Architectural Context Part 3: Camillo Sitte
Architectural Context Part 2: Perception
In architectural theory, the existence of certain relationships between the city as a whole and its constituent parts were primarily highlighted by Leon Battista Alberti. In his book “On the Art of Buildings in Ten Books” Alberti raised the following question:” If the city is like some large house and the house in turn like some small city, cannot the varied parts of the house … be considered miniature buildings?” ¹ Thus, suggesting the existence of a correlation between the city as a whole and buildings as its parts. This relationship was also underlined by Giambattista Nolli in his diagrammatic depiction of Rome in “Pianta Grande di Roma” (Figure below).
Where Nolli used the figure-ground diagram as a medium to represent sensitive and complex connections between public spaces and private buildings within the city of Rome. However, Camillo Sitte was among the first ones to systematically analyze the city not as a collection of individual building masses but rather as a series of figure-ground relationships that form a bigger whole. In his book “The Art of Building Cities” Sitte analyzed the relationships between plazas and the buildings that framed them. He drew parallels between cities of antiquity and cities of the first half of the twentieth century arguing that modern cities are lacking a great deal of qualities that antique cities used to celebrate. He argues that in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance there still existed a vital and functional use of the town square for public life and also in connection to this a strong relationship between the square and surrounding public buildings. Meanwhile, modern-day plazas are used as parking lots, and many artistic and compositional relationships between them and their buildings vanished completely.² Most importantly during antiquity, from the standpoint of public life, there was little difference between enclosed buildings and public plazas.³ Sitte highlights that sacrifices, games, tragedies and other dramatic performances took place in the open in front of the temples or uncovered hypaethral temples. Furthermore, even the ancient houses were merely a courtyard open to the sky and encircled by a number of rooms of various sizes.⁴ Meaning that in the ancient cities, the inside was not considered to be fundamentally different from the outside. Sitte suggested that urban fabric was considered to be one uninterrupted whole where plazas were continuations of buildings. Solids and voids had a central role in Sitte’s vocabulary for analyzing cities. This viewpoint allowed him to think of spatial configurations among Greek and Roman cities as a succession of figure-ground relations. By imposing the condition of multistability onto these relationships, Sitte reversed the traditional reading of cities allowing plazas to be seen as figures. For instance, in his analysis of Modena Cathedral (Figure below)
Sitte points out that individual facades of the cathedral have determined the formation of their adjacent squares, in order to render each facade as effective as possible. Three formed plazas and tree town tableaux, each one a closed harmonious entity yet each one different and all derived from a single cathedral.⁵ Each noteworthy façade gets its own plaza, and each plaza obtains its own unique façade. The building façades in Sitte’s work can be read as analogies to the edges of Rubin’s vase. Facades belong to both plazas and buildings at the same time. When buildings are viewed as figures, facades perform their primary function as an envelope. When plazas are viewed as figures, multiple facades are joined in a unified arrangement that encloses the plaza.⁶ Sitte examination develops further into spatial configurations where multiple plazas are located in close proximity and thus create groupings of voids. By decreasing the density of buildings within the urban fabric, these groupings of plazas further contribute to the creation of regions of multistability within the city. It becomes uncertain what should be read as a figure and what should be read as ground since neither the voids nor the solids are dominating the visual field. The figure below illustrates how plaza groupings in the city of Lucca: Piazza Grande Napoleone (1), Piazza del Giglio (2), Via del Duomo (3), Piazza S.Giovanni (4), Piazza S.Martino (5) and Piazza Antelminelli (6) dissolve the solidity of urban fabric when analyzed as a set of figure-ground relations.
Another important aspect Sitte highlights concerning the cities of antiquity is the placement of important sculptures and fountains within the plazas. He argued that fountains and monuments of old communities would not be placed in the midst of the deep roots but rather on passive islands that lie in between the lines of communication and traffic.⁷ Thus, the placement and form of the important monuments indicated the intensity of traffic flows within the plaza. These observations in combination with directions of the streets entering the plaza could allow reading the layouts of plazas as pictorial diagrams of traffic flows (Figure below).
All case studies done by Sitte were important steps in understanding the city as a larger whole with intricate interrelations between its parts. Where the relationships between plazas, buildings, and facades generate concentrated architectural context. However, Sitte conducted and communicated the study essentially through architectural plans, and one of the distinctive properties of architectural drawings is the reduction of complex spatial systems into simple two-dimensional diagrams. Sitte’s vocabulary for describing contextual relationships consisted of simple geometric concepts. Plazas and buildings are read as two-dimensional figures, streets are treated as axes, and important monuments are treated as independent points. Through defining the geometric grammar that governs the relationships between these components, Sitte attempted to establish a simple formalized language for the analysis of architectural context. These two-dimensional compositional assemblies were the initial steps of formulating an understanding of architectural context.
Although quite in-depth and comprehensive in nature, Sitte’s method does not allow fully capture the extent of factors contributing to the formation of the urban environment. For instance, when one desires to transfer principles derived from these two-dimensional studies into three-dimensional space a great deal of questions remain uncovered. It is far from obvious that a three-dimensional form would not yield crucial information about spatial factors that greatly influence the contextual relationships within the city. Another vital aspect of Sitte’s study was the focus on specific conditions within the city often without addressing the larger framework that constituted their creation. The scale Sitte chose for his study was well fitted for studying a multitude of local configurations (plazas, squares, temples) however it did not reflect on how these fragments of the city together formed a continuous whole. It largely remained an “archaeological” study of fragments. Archaeological in nature since for Sitte the cities and plazas in question were artefacts glazed in their current form and were not subject to change. His study omitted another dimension, i.e., the temporal dimension of a city.
References
[1]: Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Buildings in Ten Books (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988),
[2]: Camillo Sitte, The Birth of Modern City Planning, trans. George R. Colins and Christiane Crasemann Collins (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 154.
[3]: Camillo Sitte, The Birth of Modern City Planning, trans. George R. Colins and Christiane Crasemann Collins (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 143.
[4]: Camillo Sitte, The Birth of Modern City Planning, trans. George R. Colins and Christiane Crasemann Collins (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 143.
[5]: Camillo Sitte, The Birth of Modern City Planning, trans. George R. Colins and Christiane Crasemann Collins (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 193.
[6]: Camillo Sitte, The Birth of Modern City Planning, trans. George R. Colins and Christiane Crasemann Collins (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 179.
[7]: Camillo Sitte, The Birth of Modern City Planning, trans. George R. Colins and Christiane Crasemann Collins (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 160.
