Q1 :: report

musing on single-purpose cities

Palmanova and the Florentine new town were a healthy contrast to the layered cities I'd been studying. I'm in Fez, Morocco now. The medina is extensive, labyrinthine and intense. the call to prayer is one of the most amazing things i've heard; ghostly, intensifying, and then thinning out to a few voices, then a couple voices and then one, and then it's over. it aurally connects the various parts of the maze, and it is commanding.  

Morocco poses an invisible cities-like comparison opportunity in the actual color of these places due to building materials used - Marrakech (the red city), Fes (the gray city), Casablanca (the white city), and finally Chefchaouen (the blue city). Is color and culture associated? Each city is quite unique.    

smaller places like palmanova, florentine new towns, fes, marrakech and chefchouen are easier to study and seem to yield more poignant lessons in terms of form-generating ideals. In layered cities like barcelona, rome, naples, paris I am pulling out ordering systems and relationships to make sense of the "chaos", or looking at parts of them, i.e. EUR, Eixample, Spanish Quarter in Naples, to see how they work, as well as identifying building typologies across them like the Palazzo, piazza and the Domus up and down italy. 

still it is a search for form-generating ideals (i.e. single-purpose cities/sectors that get their form from a single source/ideal - sometimes this is top-down, other times bottom-up).

A categorization of cities, some of which I've studied or will be studying in person. 

roman city (barcelona, rome, ostia, naples, florence, pompeii)

medieval city (barcelona, rome, naples, san giovanni valdarno, venice, fez, marrakech, cordoba, granada, lyon, paris)

renaissance city (rome, naples, florence, venice, palmanova)

colonial city (casablanca, jakarta, mexico city, sao paulo) 

modernist city (casablanca, barcelona, paris, lyon, chandigarh, dakah)

structuralist city (toulouse, rotterdam, apeldoorn, montreal, tokyo, berlin)    

religious city - fez, marrakech, santiago de campostella, rome
islamic city - fez, marrakech, cordoba, granada

spiritual city - brasilia, cuzco, mexico city

[cultural] integration city - roman cities, florentine new towns

defensive city - palmanova, French Bastides towns, toledo

water city - venice, amsterdam, Jakarta

garden city - versailles, caserta, grenada, english new towns...

industrial city - lyon, sheffield, partizanske (slovakia),    

american dream city - celebration, radburn

gateway city - istanbul, kashgar, kunming, tangier

vertical city - manhattan, hong kong, singapore, sao paulo

continuous city - eixample, manhattan

multi-layer city - rome, barcelona, paris, 

imperial city - beijing forbidden city, kyoto 

with the idea of returning next spring to work on apollopolis - the solar city, i'm learning first-hand how urban systems work, how they are continuous and interdependent, and how it is usually impossible to "preserve" a part of the system - a tightly knit urban fabric needs all its parts in order to survive. 

palmanova :: ideal city for defense

overview
Palmanova, Italy is a town in northeast Italy that was the culmination of renaissance studies into the ideal urban geometry for defense. The fortress was erected, starting from 1593, to defend the eastern borders of the Republic of Venice from the menace of a Turkish invasion and from growing Austrian pressures. The choice of a nine-pointed star-like plan unites the influences of the Renaissance cultural debate and the most advanced solutions of the contemporary military engineering. The first defensive ring, protected by a moat, is made up of the cortine (fortifications) and the ramparts. Because of the new besieging technologies, a second ring was erected in the 17th Century. A further ring was built in the time of Napolean, between 1805 and 1813, by the French Engineers Corps settled within the fortress. The fortress is accessible by three gates, ascribed to the architect Vincenzo Scamozzi, named Porta Udine, Porta Marittima or Aquileia and Porta Cividale.

site
Flat, swamp land.

tissue
A nine-sided polygon. At the center a six-sided polygon.

Crossfire vectors determine the shape of the ramparts.

Often called the "star city" as the ramparts form multiple points.

Historical Notes
Palmanova was one of the Citte Fondate (1930's Fascist Italy)
A Citta Fondata was a fascist town zoned for uses and expressed with fascist architecture.

