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Camillo Sitte: Artistic City Planning

Camillo Sitte was an Austrian architect and city planner in the late 19th century. In his 1889 book "City Planning According to Artistic Principles", he criticized the grid layouts used in many cities and advocated for an approach focused on aesthetics and human experience. He emphasized curving streets, well-proportioned public squares enclosed by buildings, and consideration of how monuments and buildings shape civic spaces. Sitte's work brought attention to the art of city planning and importance of beauty and function in urban design.

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935 views25 pages

Camillo Sitte: Artistic City Planning

Camillo Sitte was an Austrian architect and city planner in the late 19th century. In his 1889 book "City Planning According to Artistic Principles", he criticized the grid layouts used in many cities and advocated for an approach focused on aesthetics and human experience. He emphasized curving streets, well-proportioned public squares enclosed by buildings, and consideration of how monuments and buildings shape civic spaces. Sitte's work brought attention to the art of city planning and importance of beauty and function in urban design.

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PinkyMaeVillarosaQuiñones
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© © All Rights Reserved
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CAMILLO SITTE artistic city planning

CAMILLO SITTE
born April 17, 1843, Vienna, Austria—died Nov. 16, 1903, Vienna

• Austrian architect
• painter
• city planning theoretician
• traveled around the towns of Europe
and tried to identify aspects that made
towns feel warm and welcoming
• Architecture was a process of
culturization for him.
• Sitte received a lot of attention in 1889
with the publication of his book Der
Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen
Grundsätzen

English title: "City Planning According to


Artistic Principles"
City Planning According to Artistic Principles

• written over 120 years ago


• published in 1889
• seen as the first publication to
discuss the concept of Urban
Planning
• concerned about the increasing
use of grid layouts for streets in
the development of cities
CAMILLO SITTE

Sitte defined three (3) types of public plaza based upon


their intended use:
1.) the palace plaza, 2.) the cathedral plaza 3.) and the
town hall plaza
Palazzo Del Duomo in Pisa

• Sitte cites as an exemplar religious plaza


Piazza Della Signoria in Firenze

The city's heart, a square


dominated by the 14th-century
crenellated tower of the Palazzo
Vecchio.
CAMILLO SITTE'S IDEAS

• straight lines are unnatural, do


not follow terrain
• need both art and function to
make cities appealing
• lack of urban public space in
cities
• isolated block of buildings, and
no unifying factors
• the plaza should define an
area of suitable proportions
that people could comprehend
and understand the extent of
the space
CAMILLO SITTE'S IDEAS
• Roman spaces worked and
still work, and it is with the
past’s understanding of
urban space that is
fundamental in the
understanding of the
problem with modern city
planning.

• “That the center of plazas


be kept free”.
CAMILLO SITTE'S IDEAS

• The grid represented a critical


failure in town planning.
• The ‘grid’ is a service orientated
approach.
• The result leads to unused,
unwanted space in the city that is
normally deemed as suitable
public open space.
Sitte proposed to
follow the design
objectives associated with
the streets and buildings
that shaped medieval
cities. He advocated
curving or irregular street
alignments to provide ever-
changing vistas. He
pointed out the advantages
of what came to be know
as "turbine squares", civic
spaces served by streets
entering in such a way as
to resemble a pinwheel in
plan.
PLAZA

Some of his plaza principles were:


• Public squares should be enclosed (streets not function as the
enclosure) by buildings;
• Buildings & monuments located along side of plaza, not the center;
• Plaza shape unsymetrical (irregular plaza shapes stimulate interest);
• Plaza center open (craze for isolated buildings a foolish fad);
• Streets enter at angles;
• Avoid plazas open to
too much traffic;
• From any point in
plaza, only one single
view out of plaza
possible at a time
(hence only a single
interruption of the
enclosure as a
whole);
• A plaza too small
does not give due
Siena City Plan with Piazza del Campo effect to monumental Piazza del Campo
buildings / If too
large, even the
mightiest seem
dwarfed in relation to
it.
The ideal street must form STREETS
an enclosed unit. One feels at
ease in a space where the
gaze cannot be lost in infinity.
Such a principle opposes long
straight streets except in the
case of hilly cities (such as
San Francisco) where the rise
or drop of the street on the hill
in effect creates the
enclosure. As shown in the
photos, sometimes the hills
are so steep that the street
becomes stairs and the
enclosed sense of pedestrian
scale becomes complete.
PARKS

Parks should be hidden gardens, connected with others, guarded from


the wind by the enclosing facades of high buildings (from whose windows
many eyes act as protective watchers). Public parks today are usually
surrounded by well traveled streets that take away the sense of enclosure,
except where the streets disappear from the view of the park user due to
large park size, tree cover, and indulating topography. Golden Gate Park in
San Francisco, Balboa Park in San Diego and Central Park in New York
being examples of the latter.
ARTISTIC PRINCIPLES
• criticized the modern city planning that valued logic and
mathematical solutions over artistic considerations.
• considered contemporary gridiron subdivisions as monotonous and
leading to the maximizing of land exploitation.
 

• considered the proportions of town squares, monuments, and
churches.
ARTISTIC PRINCIPLES
Buildings, Monuments, & Plazas
Emphasized that the center of the plaza should be vacant.
ARTISTIC PRINCIPLES
Plazas: Size & Shape
• DEEP TYPE
• WIDE TYPE

Piazza S. Croce
ARTISTIC PRINCIPLES

Streets and visual succession


It is necessary to emphasize that
straight streets cannot offer such
scenery.

Rue des Pierres


CITY PLANNING
THE GRIDIRON SYSTEM
THE RADIAL SYSTEM
THE TRIANGULAR SYSTEM

*All three are concerned exclusively with the arrangement of street


patterns, and hence their intention is from the very start a purely
technical one.
CITY PLANNING
THE GRIDIRON SYSTEM
• The most frequently applied
THE GRIDIRON SYSTEM
CITY PLANNING
THE RADIAL SYSTEM
CITY PLANNING
THE TRIANGULAR SYSTEM
“Today nobody is concerned with city planning as an art — only
as a technical problem. When, as a result, the artistic effect in no
way lives up to our expectations, we are left bewildered and
helpless; nevertheless, in dealing with the next project it is again
treated wholly from the technical point of view, as if it were the
layout of a railroad in which artistic questions are not involved.”
(Sitte, p.223) Camillo Sitte “City Planning According to Artistic
Principles.”

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