buildings realised with iron  could be considered to be architecture at all. Ruskin,  capable of almost schizophrenic views on this subject was able to write the following views in the 'The Seven Lamps of Architecture';
 
“True architecture does not admit iron as a constructive material.”
 
And again;

“the time is probably near when a new system of architectural laws will be developed adapted entirely to metallic construction.”

 
Here, for the first time, Ruskin acknowledges that new technology may fundamentally alter approaches to architecture. The French architect, Viollet-le-Duc, spent most of his career restoring his country’s cathedrals. He also wrote a number of great theoretical treatises on the nature of materials and embraced with rather more enthusiasm, the potential  new technology offered:

"We hear it maintained in the present day, as it was formerly, that iron cannot be employed in our edifices without dissembling its use, because this material is not suited to monumental forms. It would be more consistent with truth and reason to say that the monumental forms adopted, having resulted from the use of materials possessing  qualities other than those of iron, cannot be adapted to this latter material. The logical inference is that we should not continue to employ those forms, but should try to discover others that harmonise with the properties of iron.”

Here we can sense the stirrings of something new in architecture, detectable even in Ruskin.

The Gothic revival overturned the Classical tradition of axis and the orders and celebrated qualities such as asymmetry, originality and “truth to materials”. Once these ideas  had been accepted , the floodgates were opened to a wave of architectural innovation.

Prince Charles may feel that in the Georgian era, there was a sort of universal benchmark of quality, below which architecture did not seem to drop and that modern architecture has not achieved this. In many ways I would agree. However, there is at least one member of the Royal Family who seems to view with favour the work of at least one eminent modern architect. The Order of Merit is an award which is the personal gift of the Queen to bestow. In 1997 she gave the award to Norman Foster. 



( A version of this article appeared in The Salisbury Review).

What would Harold Say?

 Amid the controversy surrounding the National Planning Policy Framework as way of finding our bearings perhaps it would be worth while casting our minds back to the planning policies of previous Conservative governments. As I have already indicated here, I believe that the planning-free-zone of the 1980s often  led to urban design of a very poor quality. Perhaps if we extend the time frame further, as far back as the 1950s, then we can see examples of urban design which seem relevant today. The fact that the Conservatives won an election in  1951 and the subsequent popularity of that Government has often been attributed to  Harold Macmillan’s grasp of this issue. His willingness to campaign on this issue prior to the  election and the success of his tenure as Minister for Housing from 1951 -1954 where he famously met his target of 300,000 new homes a year, surely holds lessons for our current government. The failure of  the current Conservative Party to appreciate this lesson might explain their failure to secure an outright majority at the last election.

 Reviewing planning policies as they currently stand, the approach to planning of the  last 10-15 years i.e. the Blair years were generally determined by John Prescott. John Prescott’s approach to planning and urban design was basically guided by the report “Towards an Urban Renaissance”,  probably the most influential planning document  during this period. “Towards an Urban Renaissance”  was produced by the Urban Task Force chaired by Richard Rogers so it really was his brainchild. Rogers argues for the polycentric city, that a city should not be seen as a single entity but as a series of villages or neighbourhoods.

 
Much of Roger’s argument revolves around density. This is measured by the acronym DPH  (dwellings per hectare.)  Only when this reaches a critical level is it possible to create a catchment area that can justify local services such as a doctor, bus stop, shops, school etc. This is the way in which a series of mixed-use, pedestrian-scaled  neighbourhoods are created. The walkable neighbourhoods thus generated are more sustainable than a neighbourhood which is wholly residential where people have to drive to an out-of-town shopping centre. A walkable neighbourhood also has social benefits were people will meet each other unlike a neighbourhood where the connections are all made with cars.
 
The idea of the neighbourhood is probably the most interesting and valid initial approach to urban design. It needs to be mixed use and walkable scale. One of the reasons that the out-of-town shopping centres  became so popular, an  approach which became widespread in the 1980s , was simply that they had large, horizontal  car parks. However, in architectural and urban design terms the overall quality of these developments was often very poor. Car parks constitute nothing more than an urban wasteland. And one of the overall effects of out-of-town shopping centres was that many town centre shop closed; this led to what planners refer to as the doughnut syndrome – towns with holes at the centre. So a third quality is added to the requirements of a neighbourhood. A good public transport system obviating the need to always travel by car.
 
The idea of the neighbourhood is valid, with it’s 3 qualities, as I have outlined above, and  can be achieved with a majority of the dwellings consisting of houses with gardens. This has been proven to work, for instance, by the British  Garden City Movement. I recently gave an example, namely Hampstead Garden Suburb. This has the  quality of a village with a railway station at the centre.
 