During WWI, the Austrians occupied the town. In the opera house, operas would still go on. At the end of some Verdi operas, the Italians would shout: "Viva Verdi!" and clap for him. The Austrians would clap, too, thinking they were clapping for Verdi. But there was a hidden meaning: VERDI was an acronym for "Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia" and so the Austrians were unknowingly clapping for the King of Italy, their enemy.

Designed for 20,000 inhabitants, the maximum was only ever 10,000 people. 5,000 of those were military. The city has no towers, so as not to be seen over the ramparts. The Napoleonic stores would later become convention centers. The abandoned barracks take up a lot of area, and have not yet been adapted to new use.

Field Notes
Though Palmanova has perfect geometrical layout, its architecture is imperfect. Floor levels vary, building heights vary, acute corners resulting from the star layout are dealt with in various ways, the main square is extra large and therefore underpopulated as it was originally designed for military gathering. Some buildings are imported, and a hierarchy is not apparent.

A streetscape looking toward the center of the town. Instead of a lookout tower as planned, a flagpole.

The regular geometry of the street layout creates particular building form-types at various corners.

Palmanova is undetected in the landscape, because no buildings rise taller than the ramparts.

venice :: (ex)pression

This public space is a carefully designed balance of rigid geometries and breakage of those geometries using angles from the bend in the canal. All elements are highly relational bringing the various parts together in a tautly arranged whole. 

sg valdarno :: ideal city for political economy

San Giovanni Valdarno is one of several Florentine New Towns built from scratch in the late 13th century as tools for Florence to organize the countryside. Despite coming into being in medieval times, these towns mark the beginning of the renaissance of ideal town planning through relational geometries and proportions. 

florence :: (com)pression

Compressing time and space of a walk through a series of arcaded loggia in the middle of florence.

florence :: time stamps

drawing by anna gibb 

This drawing by Anna Gibb shows Florence has distinct time stamps as it was a walled city for long periods of time. As the city grew the wall was removed and built further from the center. The roman town at the center has a distinct tissue from the two subsequent time periods, due to a different urban ordering mechanism, namely the grid. The medieval tissue is not much different from one period to the next, but outside of this representation is the modern town. That fabric is characterized by larger buildings, bigger roads, factories, airports, stripmalls, gas stations, etc. as it relates to the modern mode of transportation - the automobile. the shape of the walls is potentially an ideal form. see analysis below.

e.u.r. :: ideal city for politics

EUR stands for "Esposizione Universale Roma" or the Rome Universal Exhibition, and was built in the 1930s under Mussolini, in the Italian rationalist style. Here it is a pared down revival of classical architecture, fascist in that the planning is rectilinear and axial as was classical roman town planning, but scaled for the automobile. It is close to the aesthetic architect Albert Speer was championing in Nazi Berlin, the Olympic Stadium there a realized example. Pictures can not do justice to the dwarfing effect on the human in this scale of architecture.

EUR is architecturally ordered in plan, but at street level exhibits disorder and unnavigability. The street belongs to the car. Cars clutter the streets, parked in medians and along each block. Sidewalks end suddenly in a sea of cars, and the pedestrian is left to find his own way through, sometimes walking on the street itself in order to find where the sidewalk picks up again. 

Blocks are large, and buildings do not engage the street. The facades are set back from the street, creating an unactivated strip, and resulting in long, uninterrupted stretches of fencing. There are few people on the streets at all. 

The most famous building of the lot, the Palazzo della Civilta Italiana or the "Square Colosseum" has a traffic barrier and fence around it. It is not possible to walk up to the building, or even to fully circumnavigate it. The back feels like the front, and the front drops off in a wealth of steps wide enough for the million man march, to another cross street and then the freeway.

In the shallowest of analyses, EUR is a corporate office park pretending to be a city (it does have a residential component). Upon further reflection however, EUR provides a glimpse of what european cities might have looked and felt like if the other side had won WWII. Would an entire city in this style change who we are as people?