The Art of Building Cities

Camillo Sitte's empirical study of urban space showing that irregularity in public squares helps create life and informal atmosphere

Extracted from this book

Claims (24)

Buildings of recent decades (1940-90) are noticeably missing in these fifteen properties, and this is intentional due to 20th-century architectural theories
Historical-critical claim that modern architecture consciously abandoned understanding and use of the fifteen properties, making contemporary buildings poor illustrations of living structure
Contrast, instead of separating things, brings them together when used to help centers become alive; contrast that fails to create deeper feeling is merely accidental or eye-catching
Claim distinguishing good contrast (Shaker schoolroom, which unifies) from bad contrast (glaring lobby staircase, which separates)
Echoes depend most deeply on the angles and families of angles prevalent in the design, not on superficial shape similarity; the deepest structural relationships create the family resemblance
Claim that echoes work through deep structural geometry—arrangement patterns like pairs of rectangles, diamonds containing circles—rather than mere visual similarity
Every strong center is made of many other strong centers—a multiplicity of centers at different levels which engages us; the concept is recursive, not referring to one grand center
Recursive definition of strong centers: they are composed of and supported by other strong centers at multiple scales
Good shape is built up from the simplest elementary figures; what seem like complex centers are made of simpler centers which are also alive, and these simpler centers give the complex ones their life
Claim that even apparently organic or floral designs derive their life from geometrically simple components (triangles, rhombuses, hexagons) that allow complex cross-relationships
Gradients are nearly non-existent in the modern environment because naive standardization, mass-production, and regulation of sizes all work against their formation
Claim that one of the most powerful forms of life has been almost removed from the environment by industrial production norms
It is not true that outward simplicity creates inner calm; it is only inner simplicity, true simplicity of heart, which creates it
Claim that the wild Norwegian dragon carving has inner calm despite complexity, because everything essential has been left and nothing extraneous remains—distinguishing inner from outer simplicity
It is the field of centers which is primary, not these fifteen properties, and the properties are simply aspects of the field which help us understand concretely how the field works
Meta-theoretical claim that the fifteen properties are derivative from the deeper reality of the field of centers; the properties are pedagogical tools rather than fundamental
Levels of scale is not a mechanical thing requiring merely a wide range of sizes; it arises properly only when each center gives life to the next one and the detail actually does something to create life in larger centers
Clarification that levels of scale fails when detail is merely present but not doing anything—as in machine-made doors with superficially many panels that have no real life
Life occurs in space not as an attribute of living organisms but as an attribute of space itself
Radical ontological claim that life is a property of spatial configuration itself, not limited to biological organisms; the degree of life depends on the coherence of centers
Local symmetries act as a kind of glue which holds space together; the more glue there is, the more the space is one, solid, unified, coherent—and the symmetrical segments must overlap for the glue to be effective
Interpretation of the experimental finding: overlapping local symmetries are the hidden structural feature that creates perceived wholeness
Not-separateness is finally perhaps the most important property of all—without it even a center with the other fourteen properties can be strangely separate, lonely, too egocentric
Claim that connectedness to surroundings is the culminating property; without it, beautiful centers shout 'look at me' rather than healing
Overall symmetry in a system, by itself, is not a strong source of life or wholeness; local symmetries create coherence while overall symmetry is often naive and even brutal
Claim distinguishing the deadening effect of large-scale neoclassicist symmetry from the vitalizing effect of numerous overlapping local symmetries
Roughness can never be consciously or deliberately created; to make a thing live, its roughness must be the product of egolessness, the product of no will
Claim that genuine roughness comes from abandon and freedom, not from contrived effort to appear interesting; artificial roughness is merely contrived
Roughness is an essential structural feature without which a thing cannot be whole; it is not a residue of technically inferior culture or hand-craft inaccuracy
Claim that morphological roughness arises from paying attention to what matters most and letting go of what matters less, making it more precise than rigid regularity
The boundary needs to be of the same order of magnitude as the center which is being bounded; a two-inch border cannot hold a three-foot field
Structural rule that effective boundaries must be surprisingly large compared to what they bound, e.g., arcade as building boundary, lips as mouth boundary
The fifteen properties are not independent; they overlap, and each property is partly defined in terms of the other fifteen properties
Meta-claim about the logical structure of the properties: the more carefully each is defined, the more it relies on the others, revealing their common origin in the field of centers
The fifteen properties are the glue through which space is able to be unified; they are the substance of the life which can exist in a system
Metaphorical claim that the properties are not merely characteristics we like but the actual substance binding space into living unity
The fifteen properties arise because they are the principal ways in which centers can be strengthened by other centers
Central interpretive claim of the chapter: the fifteen properties are not independent observations but all reduce to ways that centers help each other come to life in space
The fifteen properties define the enormous family of systems, among all possible systems, which have life in them
Claim that the properties collectively characterize the morphologically complex but recognizable family of all living spatial systems across cultures, climates, and technologies spanning 3500 years
The precise number fifteen is not significant, but the order of magnitude of the number is significant—there are not five and not a hundred, but about fifteen
Meta-claim that there is a natural limit to the number of combinatorially distinct ways centers can help each other; it is not easy to think up new effects different from these fifteen
The seemingly rough arrangement is more precise because it comes from a much more careful guarding of the essential centers in the design
Paradoxical claim that roughness represents higher precision than rigid regularity because it optimizes what matters most rather than what is easiest to measure
To have levels of scale, the jumps between different scales must not be too great; a jump of 2000:1 is far too great to form a nice chain of levels; jumps of roughly 2:1 to 4:1 are most effective
Quantitative constraint on the levels of scale property: centers are most helpful when size ratios are moderate; centers less than one-tenth the size of a larger one are less likely to help it
What is really happening in living repetition is not repetition but oscillation—like a wave: one, then the other, then the one again
Deep reinterpretation of the alternating repetition property as oscillation rather than mere repetition with variation

Findings (3)

Number of local symmetries correlates almost perfectly with perceived cognitive coherence across 35 strip patterns
The key experimental finding: the number of subsymmetries (locally symmetrical connected segments) in a pattern predicts its perceived coherence; most coherent strips have 9 subsymmetries, least coherent have 5; the measure correlates almost perfectly with combined experimental rank order
Perceived coherence of patterns is an objective measure, not idiosyncratic or subjective—people agree on relative coherence regardless of experimental task
Finding that relative coherence rankings remain constant across different people and across different cognitive processing tasks (description, memorization, tachistoscopic recognition), establishing coherence as an objective feature of cognitive processing
Weighted symmetry measure (by segment length) correlates less well with coherence than unweighted local symmetry count
Finding that giving extra points to longer symmetrical segments reduces correlation with experimentally measured coherence, showing large symmetries contribute little extra; what matters more is the number of smaller local symmetries

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

Chapters (1)

chapter

Chapter 5: Fifteen Fundamental Properties
cites
The chapter that catalogs and analyzes the fifteen recurrent geometric properties found in systems that have life, connecting them to the deeper theory of centers and wholeness

Thinkers (1)

thinker

Camillo Sitte
authored
Austrian architect and urban theorist cited for his empirical study showing that irregularity in public squares helps create life and informal atmosphere