It could be argued that the present Government needs a specifically conservative approach to this, in the sense that it is  something generated by private money rather than public money. To achieve this I would say firstly, that ideally an important step would be getting developers interested in the vitally important principle of mixed –use. Rather than building mono-functional zones such as out-of-town shopping centres and business parks, they should be encouraged to embrace mixed-use, both as buildings and neighbourhoods. This can be profitable as well as attractive. Instead of the approach of the single-story shopping shed surrounded by a car park you can have a multi-story building with shops on the ground floor and flats or offices above. This obviates the need for a enormous car park and if it is integrated into it’s neighbourhood, means that there will be houses with gardens within walking distance. All these activities can feed off each other, generating profits , with beautiful squares and landscaped streets instead of over-scaled vehicle parking.
 
As well as persuading developers of the benefits of mixed-use, we need to rethink attitudes to transport. David Cameron has said that he wants the present government to be the greenest ever. The initiative of the feed-in tariff was a good policy. It means that people can install photo-voltaic panels on their roof and sell the surplus electricity back to grid, meaning that the initial investment can be paid for in a much shorter period of time. However, finding a sustainable approach to transport is going to be much, much more difficult. Although we live in an age of diminishing oil resources, I personally doubt whether the electric car, which some people put their faith in, really is the answer. At present, they take 5 hours to recharge and have a range of 100 miles. I also doubt if the car powered on bio-fuels in the answer since their production depends on turning valuable farming land away from food production. What is necessary is to re-invent the notion of public transport. You may argue that this is socialist, because collective, rather than individual and conservative, but I am not sure I would agree. We already pay for roads collectively through our taxes so perhaps a proportion of this money should be  spent every year on public transport. All the roads we have paid for and built will arguably be empty in a few years time so perhaps we need to start modifying them for new types of transport i.e. trams can be retrofitted to existing road infrastructure. All this can be payed for by tax contributions and private developers through thinks like Section 106 agreements ( unfortunately these will be abolished under the NPPF). It is obviously easier to link up a tram to a constant power source than a car i.e. an overhead cable rather than a battery which goes flat every five  hours. The electricity can come from renewables i.e. solar, wind, ground source heat pump, CHP, biomass even nuclear. This entire approach will entirely change the look and feel of our towns and cities, reducing sprawl (which is often caused by cars) and leading to mixed-use neighbourhoods. This approach need not be excessively dense, as the example of the garden city movement shows.
 

Coming back to Harold Macmillan, we should really reflect on what planning policies he implemented in the 1950s and 1960s. He did  not simply advocate the relaxation of planning in favour of a developer’s free-for-all. The housing targets he set and met  were placed within the context of the planning policies of the day, policies evolved by figures such as Patrick Abercrombie and Frederic Osborne, both of whom were among the most gifted planners this country has ever produced. They were responsible for policies which included the New Towns, Green Belts and inner-city renewal. Looking back on this now, with over 50 years of reflection to draw on, it is clear that not all of these policies were unqualified successes.  Inner-city renewal often took the form of demolishing housing considered unsalvageable because  of sub-standard quality or because of war damage, and replacing it with concrete high-rises. Not all this housing is as bad as is now often supposed. Some of it was actually quite good. The high-rises, from the gleaming white concrete of early modernism to the grey concrete of the Brutalist era, were a mixed blessing, ranging in quality from good to awful. Some have called for them to be demolished and sometimes this approach has been adopted. However, it is noticeable that no one has called for the New Towns to be demolished and examples of this genre, such as  Harlow and Bracknell, are still viewed as attractive places to live. No one as far as I can see, wants to see the Green Belts built on. Hence we can still look back on the Macmillan era as a time when planning was approached responsibly and from which we can still draw relevant lessons today.

A responsible approach to urban design needs to be aware of the two scales at which towns and cities are experienced. I have already discussed the first scale, that of the neighbourhood. The next scale is that of the overall city i.e. a polycentric cluster of neighbourhoods. Urban life can, of course, be exciting, with all the facilities we associate with city life. Its drawback can be that it is actually too stimulating. People feel permanently exhausted, trapped as they are in built-up environment, cut off from nature. This can be mediated by building city neighbourhoods with a high proportion of the dwellings composed of houses with gardens. Another form of mediation is to deliberately limit a city’s size. This can be done by creating satellite towns. This was the idea behind the New Towns of  Macmillan’s time and indeed the Eco Towns policy, proposed in the last days of the Labour Government.

