URBAN PATTERN
URBAN PATTERN
Contents
4. STREET PATTERN 6. Grid street plan 8. The American grid towns 15. Urban morphology
18. CITY PLANNING 20. Quadrangular blocks 28. Concentric circles 36. Radiating streets 48. Grid System
54. ORGANIC STRUCTURE 56. Form follows structure 58. Process of connection
Introduction
The concept of “order� has always been strictly related to the concept of normal, common, but when it’s application reaches extreme levels, is the order still considered normal or it becomes an eccentricity? The peculiar human drive towards order enables humans not only to create structures, but also to recognize, maintain and measure those structures more easily. Sometimes this necessity of having everything so well organized with a specific system reaches extreme levels. This book contains the stories, photos and maps of some cities with a sense of order and organization which is almost maniacal showing how thin could be the line between two opposite concept: order and eccentricity.
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STREET NETWORK
Grid street plan
Collection of historic towns lattice frames. Manuel de Sola Morales, 1977
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The grid plan, grid street plan or gridiron plan is a type of city plan in which streets run at right angles to each other, forming a grid. Many of the earliest cities in the United States, such as Boston, did not start with a grid system. However, even in the pre-revolutionary days some cities saw the benefits of such a layout. New Haven Colony, one of the earliest colonies in America, was designed with a tiny 9-square grid at its founding in 1638. On a grander scale, Philadelphia was designed on a rectilinear street grid in 1682; one of the first cities in North America to use a grid system. Arguably the most famous grid plan in history is the plan for New York City formulated in the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, a visionary proposal by the state legislature of New York for the development of most of Manhattan above Houston Street. An exception to the typical, uniform grid is the plan of Savannah, GA (1733). It is a composite, cellular city block consisting of four large corner blocks, four small blocks in between and a public square in the centre. Its cellular structure includes all the primary land uses of a neighborhood and has for that reason been called fractal. Its street configuration presages contemporary traffic calming techniques applied to uniform grids where certain selected streets become discontinuous or narrow thus discouraging through traffic.
text by id2125cl.pbworks.com
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The spirit of freedom in a “terra incognita” had to come up with solutions for habitation, and it is remarkable that – apart from ‘naturally’ grown cities – the grid design turned out to be popular in the new colonies. The grid was earlier identified as a Fourth Quadrant member in an ‘evolutionary’ family of basic graphical elements of city plans. The grid (city) does not have – at least in theory – a clear boundary, edge, or entry, since the grid is expandable in all directions. The argument was often brought forward that the rectilinear grid greatly simplified the task of surveying and fitted into the mental pattern of surveyors and civil engineers.
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text by quadralectics.wordpress.com
The American towns: can you guess the cities by their grids?
text by billypenn.com
Philadelphia’s almost entirely regular street grid didn’t happen by accident. Aside from a few arterial roadways and rogue neighborhood pathways, the city’s central core boasts streets so aligned that they look like they went to military school.
PHILADELPHIA
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text by www.smartcitiesdive.com
The square and rectangular blocks degrade in a number of ways, including some neighborhoods that have a more diagonal grid that creates triangular blocks and open spaces. Subsequent iterations include more curvilinear blocks are rectangular grid but with undulating curves, and some more organic layouts.
PORTLAND
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text by bigthink.com
The American grid system was codified by Thomas Jefferson and became the standard method to divide up America. Its imposition can be seen ‘in action’ in Detroit: originally oriented northeast-southwest on the riverfront, its later expansion was executed in line with the standard Jeffersonian grid, using Eight Mile Road as is baseline.
DETROIT
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Urban morphology – the study of change in the physical form and shape of settlements over time – focuses on patterns and processes of growth and change. Differences in street and block patterns, plot patterns, the arrangement of buildings within plots and the shapes of buildings create very different environments – the different patterns are commonly referred to as ‘urban tissue’.
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text by http://www.vasturaag.com
Urban morphology: famous patterns of iconic cities
Portland
San Francisco
New York
Irvine
London
New Dehli
Rome
Los Angeles
Amsterdam
Osaka
Atlanta
Paris
Boston
Dubai
Sacramento
Copenhagen
Savannah
CITY PLANNING
1. Quadrangular blocks
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photo by Kaspars Upmanis
Eixample is a district of the Spanish city of Barcelona, that lies between the old city and the surrounding suburb. The district was built as an extension (hence the name “Eixample”) when Barcelona started to grow during the middle of the 19th century. The 7.5 square km district is characterized by long straight streets, a strict grid pattern crossed by wide avenues, and octagonal city blocks - rectangular blocks with the corners cut off, which are distinctive for Barcelona. This was the visionary, pioneering design by Spanish urban planner Ildefons Cerdà.
