Projecting Urbanity Architecture For And Against The City

Existing histories of modern architecturetypically give their highest praise to private houses and their most severecondemnation to architect-authored urban plans, often neglecting the builtworks that are no smaller than a single building and possibly as large as anurban block, the middle or institutional scale, where culturally significanturban transformation actually takes place. Urban architecture is a timely topic as todaycities worldwide are suffering accelerated urbanisation, which is oftendehumanising and destructive, especially to the unbuilt environment, airs,waters and soils. The middle or institutional scale is shown to activate andactualise latent potentials for cultural experience and environmentalintelligence, allowing the city to surprise itself and delight in itsdiscoveries. In ProjectingUrbanity, David Leatherbarrow, via author-architect texts by his formerdoctorate students, lays out the basis for a revision of modern architecture'scontribution to cities and their culture. Presenting a series of textsfeaturing buildings or their parts of various scales - from the constructiondetail, to the room or garden, to ensembles within a neighborhood - thecontributors introduce concepts for contemporary and future urbanarchitecture, together with richly indicative examples from the past severaldecades. While architecture cannot "solve" today'surban problems, it certainly has a role to play in their productivetransformation, articulating opportunities for life and culture that are morehumane, less wasteful, and more beautiful.

A comprehensive guide to the scope of contemporary urban design theory in Europe and the USA.

A comprehensive new survey tracing the global history of urbanism and urban design from the industrial revolution to the present. Written with an international perspective that encourages cross-cultural comparisons, leading architectural and urban historian Eric Mumford presents a comprehensive survey of urbanism and urban design since the industrial revolution. Beginning in the second half of the 19th century, technical, social, and economic developments set cities and the world’s population on a course of massive expansion. Mumford recounts how key figures in design responded to these changing circumstances with both practicable proposals and theoretical frameworks, ultimately creating what are now mainstream ideas about how urban environments should be designed, as well as creating the field called “urbanism.” He then traces the complex outcomes of approaches that emerged in European, American, and Asian cities. This erudite and insightful book addresses the modernization of the traditional city, including mass transit and sanitary sewer systems, building legislation, and model tenement and regional planning approaches. It also examines the urban design concepts of groups such as CIAM (International Congresses of Modern Architecture) and Team 10, and their adherents and critics, including those of the Congress for the New Urbanism, as well as efforts toward ecological urbanism. Highlighting built as well as unbuilt projects, Mumford offers a sweeping guide to the history of designers’ efforts to shape cities.

Examines configurations of urban space, analyzing them in ways that blur the traditional opposition between figure and ground.

How can architecture today be simultaneously relevant to its urban context and at the very forefront of design? For a decade or so, iconic architecture has been fuelled by the market economy and consumers' insatiable appetite for the novel and the different. The relentless speed and scale of urbanisation, with its ruptured, decentralised and fast-changing context, though, demands a rethink of the role of the designer and the function of architecture. This title of 2 confronts and questions the profession's and academia's current inability to confidently and comprehensively describe, conceptualise, theorise and ultimately project new ideas for architecture in relation to the city. In so doing, it provides a potent alternative for projective cities: Typological Urbanism. This pursues and develops the strategies of typological reasoning in order to re-engage architecture with the city in both a critical and speculative manner. Architecture and urbanism are no longer seen as separate domains, or subservient to each other, but as synthesising disciplines and processes that allow an integrating and controlling effect on both the city and its built environment.

This book is a useful reference in the field of urbanism. It explains how the contemporary city and landscape have been shaped by certain twentieth century visions that have carried over into the twenty-first century. Aimed at both students and professionals, this collection of essays on diverse subjects and cases does not attempt to establish universal interpretations; it rather highlights some outstanding episodes that help us understand why the planning culture has given way to other forms of urbanism, from urban design to strategic urbanism or landscape urbanism. Compared with global interpretations of urbanism based on socioeconomic history or architectural historiography, Urban Visions. From Planning Culture to Landscape Urbanism, aims to present the discipline couched in international contemporary debate and adopt a historic and comparative perspective. The book’s contents pertain equally to other related disciplines, such as architecture, urban history, urban design, landscape architecture and geography. Foreword by Rafael Moneo.

Non-Plan explores ways of involving people in the design of their environments - a goal which transgresses political categories of 'right' and 'left'. Attempts to circumvent planning bureaucracy and architectural inertia have ranged from free-market enterprise zones, to self-build housing, and from squatting to sophisticated technologies of prefabrication. Yet all have shared in a desire to let people shape the built environment they want to live and work in. How can buildings better reflect the needs of their inhabitants? How can cities better facilitate the work and recreation of their many populaces? Modernism had promised a functionalist approach to resolving the architectural needs of the twentieth-century, yet the design of cities and buildings often appears to confound the needs of those who use them - their design and layout being highly regulated by restrictive legislation, planning controls and bureaucracy. Non-Plan considers the theoretical and conceptual frameworks within which architecture and urbanism have sought to challenge entrenched boundaries of control, focusing on the architectural history of the post-war period to the present day. This provocative book will be of interest to architects, planners and students of architecture, design, town-planning and architectural history. Its contributors include architects, critics and historians, including many whose work helped shape the Non-Plan debate during the period. List of contributors: Cedric Price, Benjamin Franks, Elizabeth Lebas, Eleonore Kofman, Ben Highmore, Yona Friedman, Paul Barker, Clara Greed, Barry Curtis, Colin Ward, Ian Horton, John Beck, Chinedu Umenyilora and Malcolm Miles.

Why urban design is larger than architecture: the foundational qualities of urban design, examples and practitioners Urban design in practice is incremental, but architects imagine it as scaled-up architecture—large, ready-to-build pop-up cities. This paradox of urban design is rarely addressed; indeed, urban design as a discipline lacks a theoretical foundation. In The Largest Art, Brent Ryan argues that urban design encompasses more than architecture, and he provides a foundational theory of urban design beyond the architectural scale. In a “declaration of independence” for urban design, Ryan describes urban design as the largest of the building arts, with qualities of its own. Ryan distinguishes urban design from its sister arts by its pluralism: plural scale, ranging from an alleyway to a region; plural time, because it is deeply enmeshed in both history and the present; plural property, with many owners; plural agents, with many makers; and plural form, with a distributed quality that allows it to coexist with diverse elements of the city. Ryan looks at three well-known urban design projects through the lens of pluralism: a Brancusi sculptural ensemble in Romania, a Bronx housing project, and a formally and spatially diverse grouping of projects in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He revisits the thought of three plural urbanists working between 1960 and 1980: David Crane, Edmund Bacon, and Kevin Lynch. And he tells three design stories for the future, imaginary scenarios of plural urbanism in locations around the world. Ryan concludes his manifesto with three signal considerations urban designers must acknowledge: eternal change, inevitable incompletion, and flexible fidelity. Cities are ceaselessly active, perpetually changing. It is the urban designer's task to make art with aesthetic qualities that can survive perpetual change.