Urban places are more than just buildings- its the spaces between buildings and the way the buildings relate to those spaces that matters
When people think of what makes a city, town or village they often think of the buildings and their architectural style. Are they brutalist, Georgian, Victorian or modern? Do you like that building or the other? Often little thought is given to the urban structure within which the buildings are sat, or to the relationship between the buildings and the spaces between one and the next building. The eye is drawn to the buildings, so people think of buildings. But what we actually perceive is mostly guided by the relationship between the different buildings and the spaces between them.
This can be seen by putting the same building in a different context. Take the entrance lodge to the Blackwell Tunnel. This is an attractive gothic structure from the turn of the 20th century, shown in the 1930’s below- and in the video you have hopefully just watched.
The same scene in 2020:
CLICK HERE for a Streetview tour
The building hasn’t changed but it feels different thanks to the urban structure around it being wholly different.
Any successful urban environment is generally built around a set of structural principles that ensure the place works for people. Pre-car cities are built around these principles, as are good modern developments. However, in the half century or so after the second Great War those principles were abandoned. Many of the hated and failed buildings of that era are sat in urban structures which break these rules, urban structures that differ from the historic city. Those failed urban places are often blamed on the appearance of the dated modern concrete buildings. Yet repairing or replacing the buildings alone usually won’t fix the problems with the structure.
If we site modern buildings within the urban structure of the pre-car town we can often achieve the character that peoples like in historic towns, without recreating pastiche impressions of buildings of the past. Poundbury in Dorset is Prince Charles’ pet project. He has successfully recreated a pre-car market town that is much loved by its residents, but critiqued by some for its pastiche architecture. Imagine if instead Poundbury’s pastiche buildings were scattered around the urban expressways and roundabouts of Harlow new town, it probably wouldn’t be so well liked.
However, if Poundbury’s urban structure was occupied by modern buildings using the same building envelopes- By that I mean the same heights, footprints, setbacks (distance between the front of the building and the street) and with building fronts that interfaced with the street the same way, then it would feel strikingly similar and function in a similar way to the place with pastiche buildings. How do we know this? Well it has been tried. That is the approach adopted by the Dutch in many of their schemes. Alternatively, consider Federation Square in Melbourne shown below. Although it is surrounded by ultra-modern buildings it has the same structural qualities and dimensions as a pre-car market square in Poundbury. So it works in a similar way for people.
Federation Square: CLICK HERE for a Streetview tour
Poundbury: CLICK HERE for a Streetview tour
The buildings frame the space and the space is of a size such that humans feel comfortable in it. It is the relationship between the between the buildings and the space that is responsible for the character, not the architecture of the individual buildings.
Done here? Time for section 3.
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