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text by Kaushik Patowary
The Peculiar Architecture And Design of Eixample, Barcelona
text by www.amusingplanet.com
photo by Marton Mogyorosy
photo by Moemen Omara
photo by Vincenzo Maulucci
THE PRINCIPAL AIM OF THIS URBAN PLAN WAS TO OVERCOME SOCIAL PROBLEMS Cerda wanted housing blocks to be orientated NW-SE to ensure all apartments received sunshine during the day. Each district would be of twenty blocks, containing all the community shops and services, and each block were to have at least 800 square meters of gardens. Cerda’s idealized use of urban space was scarcely achieved. The blocks went up to much more than the planned heights, and in practice all the blocks have been enclosed, with very few inner gardens surviving. Most of the inner courtyards today are occupied by car parks, workshops and shopping centers. The streets were narrower - only one of the two diagonal avenues was carried out - the inhabitants were of a higher class than the mixed composition dreamed of by Cerdà. The grid pattern with its distinctive octagonal blocks, however, remains as a hallmark of Barcelona’s Eixample.
PARIS, FRANCE The street plan and distinctive appearance of central Paris, France is largely due to the vast public works program commissioned by Emperor NapolÊon III and directed by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, between 1853 and 1870.
2. Concentric circles
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photo by Nevver
Sun City was opened January 1, 1960, with five home models, a shopping center, a recreation center, and a golf course. Today, the idea of Sun Belt residential villages planned specifically for retired adults is a familiar one. But before the 1960s, the concept didn’t exist. Del Webb changed all that. He was a successful developer who saw that senior citizens needed more than just a place to live; many were in search of a sense of community and recreational opportunities, as well.
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text by interactive.wttw.com
The future retirement community of Sun City, Arizona
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Webb’s first experiment in a planned, age-restricted retirement community was the Phoenix suburb of Sun City, Arizona. The layout of Sun City was distinctive, with two circles of concentric streets; at the center of the circles, Webb placed commercial and institutional buildings. Del E. Webb expanded Sun City over the years, and his company went on to build other retirement communities in the Sun Belt; Sun City West was built in the late 1970s.
1. photo by Daily Overview
2. photo by Anthony Quigley
3. photo by Zweifel
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DALY CITY, CALIFORNIA Skyline Boulevard (officially State Route 35) runs through a residential neighborhood in the Westlake District of Daly City, California. Its endless rows of uniform homes were the inspiration for Malvina Reynolds’ 1962 folk song, “Little Boxes” .
3. Radiating streets
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photo by Archivio di Stato, Turin
Palmanova is a city built in 1593 during the late Renaissance period. This 9 pointed star fort, designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi, is an attempt to follow the ideals of an utopian city. It is a concentric city with the form of a star, with three nine-sided ring roads intersecting in the main military radiating streets.
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text by magazine.dooid.it
The nine pointed star fort
photo by placefromabove.altervista.org
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Palmanova, Italy
photo by worldurbanplanning.com
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Mexico City, Mexico
SUBSECTION OF THE VENUSTIANO CARRANZA NEIGHBORHOOD PLACED IN MEXICO CITY, MEXICO. The area shown is known as the Colonía Federal, a subsection of the Venustiano Carranza neighborhood in Mexico City, Mexico. Designed in 1925 by architect Raul Romero, this neighborhood was founded to house the residences of government workers, hence the name, “Federal”. Interest in the area that would become Colonía Federal began in 1908, the government acquired the land for the purposes of constructing a pantheon. However, due to its distance from the center of the city, the plans were abandoned, and the area remained idle until the 1920s. In 1924, interest sparked again as employees of the Office for Domestic Affairs began to settle in the area, known at the time as Cuatro Arboles (Four Trees). After the creation of a commission by government employees and subsequent pressure on the national government, then President of the Republic, Alvaro Obregon, appointed architect Raul Romero to design the new colonía. Through the collaboration of Romero and residents, the neighborhood was founded in 1925 based on post-revolutionary rationalist ideology. The neighborhood’s radiating octagonal pattern is unique in the city and across the world. It is believed that Romero gained inspiration from both the city of Palmanova, Italy and the Place Charles de Gaulle in Paris, France. Given the neighborhoods striking similarity to Palmanova, a city highly symbolic of Renaissance-era rationality and order, it is highly likely that Romero intended a similar symbolism, and wanted to create a highly ordered residence for workers of a government who’s prosperity was clear from a bird’s eye view.
text by cityplans.org
photo by worldurbanplanning.com
photo by euspaceimaging.com
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BOCA RATON, FLORIDA Residential development is seen in Boca Raton, Florida, USA. There are a number of intricate designs because many cities in the state contain master-planned communities, often built on top of waterways in the latter half of the twentieth century.
