jakarta :: (im)pression

two urban orders
on the one hand social relationships are established in the street where information can easily be exchanged. this is the driving social order behind a dense pattern of low-rise live/work form-types, where the street is heavily populated by pedestrians, bicycles, tricycle trucks, scooters, and donkeys - the old town.

on the other hand modern urban life is characterized by “increasing individualization by way of social relationships established through various networked media and dispersed work careers. so people can now lead functional urban lives without ever having to take others with whom they nominally share living and public spaces into any substantial consideration.” (abdoumaliq) this is a social order conducive to high-rise and suburban living - the new town.

evolution
the former urban order has been around as long as cities have been around. the latter has been around since the automobile and the telephone. the former is dying - perceived as impoverished, dirty, and backward, while the latter is growing, and becoming our global culture of space. finding the designer of the former is like trying to find the chef that created the hamburger, while the latter is financed by developers and designed by architects.

*Simone, Abdoumaliq. City Life from Jakarta to Dakar. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Q2 :: islamic | christian

visual priority

The Islamic city privileges environment. Streets are narrow, opening only to courtyards inside buildings. The city is a fabric made up of a similar building type throughout. Surfaces outside the building are simple, while inside the courtyards are decorated with zelige - geometric designs and script that strive to achieve a vibration between our reality and the cosmos. The city is structured for meditation, which is key to the Islamic faith. Though minarets rising high above the urban fabric are easy to spot, as a visitor to an older Islamic city it is possible to be standing next to a great mosque without realizing it is there. 

The Christian city privileges spectacle. Long straight avenues create major axes that end in focal points (spatial nodes). Churches almost always enjoy a front plaza for gathering. Here the facade becomes a design that narrates stories and aggrandizes the entrance. The naves are continuations of urban axes, culminating in a pulpit, the closest space to God. Like the passion of Christ, linear procession is reinforced. The streets in a Christian city are wider than their Islamic counterparts, creating a space ripe for spectacle. This usually takes the form of procession (parade). These processions comprise spectacles, effigies, and costumes that narrate the Christian stories. A visitor to a Christian city quite easily sees the churches both from afar and through the streets. 

urban ordering

In the Christian city, streets are laid out first. As buildings fill out the blocks, courtyards are formed. These serve as semi-public or private outdoor spaces. The street is the public realm. Blocks that have not been built upon become public Squares. Courtyards are semi-public, sometimes turned private. Indoor spaces are private. 

In the Islamic city, private courtyards come first (riads). Buildings are created by laying out living spaces around the riad. As families grow, the house grows by laying out more rooms around the riad. The maze of  streets result from this spatial aggregation.

object | field

The Christian city exhibits far more object buildings than the Islamic city. This could stem from traditional spatial usage resulting from religious ideas. The Bible is made up of stories, with characters doing things. These lend themselves to depiction. The Quran is largely a book of prayers, that are meditative in cadence. The architecture that results from these different backgrounds exhibits these values spatially.

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. 

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.

rome :: (ex)pression

The paintings below of the lighting of the candles at Carnivale capture something about the street's ability to host a chaotic spectacle, when the street is itself an ordered space. Here self-similar buildings are built to the street edge to create a legible, active outdoor space that handles flows and hosts a wide variety of activities. To be in the chaotic mob or to be in a flat looking down - either way everyone is involved. The party permeates the town. 

[title unknown] - Giuseppe Gioachino Belli

Li Mocolleti - Ippolito Caffi

rome :: tension | compression

city design | urban ordering
Below is an example of both city design (top down) and urban ordering (bottom up) approaches. The classical city emerged in form from local rulesets, with exceptions, while the tension network was carved from the existing fabric. The catch here is that the tension network was acting on an emergent order, too - that of pilgrims moving between the votive churches. Sixtus merely reinforced what was already occurring by widening, possibly straightening the streets, and putting focal points at each church - the obelisks. Now one can walk through the streets of Rome and overhear tourists saying things like, "It's all about the obelisks." 

tension | compression
A Baroque spatial innovation was the long, straight street with a focal object on axis. This draws the eye up and out, thus the use of the term "tension". Classical Rome had nothing like this, so the opposite of "tension" is used - "compression". 

The Aurelian Wall (271AD) enclosing two systems*:

     1) Classical city in compression (yellow)

     2) Baroque network of churches and squares in tension (orange)

*Bacon, Edward. Design of Cities. New York: Penguin, 1974.

barcelona :: square grid

the eixample autonomously fills the plain between the old towns

The Eixample: a grid of chamfered square blocks, uniform in all orientations (isotropic). Each block is geometrically the same. 

The streets are hierarchical, so the grand avenues are wider, incorporating a strip for pedestrians and bikes on either side, a center lane for through traffic, and an outer lane on either side for local traffic. As a jogger and a biker, I am thankful these grand avenues exist. If no available park, they are the next best way of running or biking almost continuously without hindrance. The treelined strips are really pleasant even in winter. In the hot mediterranean summer, they provide a shaded path.

Gran Via provides tree lined strips for running, biking, walking      

The only time the blocks are different are when the extra width of the grand avenues takes away some of the block, or when a diagonal cuts through, creating odd-shaped blocks. This is enough to break the monotony, but the prevailing continuity of the grid is one of its main strengths.

barcelona :: formal | informal

When I first looked at a map of Ciutat Vella, Barcelona's old town, I filed it as informal, unplanned, medieval, etc. The more I learned about it, though, I came to realize it is a result of a process of many years of densification - in fact with a surprising level of underlying order. Here is a map of Barcino today with its original Roman grid overlaid. The red indicates straight avenues that were carved out of the urban fabric in the late 19th century. Notice how they are informed by the Cardo-Decumanus (darker black lines). 

This kind of organic change through the middle ages occurred all over the former Roman Empire, turning towns like Barcino into what we see below, and similarly Islamic cities like Aleppo and Damascus reclaimed their organic forms from the imposed Greek and Roman grids.

When urban blocks are too large for a human scale, transverse itineraries are created. This is the new road network seen below. But could we consider itineraries in a hierarchy - larger roads for autos, smaller roads for bikes and pedestrians? 

barcelona :: centuriation

*Adaptation of the Roman site to the topography

The Roman wall and defensive towers around Barcino, the 2000 year-old city that was the beginnings of Barcelona, are centered on a very special intersection. The cardo decumanus is ground zero for the centuriation of the lands in the area, and was likely set out in a spiritual siting and orienting event by the Roman survey team about 4 BC. It would have been located based on three decisions*:

1) determine the decumanus maximus by observing the direction of the rising sun on the day of the founding.

2) determine the line that would become the cardo maximus, in this case the line orthogonal with the coastline.

3) determine the course of the parallel streets to be laid out over time.

*Busquets, Joan. Barcelona: the urban evolution of a compact city, 2005.