fez :: medina breakdown

pedestrians and animals only
fes el-bali (fez old town) remains preserved due to its status as a world heritage site and to the fact that fez new town was made on the other side of the hill. it is the largest car-free area in the world. "medina" means "town" in arabic; but also refers to the old town of current islamic cities. here are some of its the major elements.

the wall

the dar (house) + the riadh (private courtyard)

an elongated dar in marrakech with riadh off to the side

(more like 4m)

the bab (gate)


the sqaq (street) + the derb (dead-end alley)

fractal nature of the streets of fes 4.0/1.5 = 2.7 (e) 

the mosque

the souk (covered market)

the fondouk (pension)

the madrasa (islamic college)

the factory

the hammam (spa)

fez :: (im)pression

"My friend! You want to get high? Really, no? Okay okay, I don't push like Bush".

fez medina is labyrinthine and intense. the call to prayer here is haunting and arresting - the whole medina from hill to valley fills with a ghostly but commanding wail. i've been offered hash, beer, massage about 200 times in three days. i can't take a walk without attracting a "guide" that follows me home, sometimes helps me through the maze, sometimes seeming to want to get me more confused to possibly pick my pockets, but there are usually just enough "eyes on the street" to spot this and call it out. the scams are infinite, but so far harmless and even amusing.

roofscapes [fez el-bali]

cityscape [fez el-bali]

roofscape [marrakech]

Q1 :: daylight conditions

sky

horizon

face

Q1 :: (com)pression

these images are taken every thirty paces with the same focal length and horizon line, then overlaid. the idea is challenge traditional opticality by compressing both time and space, highlighting rhythms and flows unique to a place. comparing these montages across different cultural and physical latitudes would hopefully reveal more about the respective cultures of space.

barcelona (spain) | florence (italy)

Q1 :: scale + grit

I Found this well-written argument on archrecord.com.  

It's always an unquestioned premise that cities have to accommodate large-scale development projects, and yet there is always an undercurrent of concern that the need to contain the scale of 'large scale' sufficiently that they don't lose their soul.

It's a tender balance, made more difficult because the sites and investments are too large to permit the city to be shaped by its own evolution. The use of large-scale development techniques favored by private-sector developers and bankers is now so ingrained in our culture that we have lost track of the fact that this is utterly at odds with the way cities organically develop from public infrastructure and incremental, lot-by-lot development.

Cities also have to adjust to the mores of each successive generation. Hardworking blue-collar places like San Francisco (or Brooklyn) became havens for messy vitality precisely because they had lost their mainstream economies and there was thus a vacuum to be filled. But you can't sustain that vacuum artificially; the city sucks up energy and comes back to life, and since the city sustains itself on that economic energy it will not, as an organism, be easily prevented from doing so.

That creative period of economic vacuum can't be bottled up and sustained, like an interesting artifact found when the demolition crews arrived. To plan their destinies more successfully, cities need to reduce the size of each incremental input, based upon a clear, simple, and publicly-owned plan of development and smaller, simpler tasks for the individual developers. 

Then we won't have to worry about bottling a few gallons of "artistic temperament" to scatter like a perfume through lifeless new urban spaces.

- someguy (screen name), ArchRecord.com, message board re: SF Pier 70 development.

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.