A LAND WITHOUT SUBURBS
Here the city ends abruptly, even without walls (long gone). Outside the city lies farmland or wilderness, protected by zoning which has no provision for intermediate suburbs:
When you’re not in the city, you’re in the country. If you’re in a village, you’re still in the country. A village is a tiny eruption of urban fabric surrounded by landscape, such as pasture land. It is not a shopping center. It may contain a church, but rarely is it big enough to support even a single shop:
When you’re not in the city, you’re in the country. The foothills beyond contain bears:
A cluster of families provides a tiny eruption of rural urbanity. The village families work the surrounding fields, somewhat outside the money economy. Their tax returns don’t reflect their true wealth:
In this smaller city you can see out to the country; it’s just…over there:
Without suburbs, the country is never far away, even in a medium-sized city:
Organically adapted to the land form, this town oozes down a valley. Urban architecture is variable, reflecting local climate, culture, history and building materials. It does not spring from numerical formulas. One town is different from another:
Central square of a small town, with City Hall. It’s difficult to distinguish new from old buildings. This is not because the creators of the new buildings are shameless copyists and pasticheurs; it is because the local vernacular architectural tradition is alive and unbroken. This is not revivalism; this is simply the way people build in this place. No one here is interested in learned arguments about stylistic appropriateness in modern times. This issue is settled (in fact, it never came up):
Plaza in a smaller city. A pleasant variety of buildings that agree about scale, and are not unnecessarily short. They have similar (but not identical!!) footprints, and their level of detail and their allocations of solid and void are compatible. Together they conspire to make the walls of an outdoor room:
Newer buildings seamlessly integrate with older fabric, without apologies for their relative modernity:
Bicycles supplement walking in a smaller city. If the city is sufficiently compact, public transport is hardly required.
Note glass curtain wall at left.
Leon Krier says a city should be of a size that allows all points to be reached on foot (He obviously doesn’t believe in big cities). Many streets are pedestrianized during certain hours. Shopkeepers on this street don’t seem to feel the need for cars:
Medieval space…
…loves the skew and the vertical:
Capital city medievally snakes between river and mountain. Corbusier’s socialist ghost haunts the outskirts (right and left background):
Medieval in two flavors of revival-- 19th and 20th Centuries-- coexist in harmony (shades of Rudolf Steiner in the later example?):
Buildings of different styles suggest layers of history:
Inner city skyscrapers were long resisted until it was discovered that if their footprints were kept small they introduced no harmful disruptions of scale:
Prevalent architecture in most cities is some flavor of classical:
It suggests permanence and cultural continuity:
It does this by generally favoring the static over the dynamic:
Time stopped by stillness:
Michelangelo rules:
And Giulio Romano:
Even the pizzeria:
Tending toward Art Nouveau:
And ending in Deco:
Street walls:
Church on the hill:
Tranquil courtyard:
Street busy with shoppers:
And less busy. Better than cowering on the sidewalk is having so little auto traffic that you can walk in the middle of the street:
The most delightful spots in the city occur where public meets private in confusion:
Who needs trees when the architecture looks this good?
The Baroque branch of Classicism likes things a little more dynamic:
Writhing forms against blank planes:
Streets:
Prosperous bourgeois houses:
Labyrinth:
In the arches of a bridge approach:
Preferred transport:
A uniform cornice line.
Uniform Cornice Line II.
Articulated means highly maneuverable:
End of the line:
New cities built in the Renaissance featured an orthogonal order, a modified grid. Do you suppose people complained that they looked too new? Or did they complain perhaps that they looked not new enough? These cities too end abruptly in field or forest:
The same general idea in a different color…
…and again near the sea, where the climate turns subtropical:
Long shadow of the Rouse Company falls on seasides everywhere. The discreet charm of the festival marketplace:
Some seaside resorts feature more or less modern architecture, reflecting their recent provenance:
New vacation village for plutocrats echoes older forms:
Its inspiration was planted just up the corniche quite a few centuries back:
Medieval settlements perch on ridges overlooking the sea. They are held in by topography and protective zoning:
From atop a rampart, a hotel terrace offers ocean view in one direction and mountains in the other:
Did you notice that in the Land without Suburbs there are no parking lots?
* * *
Why do we tolerate the junk heaps we live in?
Even more: why do we assure their perpetuation with laws?
* * *
Why do we build such junk?
One reason is that we start with numbers and end with form.
Numbers like dollars, square footages, building heights, setbacks.
We don’t really do urban design; we apply formulas.
Garbage in, garbage out.
We could start with the form and work back to the numbers.
If we did, the early stages of conceiving a city or a part of a city might look like this, instead of a bunch of numbers:
Not perfect, by any means.
But a reasonable approximation of the Land without Suburbs.
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Originally posted by jordanb
