reading 5
Read the excerpt from Camillo Sitte’s book City Planning According to Artistic Principles, “Improvements to the Modern System” – the question to consider is simple – what is the “modern system” and what “improvements” is Sitte proposing? Then you should browse the excerpt on Raymond Unwin’s thoughts on Sitte – what does he praise and what does he criticize in Sitte’s ideas? Finally read the excerpt from Unwin’s manual on urban design, Town Planning in Practice, titled “Of Formal and Informal Beauty” – what is Unwin’s via latiora?
2-Please be specific to the article and don’t be general.
3-please use only my resources. Also the main thing that you need to look for is the main argument. what you think is important that the author think is important? This is not a summary paper.
4-Here is what the prof. say and want:
A response paper is not a summary, rather it should make an argument concerning the issues of the class meeting.
5-please use the same citation that you use in order ID 884332
6- please use quotation from the article.
Excerpts from Raymond Unwin on Camillo Sitte:
Camillo Sitte deduces from the fact that in most such medieval towns the irregularities appear to have so much system and art in them that there must have been much more of conscious planning and designing in the laying out of these towns than we have been accustomed to think. This may well, be the case, and that the general lines in their irregularity and want of symmetry suggest natural growth may at least to some extent be due to the fact that probably the setting out of the buildings was done largely on the ground by the eye, and not transferred from a paper plan by means of an accurate survey with careful alignment; but whether the designing was conscious, as Sitte and his school think, or the unconscious result of the influence of the guiding tradition in which the whole building profession was steeped, is very difficult to determine.
52
… since the publication in that year of Camillo Sitte’s book, “Der Stadtebau,” the French translation ot which, under the title of “L’Art de batir les Villes,” was published in 1902, there has been a marked change in the character of German town planning.
Camillo Sitte, by a careful study of plans of medieval towns, came to the conclusion that these were designed on lines which not only provided completely for the convenience of traffic, but were in accordance with the artistic principles upon which the beauty of towns must depend.
Impressed by the picturesque and beautiful results which sprang from devious lines and varying widths of streets, and from irregular places planned with roads entering them at odd angles, the Germans are now seeking to reproduce these, and to consciously design along the same irregular lines. It is, indeed, maintained by Sitte and others that much of the irregularity characteristic of the medieval town which we have been apt to consider the result of natural and unconsidered growth was, on the contrary, deliberately planned by the ancients in accordance with artistic principles then well understood. Be this as it may, there can be little doubt that the true artistic tradition in the Middle Ages was so steadily maintained and so widely prevalent as to constitute almost an instinct in the people which would lead them in dealing with irregularities arising from natural growth to do just the right thing in each case.
100-104
While, however, the importance of most of the principles which Camillo Sitte deduced from his study of medieval towns may be as great as the modern German school thinks, it does seem to me that they are in danger of regarding these principles as the only ones of great importance; nor do they appear to realise how far it is possible to comply with these principles in designs based upon more regular lines. Some of the irregularity in their work appears to be introduced for its own sake, and if not aimlessly, at least without adequate reason; the result being that many of their more recent plans lack any sense of framework or largeness of design at all in scale with the area dealt with.
If we examine the plan of Rothenburg, we see how, especially in the original old town, the scale of the principal places and streets is sufficiently large for them to dominate the town, and to provide for it-a frame and centre points which render the whole really simple and easily comprehensible to the stranger, but in any such plan as that of Pforzheim one feels the same simplicity is lacking.
112
Camillo Sitte and those who follow him argue that the necessity chiefly arose owing to the particular geometrical type of planning which was in vogue previous to his day, and that a freer type of planning, in which greater consideration could be shown for the existing conditions of the site for existing roadways and property boundaries, would render needless very much of the rearrangement of properties which the geometrical school of town planning found so necessary. It is further argued that the consideration of these existing conditions would lead to a type of plan having in it something of the interest and variety which characterise the towns of the Middle Ages.
113
“Before the architect can properly weigh the arguments on both sides of this and, indeed, many other questions which town planning raises, he must think out for himself the abstract question of formalism as opposed to informalism, and must adopt for his own guidance some theory by which he can weigh the relative importance of carrying our some symmetrical design, and, other hand, of maintaining existing characteristics of the site with which he is dealing.”
114