Context Flashcards
What are the six major considerations in building preliminary design?
- Urban development and group behavior
- Community influences
- Psychological and inter-social influences
- Transportation and utility
- Climate and environment
- Sustainability
In the earliest cities, what was the role of the temple?
Both as a place for religious rites and a place to conduct the administration of the city, such as commerce, politics, and social interaction.
What was the difference between Greek cities and earlier primitive cities?
Greek cities had an agora, which separated economic, political, and social activities somewhat from the temple.
As cities became more sophisticated, the need for a complex other than a single building grew.
What was the center of the typical medieval city?
The market and the church.
What primarily changed about urban design between before and after the Renaissance?
City design had previously been focused largely on defense, but considerations of aesthetic qualities became important as well.
Symmetrical & axial layouts, connection of points-of-interest, and beautification of streets became important.
What were the main aspects of Christopher Wren’s city plan for London?
- To rebuild after the 1666 great fire
- Reflective of the new Renaissance / Baroque approach
- Superimposed major avenues that connected major government buildings and monuments over a gridiron
- Never realized
What were the main aspects of Eugene Haussmann’s city plan for Paris?
- Partially implemented between 1853 and 1869
- Major boulevards connected important buildings, monuments, and plazas.
- Prioritized creating vistas of important landmarks
- Also designed to limit riots, bolster defensibility, and clear out slums
What were the main aspects of Camillo Sitte’s approach to urban design?
- Austrian architect; wrote City Planning According to Artistic Principles in 1889
- Cities should have curving, irregular streets, like in medieval times, to provide a variety of views
- Use more T-intersections, to reduce the number of traffic conflicts
- Proposed the turbine square: a pinewheel arangement of civic sites
What did the Industrial Revolution primarily change about city layout and why?
- Cities became more centralized and densely packed
…. Because it became necessary for workers to live and work near the power and distribution hubs of goods.
- Cities had worsened housing conditions and aesthetics became less important
…. Because of a focus on production and economic efficiency in factory towns
What were the two stages of reform movements in reaction to the Industrial Revolution city layout?
First, a focus on improveing living conditions – particularly crime, sanitation, and crowding – that resulted from factory towns.
Later, a recognition of the importance of open space and recreation.
What are the primary historical aspects of the Garden City concept?
- Created by Ebenezer Howard, first in 1898.
- Reaction to the Industrial Revolution
- Two actual towns were created based on this concept:
Letchworth, England in 1903
Welwyn Garden City in 1920
What were the primary design aspects of the Garden City concept?
- To combine the best of country living and urban commerce in one city plan
- Aprx. 6000 acres each, spread out across the landscape
- Land privately owned by the city’s residents
- Concentric rings of development:
Center: civic and cultural buildings in a park
Housing and commercial (about 30,000 residents on 1,000 acres)
Park and grand avenue ring
Industrial
Agricultural belt (about 2,000 residents on 5,000 acres)
What were the primary aspects of the Cité Industrielle concept?
- Created by Tony Garnier in 1917
- Reaction to the Industrial Revolution
- Separated the city into zones (residential, industrial, public, ETC) that were connected by circulation paths
- Buildings placed on long, narrow lots with plenty of space between them
- First to suggest the concept of ‘zoning’
What were the primary design aspects of early US urban design?
- Towns and cities organized around a central commons
- Detached, single-family homes, set back from the street
- Considered a reactiona against the high design of the European / Renaissance “Old Word”; reflected the agrarian lifestyle of earl Americans.
What were the design and historical aspects of the Philadelphia?
- Established in 1682
- Based on a gridiron layout with:
regular breaks for public spaces
uniform spacing and setback
- Became of model for other cities in America and for the establishment of Western settlements
What were the primary historical and design aspects of Savannah, Georgia?
- Designed in 1733 by founder James Edward Oglethorpe
- Separated into “wards”, each with:
Four residential blocks, 40 lots each
Four civic blocks, arranged around the square
Open central square, part of which was reserved for public use
- Wards were bound by major street, which were on a regular grid
What were the historical and design aspects of the Land Ordinance of 1785?
- Established surveying standard for all land west of the Pennsylvania-Ohio border
- All land broken into a grid, each 24 miles square
Each grid with 16 “townships”, 6 miles square
Each “township” with 36 “sections”, 1 mile square
In each “township” one “section” was designated for a school, and others were reserved for government or public facilities
What were the primary historical and design aspects of Washington, DC?
- Designed by Pierre Charles L’Enfant
- Broke from the tradition of gridiron cities; was designed more like the Renaissance / Baroque cities
- A diagonal grid of major streets superimposed over a regular grid
- Centered on the Capitol Building, the White House, and the Mall
- Diagonals connected other major buildings / monuments as well.
What was Frederick Law Olmsted’s significance in urban design?
- Along with Calvert Vaux, designed Central Park
- Central Park became a model for public parts in major cities across North America
- Promoted preserving natural features of the landscape while infusing naturalistic elements
- Major actuator in the Columbian Exposition
What was the historical importance and design aspects of the Columbian Exposition?
- The “Chicago World’s Fair” in 1893
- Design by Frederick Law Olmsted, Daniel Burnham, and John Root
- Classical buildings, each with large promonades and central courts, arranged around a central reflecting pool
- Fundamentally shifted urban design in the US, promoting more:
civic buildings arranged around formal parks
classical-style buildings being built
broad, tree-lined parkways
- Renewed interest in urban design in the US, starting the City Beautiful movement
What were the major design aspects of high modern urban design?
