urban form and design - debating the american city
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PLAN 4003: Urban Form & Design
Week 4: Debating the American City
Anuradha MukherjiAssistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning
MORDERN PLANNING & LE CORBUSIER
- Critiques traditional physical structure of cities
- Utopian vision of modern city geared towards the car
- Not grounded in how people live, interact, and enjoy cities
- Enamored with products of industrialization – car, mechanization, standardization
CORBUSIER’S ARGUMENT
PACK DONKEY’S WAYVS
MAN’S WAY
Man: Governed by reason, intelligence, experience, goals
Pack Donkey: Comfort, convenience, lack of concentration, meanders, line of least resistance
Haussmannization of Paris (Transformation of a Medieval City)
Camillo Sitte, Study of Medieval Plazas
This image is attributed to Public Domain (PD-US-1923)
Piazza Del Campidoglio (Rome, Italy)/Capitoline Hill, Michelangelo, 1537, Italian Renaissance
This image is attributed to Giulio Menna @ 2010 (CC BY-ND 2.0)
CAMILLO SITTE’S IDEAS
- Straight lines are unnatural, do not follow terrain
- Need both art and function to make cities appealing
- Lack of urban public space in cities
- Isolated block of buildings, and no unifying factors, boring spaces
This image is attributed to United States Geological Survey
Pruitt-Igoe Public Housing Complex, St. Louis, Missouri
CORBUSIER’S IDEAS
- Modern city functions along straight lines – sewers, tunnels, highways, traffic circulation
- Divided into grid system, no need for curves
- Stress on functionality, no artistic tradition
- Bare, efficient, functional – main purpose of carrying traffic, gas, water, electric lines
- No discussion of street as a public space –crooked streets as pack donkey’s way
CORBUSIER’S IDEAS
- High-rise vertical towers with lots of leftover space in-between
- Standardized super blocks using repetition, mechanization, and industrialization of construction
- Dense city center comprising business and residential towers with garden cities on periphery
- Technical, civil engineering project
BRASILIA, Capital of Brazil
This image is attributed to www.urbanity.es, Accessed February 2013
BRASILIA
BRASILIA
This image is attributed to www.skyscraperlife.com, Accessed February 2013
BRASILIA
This image is attributed to www.skyscraperlife.com, Accessed February 2013
Construction Phase, National Congress, BRASILIA
Built upon 20th century principles of urbanism as expressed by Le CorbusierApplied to the scale of a capital city, only other example is Chandigarh, India
This image is attributed to www.oesquema.com.br, Accessed February 2013
Central Monumental Axis, BRASILIA
This image is attributed to m.feher.pestana @ 2010 (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Central Monumental Axis, BRASILIA
This image is attributed www.urbanity.es, Accessed February 2013
Central Monumental Axis, BRASILIA
This image is attributed to www.indirameza.wordpress.com, Accessed February 2013
Central Monumental Axis, BRASILIA
HAUSSMANN’S PARIS
HAUSSMANN’S PARIS
HAUSSMANN’S PARIS
BRASILIA
This image is attributed to Felipe Venancio @ 2008 (CC BY 2.0)
Ministry Buildings, BRASILIA
This image is attributed to Julio Cesar Barbosa @ 2010 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
BRASILIA
This image is attributed to Julio Cesar Barbosa @ 2010 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
BRASILIA
This image is attributed to Julio Cesar Barbosa @ 2010 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
BRASILIA
This image is attributed to Diogo Diniz Garcia Gomes @ 2010 (CC BY-NC 3.0)
BRASILIA
This image is attributed to Julio Cesar Barbosa @ 2010 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Presidential Palace, BRASILIA
This image is attributed to gtavares @ 2010 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Palace of Justice, BRASILIA
This image is attributed to Sergio Lang @ 2012 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Metropolitan Cathedral, BRASILIA
This image is attributed to Olivier Peyre @ 2007 (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
BRASILIA
This image is attributed to Marco Mugnatto @ 2010 (CC BY-NC 3.0)
CORBUSIAN CITY
- Theoretical top-down design, gigantic at eye level, not to human-scale
- No sensitivity to local contexts
- Forgot how people lived for centuries – need a car in a Corbusian city
- Centralized and controlled by designer, no input from people
NEIGHBORHOOD UNIT
This image is attributed to New York Regional Survey @ 1929
- Growing congestion and traffic
- New plans for regional expansion
- Idea of a self contained neighborhood unit
- Centered on school and community center
- Bound by arterial roads
- No vehicular traffic through neighborhood
- Unit – school, residential, shops, parks
- Codified by FHA into sub-division standards