4. Grid plan
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photo by laughingsquid.com
Unlike cities like London and Paris whose roads are planned in a spoke and wheel layout, New York’s streets and avenues follow a mostly horizontal and vertical criss-cross direction. The three-man team who designed the street plan in 1807-1811 chose a neat system full of parallel avenues and streets crossing at right angles in an unbroken grid. The original rough landscape of the city was totally disregarded and would in fact completely disappear as the grid overspread the island. It was designed to be a totally new skeleton for the land, created with the idea of being conducive to future building and housing in the city.
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text by futuremaps.com
Horizontal and vertical criss-cross direction
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COMMISSIONERS’ PLAN OF 1811 As a result of New York’s geographic location and role in the early stages of the United States, its population was booming in the early 1800s. The commission created a plan which was accepted by the city and the state, now known as the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811. In it, said commissioners laid out a plan for the entire city north of Houston Street. They determined that there would be 12 main North-South avenues and a series of East-West perpendicular cross streets, with Broadway being the only angled road, crossing from the Northwestern corner of Manhattan to the Southeastern corner. The North-South corridors, known as avenues, were to be numbered from 1st Avenue on the eastern edge of the island to 12th Ave on the Westside. While the spacing of avenues was varied, cross streets were rigidly measured, with the original plan calling for streets all the way to 155th Street.
text by becomeanewyorker.com
photo by www.reddit.com
photo by jmeade_photo
photo by www.6sqft.com
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ORGANIC STRUCTURE
Form follows structure
Occupying and Connecting, Frei Otto, 2009
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The image above is provided by Otto in support of his argument that human spontaneous networks of urbanity follow similar patterns to ones formed in nature through the structures of leaves, insect colonies or soap bubbles. Since none of these networks mentioned is formally planned, their form is the outcome of an evolutionary process favouring systems with a minimal energy path or more accurately an energetic equilibrium. In a similar manner our own organic non-planned communities, such as medieval villages follow those patterns, which minimize energy expenditure. This may lead us to one of two possible conclusions: 1. we need not bother with urban planning, as the emergent self organization would take care of itself in the most efficient way, or 2. our planning should be informed by these processes and at best imitate their operations to ‘become one with nature’. This has essentially triggered an enormous interest toward a more qualitative yet empirical examination of processes of self- formation, but if we look at nature, we do need to understand that things and organism emerge because larger systems (ecosystems) are eventually responsible for what we call morphogenetic changes. Otto looks into various experimental apparatuses that take into consideration patterns and grids established by natural systems and processes of crystallization.
text and photo by keepitsur-real.com
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“The result was astonishing. Hardly anyone could identify the structural forms with more than 50% accuracy. Taking part in the quiz, I and my colleagues, who had been involved in selecting the examples, also made mistakes, e.g. the outline of a urban structure was confused with the foliage structure of a deciduous tree.”
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text by Frei Otto, Occupying and Connecting
Process of connection: structure’s system lines
DRAGONFLY’S WING
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MAPLE LEAF
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STONEWARE GLAZE
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ISTANBUL, ROAD NETWORK
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SOAP-BUBBLE RAFT
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photo by www.over-view.com
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Credits
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Faculty of Design and Art Bachelor in Design and Art – Major in Design Course: Project Visual Communication Course title: Order & Eccentricity Summer Semester 2020 Design by: Rebecca Morando Urban Pattern Supervision: Project leader: Prof. Antonino Benincasa Graphic Design: Prof. a.c. Emilio Grazzi Theories and languages of visual communication: Prof. Emanuela De Cecco Photography: Fabio Alessandro Fusco (pages 18-19) www.reddit.com (page 24) www.reddit.com (pages 26-27) www.over-view.com (pages 34-35) worldurbanplanning.com (page 44) www.theguardian.com (pages 46-47) Jeffrey Milstein (page 52) Format: 148 x 210 mm Fonts | Font Sizes & Leading: Body Text Univers LT Std 10/18 pt Caption Text Univers LT Std 8 pt Title Text Univers LT Std 30/48 pt
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Subtitle Text Univers LT Std 14/18 pt Layout Grid: 10 Column Grid Module proportion: 1.419 : 1 CPL | Character per line - Body Text: 65 characters including spaces