Many have voiced fears of a planning free-for-all and indeed it seems that under the draft National Planning Policy Framework, local authorities who do not have a core strategy in place by April 1^st 2012 will be able to exercise no control over development in their area. It often seems that all planning policy in this country is directed by developers, nimbys, the heritage lobby and organisations such as the Campaign to Protect Rural England. All these groups sometimes pursue irreconcilable goals; this state of affairs will only get worse if there is not a proper planning policy to reconcile the wishes of all the various groups. Rarely is there a planning policy aimed at meeting the needs of all the British People. Many fear that the  effect of the NPPF, if it goes through, will produce very poor quality development which will not meet their housing needs or other building needs.

Towards an urbanism

The  purpose of this blog  is to find an approach to urbanism appropriate to the British Context. If that is it’s purpose then  it seems to me the following question must be answered; is urban design theory applicable to all cities or is an approach to urban design appropriate for one city irrelevant to other cities? Does a British city entail a specific cultural condition? For instance, the “Urban Renaissance” applied to British Cities during the premiership of Tony Blair seemed to often consist of building high-density housing in almost every available site in the country. Is this approach to urban design appropriate for a British Context?

If I had to choose one architectural theorist who understood regional architectural cultures I would choose Christian Norberg-Schulz. No-one more clearly perceived the difference between cities in the North and South of Europe. Norburg-Schulz believed that there are basically two types of architectural culture that exist in Europe, one of the North and one of the South or, as he would put it, Nordic and Mediterranean Europe. He argued that in an urban condition, the ceiling is effectively the sky but it’s appearance is conditioned by the upper termination of the buildings. In the North, the sky is the result of “variable atmospheric conditions;” in the South, the sky is perceived as “a distant and stable background.” Hence, these two conditions can be seen to giving rise to what might be taken as two typologies, two forms which capture the essence of their respective architectural cultures: the gable in the North and the dome in the South.

 The difference between Nordic and Mediterranean architecture could also be understood by looking at the predominant materials used, timber in the North of Europe and Stone in the South,  in what might be taken as the formative period in these civilizations which would be the Medieval period in Northern Europe and Classical period in Southern Europe. There are of course exceptions to this rule but, in the case of Northern Europe, timber can be taken as a defining “image.” Norberg-Schulz states that

 “These images may be related to the fact that in the North vegetation forms the continuous “ground” on which rocks and mountains appear. In the arid South, instead, the topographical configurations constitute the background, whereas trees and groves are perceived as relatively isolated “figures.” Existentially it is therefore justifiable to talk about wood and stone cultures.”

From this we can deduce that the two types of architectural culture in Europe, one of the North and one of the South or as Norburg-Schulz would say, the Nordic and the Mediterranean, do not follow from tradition but rather they follow from nature. It also follows that there are two types of city. We can examine these two types of city to develop an appropriate idea about architectural strategy, using the idea that a strategies gestalt is generated from the interaction of figure and ground.  Norberg-Schulz argues that, in a Mediterranean city the ground, on which the figure appears, consists of “ topographical configurations” which often mean mountains and stone. The figure will consist of urban spaces and buildings, often themselves of stone. Mediterranean people, drawing on their experience of nature, already expect a stone environment and do not need a large amount of greenery in a city. Hence there will be little in the way of parks and gardens. In a Northern environment the “ground” consisits of trees and greenery.  A large amount  of land used as parks and gardens will not be perceived as wasteful use of space but simply a “ground” on which figures appear usually in the form of buildings or urban planning exercises. Hence strategic ideas appropriate to a Mediterranean city cannot be simply transposed to a British city and be found to work.

So am I advocating a return to suburbanism?

In order to answer that, firstly it is necessary to define what is meant by suburbanism. Many people use that word, thinking they defined something with a great deal of precision. They have not. When many people use that word, they often mean houses with gardens. Hence, if you are trying to create  an urban design proposal, the word suburbanism is essentially useless. Urban design proposals deal with all the functions of a town or city, not just one i.e. housing. Le Corbusier, when he drew up some of his famous city plans, at times definitely indulged in megalomania. But he did assign four functions to his city plans not one.

There is another way of defining suburbia as opposed to a truly urban condition. In an urban condition  buildings are brought  up to back of pavement. In a suburban condition buildings are set back allowing front gardens. But there are plenty of exceptions to this. This definition can be broken down.

So what kind of urbanism am I advocating?

The aim of this blog is an attempt to answer that question.

( Quotation of  Christian Norberg-Schulz from  “Architecture: Meaning and Place-“Timber buildings in Europe”“     

Rizzoli, New York, 1988.)