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The Straight and The Curved:Design Alternatives: Leon Battista Alberti

The document discusses the history of straight versus curved urban design. It notes that before the modern period, curved or irregular city forms were not typically appreciated as a rational choice. Later, philosophers like Aristotle and architects like Alberti saw advantages to curved designs from both defensive and health standpoints. By the 18th century, theorists began openly endorsing non-geometric urban design over rigid Renaissance ideals of uniformity. Some notable later examples incorporating curves include the industrial model villages of Port Sunlight and Bournville.

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Mushfiq Humam
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59 views4 pages

The Straight and The Curved:Design Alternatives: Leon Battista Alberti

The document discusses the history of straight versus curved urban design. It notes that before the modern period, curved or irregular city forms were not typically appreciated as a rational choice. Later, philosophers like Aristotle and architects like Alberti saw advantages to curved designs from both defensive and health standpoints. By the 18th century, theorists began openly endorsing non-geometric urban design over rigid Renaissance ideals of uniformity. Some notable later examples incorporating curves include the industrial model villages of Port Sunlight and Bournville.

Uploaded by

Mushfiq Humam
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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THE STRAIGHT AND THE CURVED:DESIGN ALTERNATIVES

• Before the modern period, it is hard to find evidence that the "organic" city form was
appreciated as a rational choice.
• Aristotle paused to think on the matter. Always curious about the facts of things as they are,
he saw advantages in the irregularity of old towns in military terms, while he championed
the new-style urbanism of Hippodamus of Miletus.
• Alberti, more of an empiricist than his reputation as the arch-theorist of early Renaissance
architecture would allow, revived the defensive argument, and amplified it to support cul-
de-sacs and alleyways. In De re aedificatoria, he wrote
The ancients in all towns were for having some intricate ways and turn-again
streets, without any passage through them, that if an enemy comes into them, he Leon Battista Alberti
may be at a loss, and be in confusion and suspense; or if he pushes on daringly,
may be easily destroyed.
• There were health benefits to keeping streets narrow and turned. Alberti observed, that the widening of streets
"made the city hotter, and therefore less healthy." In narrow winding streets the air is more bracing, breezes and
some sun will reach all the houses, and the force of "stormy blasts" will be broken.
• It seems clear from this passage and others that Alberti, though he favoured in principle a geometrically
organized city form, responded with appreciation to familiar north Italian cities, many of which did not originate
from, or had since lost the definition of, a Roman grid.
ORIGINS OF THE PLANNED PICTURESQUE

• late medieval cities were far from being unguided in their appearance has been a
documented thesis of recent scholarship. We have ample knowledge of the existence
of vigorously enforced building codes, and regulations that were intended to insure
the integrity of public spaces
• Siena, for one instance, showed a determination to complete and polish the more
informal physical arrangements of its early history, and to codify their effects . The city
council was at pains in 1346 to insist that

it redounds to the beauty of the city of Siena and to the satisfaction of almost all
people of the same city that any edifices that are to be made anew anywhere along
the public thoroughfares ... proceed in line with the existent buildings, and one
building not stand out beyond another, but they shall be disposed and arranged
equally so as to be of greatest beauty for the city.
• whereas its neighbour and mighty rival Florence had begun to campaign for streets
that were "pulchrae, amplae et rectae"-beautiful, wide and straight in proto-
Renaissance solicitude for visual clarity, and also in the hope of re-establishing the Siena (Italy)
orthogonal lines of Roman Florentia, Siena cherished the aesthetic of Gothic curves.
• The decisive swing toward an open, reasoned endorsement of non-geometric urban
design came in the later 18th century. The revolt was against Renaissance theory and
practice-the belief in the undeviating street prospect and the measured , uniform
order of the street layout . Descartes summed up the case against them:

Often there is less perfection in works composed of several separate pieces and
made by different masters, than in those at which only one person has worked ....
So it is that these old cities, originally only villages, have become through the
passage of time great towns, and are usually so badly proportioned in comparison
with those orderly towns which an engineer designs at will on some plain,
although the buildings, taken separately, often display as much art as those of the
planned towns or even more.

• In town-planning proper, anti-Renaissance incursions that stand out prominently are of


two kinds: combinations of curved urban setting sand landscaping, as at Bath; and
streets defiantly lax in terms of the Classical canon, with jogs and unmatched
elevations, John Nash's project for Regent Street being the best-known instance.

London's Regent' s Park and


Regent Street.
• Early industrial model villages, aspiring to entrap the virtues of the traditional English village along with its form, were
tried out first in the wool centres of Yorkshire. The choice of a picturesque layout for workers' housing remains rare in
the 19th century .
• Two late examples, sponsored by philanthropic employers, are famous. Port Sunlight, near Liverpool, goes back to
1887; it was built from 1892onward. Bournville near Birmingham, the Cadbury brothers, the chocolate
manufacturers, starts a few years later; there, the curve was only gradually introduced.
• It was here that the "superblock" idea was first introduced , that is, the idea of having houses turn their back on
main streets and look inward toward a green from which traffic is altogether excluded.

Port Sunlight (England), soap manufacturer View of Bournemouth (England)

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