History of Urban Design

By Temple Ligon
August 2, 2013

Chasing a 75-storey commission, American architect I. M. Pei was presenting his architectural competition entry ideas in Houston in the mid-1970s when he told the selection committee his emphasis lay with the street level, not the shaft of the building or its top. He said, and everybody in the room agreed, that when visitors toured American cities, they tended to remember individual buildings, while when they toured European cities, they remembered the urban spaces defined by buildings.

In America, then, it’s the buildings; and in Europe, the spaces.

Pei’s building site was an entire downtown Houston block with a buildable dimension of 200 ft. X 200 ft. Pei chamfered considerably one corner to create a significant urban space in an otherwise dull downtown streetscape and won the commission.

Pei married architecture and urban design.

Urban design is the consideration of all the buildings and site characteristics in the context of an addition or alteration to the site. The biggest deterrent to good urban design is combined low design talent and high land value.  Developers are usually not interested in leaving parts of a building site empty in the name of urban design. The more a building floor plan foot print can cover a site while still holding to ideal dimensions to the windows on the periphery and the elevators in the core, the more occupied square feet per floor come to market, which delivers the more rent revenue for the long haul.

The office building on the southwest corner of Hampton and Main doesn’t appear that it was designed with the corner in mind. Across the street, both the Marriott Hotel and the former SCANA headquarters come to the corner at Hampton and Main in a site-conscious foot print. Sylvan’s has the same claim to the site. It, too, knows it’s on the corner. The open piazza in front of the Columbia Museum of Art replaced the Belk Building, which had a corner-conscious brick veneer over the old Mimnaugh’s. But the bank building, now Wells Fargo at 1441 Main Street, never really knew it was on the corner – not in an urban design sense, anyway.

The building at 1441 Main was designed to work as an efficient speculative office building, and as such it has always worked well, but there is no good reason the north side of the building, which faces Hampton, is a match for the south side, which faces a parking lot.

To appreciate this narrow point of view is to understand the basics of urban design and to know a little about the history of urban design.

The design of cities as we know them began roughly when democracy began. There was no need to gather downtown before there was a vote. Before the vote, the individual had no say over what was happening, so there was no need to gather to talk about it.

The Greeks of the 5th century before the Christian Era started experiments with democracy, and such experiments called for a town center as part of the agora, which was a market of sorts where ideas and opinions and even gossip could be exchanged.

The Greeks put satellite cities on the west coast of Turkey, and two of the most famous are Priene and Miletus, both with rigid grid street plans, just like the 1786 layout of Columbia.

What the Greeks did with their grids was pretty much forgotten by the Romans. Take another look at the street plan of Rome around the 2C, about the time of the height of the Roman Empire when the City of Rome had a population of something more than 800,000. There is no extended straight street and there is no grid. And the design of urban space is no more sophisticated than the southwest corner of Hampton and Main.

After the Fall of Rome, the Dark Ages really were dark, and light didn’t fall on the design of cities until the early phases of the Renaissance, around 1410. That’s when the first great architect of the Renaissance, Brunelleschi, rediscovered single-point perspective. He learned how to depict a three-dimensional subject, in this case the Cathedral Baptistry in Florence, on a two-dimensional plane. Once he could draw the depth of an elongated straight street, such things returned to cities along with the grid and urban space.

Concurrent with Brunelleschi but unknown to him was the development of what became the Forbidden City in Beijing, which was put together along a single-point perspective of an elongated straight street.

Back in Italy, coming out of the Dark Ages, developing through the Middle Ages, getting almost all the attention in the Renaissance, and finally achieving completion under Napoleon in the early 1800s was St. Mark’s Square in Venice. St. Mark’s gets high marks as the world’s best and most beautiful urban space. Probably apochryphal, there’s a story about a young Englishman in the early 19C on his grand tour when he tries to meet a knockout in St. Mark’s. He returns to London with her on his mind. He addresses a letter: To the most beautiful girl in the world, in the world’s most beautiful town square, in the world’s most beautiful city. She got the letter.

And so it goes.

The history of urban design begins 2,500 years ago, and comes through the 19C to the United States and to contemporary times with all kinds of examples of design done right. Now that we have the Bull Street property before us, a quick recall of the history of urban design is in order.

The Wren Institute of Urban Research is host at the Capital City Club for just such a lecture by me on Friday night, August 9 at six o’clock.

 

Temple Ligon: [email protected]

 

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