{"id":42203,"date":"2022-04-30T21:01:39","date_gmt":"2022-04-30T18:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/architecturallife.com\/?p=42203"},"modified":"2022-04-30T21:01:39","modified_gmt":"2022-04-30T18:01:39","slug":"townscape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sribno.com\/architecturallife\/townscape\/","title":{"rendered":"Townscape"},"content":{"rendered":"

The townscape movement emerged after the Second World War as a way of looking at how towns grew organically and how planners should respect the visual richness produced by this organic growth. Although primarily a British movement, it had a wide influence as an alternative to the modernist attitude to looking at towns and redeveloping them.<\/p>\n

Like many generations before them the architects of the modern movement had clear ideas of their perfect city. For most it was a city built from scratch, full of modernist towers and planned in zones\u2014an area for work, another for play, another for housing. For most, it was also an ideal in which traffic was separated from pedestrians, a place of urban freeways and soaring overpasses.<\/p>\n

Reconstruction<\/h3>\n

After the Second World War architects and planners had their chance to put these theories into practice. If not entire cities, large swathes of towns and big new estates began to rise up where wartime bombing had given builders carte blanche. For many this was a brave new world in which towns, most of which had grown haphazardly over the centuries, could be properly planned for the first time.<\/p>\n

This outlook resulted in the transformation of many cities\u2014the 1950s\u2019 redevelopment of central Boston with its urban freeways, for example, or, in Britain, the construction of vast housing estates around cities such as Birmingham, not to mention the logical, grid- based planning of new towns such as Milton Keynes.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026 if at the end of it all the city appears dull, uninteresting and soulless, then it is not fulfilling itself. It has failed. The fire has been laid but nobody has put a match to it.\u201d Gordon Cullen, The Concise Townscape<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Learning from the past<\/h3>\n

But not everyone saw urban planning in this way. For some, the old haphazard way in which towns had grown, with their mixture of architectural styles and often narrow, winding streets, was a good thing. It was visually stimulating and indicative of a culturally rich past. Perhaps surprisingly, one place where this alternative view was voiced was Britain\u2019s Architectural Review\u2014a leading journal that had often championed modernism. In 1944, with the prospect of the end of the war at last realistic, its editor, Ivor de Wolfe, called for a more diverse, pluralistic approach to town planning.<\/p>\n

Ivor de Wolfe and his colleague Gordon Cullen saw that the general public would not take kindly to a \u201cnew Jerusalem, all open space and white concrete.\u201d Planners should instead study what was good about our existing towns and cities. They should remember that the ideals of the 19th-century picturesque movement (see The picturesque), in which architects and gardeners placed buildings in landscapes with an eye on their artistic effect, could also be applied to urban settings. In other words, townscape was as important as landscape.<\/p>\n

Explaining townscape<\/h3>\n

In articles in the Architectural Review and in books such as Townscape and The Concise Townscape, Cullen outlined these ideas. He spent a lot of time and space analyzing the buildings, streets, lanes and squares of towns, old and new, to demonstrate how they worked and what was good about them visually. With the aid of photographs and his own clear and evocative drawings, he showed how our experiences of urban spaces change as we move through them.<\/p>\n

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Urban features<\/h4>\n

Townscape identifies many features like those in the view of Oxford (below) that make city scenery distinctive. Here are a few of the most important. <\/em><\/p>\n