- Promoted in various versions by designers like Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier
- Reaction against centralization and density …. usually featured dense living or working buildings seperated by vast green spaces
- Contemporary urban design rejects these ideas as leading to sprawling cities that would lack vibrance
What was the rough development of the suburb in western urban design?
- Started in the late 1800s as a way for the wealthy to escape crowded cities by building country houses that could be reach by rail.
- In the early and mid 1900s, in the US, developed into large settlements centered around small towns that could be reached easily by rail or by improved roads
- After WWII, as the US population exploded, became the most desireable place to live for middle- and upper-class families
- As more people tried to move to suburbs, the average plot size shrunk and suburbs grew even father from city centers
- Eventually, these trends led to the growth of suburbs as cities of their own, and resulted in Urban Sprawl
What were the historical and design aspects of the New Town concept?
- Began in Great Britain in the 1940s, and spread to the rest of Europe and the US
- Suburban centers could be built into self-sustaining towns of their own
- Supposed to be surrounded by a green belt
- Originally limited to 30,000 residents, but eventually increased to 70,000 and then 250,000
- Most attempts failed, as they did not provide adequate employment opportunities to support their populations and became dependant on nearby cities
- US examples:
Columbia, Maryland
Reston, Virginia
What are the primary philosophical / driving aspects of New Urbanism?
- Recognize (unlike most past urban design movements) that the urban environment is not static, but evolves over time
- Counteract the negative aspects of:
Suburban sprawl
Automobile reliance
Environmental deterioration
Housing segregation
Shrinking farmland
Single-use development
What are the primary historical aspects of New Urbanism?
- Began int he 1980s
- Sparked by the construction of Season, Florida by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk
- Also promoted by Peter Calthorpe and Peter Katz
What are the primary design aspects of New Urbanism?
- Multi-scope applicability:
Intended to work at building, neighborhood, district, or regional levels
- Multi-phase applicability:
Intended to work for both new-build and existing-infill designs
- Mixed-Use design:
Housing located within walking distance of commercial sites
Employment and residential buildings share location
Variety of housing types (EG single-family, townhouse, multi-family) share location
- Human-centric connections
Promote local pedestrian and bicycle routes, connecting with regional routes
Reduce reliance on automobiles, largely by providing effective public transportation
Promote walkable streets with ample pedestrian connections to surrounding buildings
- Preservation and re-use of existing and historic structures
- Sustainable design principles
- Affordable housing
- Integration of institutional buildings into the neighborhood fabric
What are the major factors that have influence the development of the morphology of cities?
- Geographic features
- Water (coast or rivers), usually growing outward from there
- Transit (most often highways), often starting at the intersection of two major pathways
- Planning (grid or radial layout, or, rarely, based on zoning ordinance
What are the primary types of city morphologies?
- Grid
- Radial
- Field (diagonal overlapping of major thoroughfares)
- Satillite (central city with suburban hubs surrounding)
- Megalopolis
What are the primary characteristics of the grid city morphology?
- Call the “expanding grid”
- Usually begins with the intersection of two major roads, and then expands from there outward in a rectangular grid
- Grows until stopped by a natural land feature or economic limit
- Usually characteristic of smaller cities; larger metropolises often have several smaller grids or a grid interupted by organic growth
What are the primary characteristics of the radial city morphology?
- Also called the “star pattern”
- Formed by the spokes of major transit paths (road or rail) that radiate from the center
- Denser near those transit spokes, becoming less dense as you move away
- Similar but not influenced by medieval star cities, which were built that way more for defense
What are the primary characteristics of the satillite city morphology?
- A denser urban center with surrounding urban subcenters
- Subcenters connected by major highways
- Often have beltways that ring the city, allowing transite from one subcenter to another without passing through the core
- Often begin as a radial morphology, with commercial, business, or transporation hubs that develop into centers of their own
What are the primary characteristics of the field city morphology?
- No apparent organization heirarchy
What are the primary characteristics of the megalopolois city morphology?
- Formed when to major urban centers merge into one as the space between them is developed
- Characteristic of many cities in the US Northeast and Souther California
What at the major contributions of Kevin Lynch to urban design?
- Developed the idea of Imageability
- Wrote The Image of the City in 1960
What are the central aspects of Imageability?
- The concept that each city can be understood by the inhabitants based on the key notion(s) of that city, the ‘image in their head’ when they think about that city
- This image can be defined by a pervasive style or prominent landmarks / structures.
- Can be classified by the five elements of a city, outlined in The Image of the City
What were the five elments of a city outlined in Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City?
- Paths (transit routes)
- Edges (natural boundaries)
- Districts (recognizable areas)
- Nodes (inhabitable focal points)
- Landmarks (visual focal points)
What are the aspects of a “path” in the image of a city?
- Routes by which people tend to or may potentially travel
- Can be roads, streets, railways, rivers, sidewalks/paths, ETC
What are the aspects of “edges” and “districts” in the city image?
- Edges for the boundaries between Districts
- Edges can be:
Natural formations (rivers, shoreline, hills, ETC)
Built formations (a row of buildings bounding a park, a wall)
Paths themselves (EG, a highway)
- Districts are areas that are perceived as a unit because everything within them is unified by a characteristic or style
What are the aspects of “nodes” and “landmarks” in the image of a city?
- Nodes are a point of interest that people can enter and through which they navigate
- Nodes can be an intersection of paths, a change in mode of transit along a path, a plaza/park, or the center of a District
- Landmarks are a point of interest that people cannot enter and around which they navigate
- Landmarks can be towers, civic/historic buildings, monuments, or natural formations.
