School of Architecture Yale University

Spring 2011

Architecture 345b/4011b: Civic Art: An Introduction to Urban Design

Alan J. Plattus 317 A&A 432-2290 alan.plattus@yale.edu Elihu Rubin Andrei Harwell Lectures: Wednesdays 9:30-11:00AM Discussions: TBA
This course provides an introduction to the theory and practice of urban design within the context of the broader fields of urbanism and urban history. That is to say that the design of the built environment will be considered in relation to patterns and practices of urban life and culture, and as a response to historical transformations of the political, economic and technological forces that have shaped cities since their origins. The course will attempt to negotiate between the broader landscape suggested by these forces and the specifics of particular cities at critical moments in their development and the projects which represent the efforts of those cities and their designers to come to terms with the dynamics of urban change. Thus the lectures will include case studies of specific cities and exemplary urban design projects, as well as the general issues and principles of city design suggested by those case studies, including consideration of their implications for contemporary practice. The weekly classes will provide opportunities for the introduction of supplementary examples from the wider field of international urbanism, as well as introducing techniques of urban representation and analysis relevant to the assignments, and affording time for discussion of readings and lectures. Student work for graduate students in the course, in addition to responsibility for the weekly reading assignments, will be structured around analytic case studies of specific cities, including the documentation, analysis and critique of both a historical and a contemporary urban design project. Undergraduate students will undertake an initial assignment involving observation and analysis of urban space and a term project involving the documentation, analysis and critique of a contemporary urban design project.

Outline of Lectures and Readings Week 1 Lecture: Reading: Introduction Buildings, Cities, Lndscapes: The Field of Urban Design and its Representation Alan Colquhoun, The Superblock, in Essays in Architectural Criticism: Modern Architecture and Historical Change, Cambridge, 1981, pp. 83103. Peter Bosselman, Representation of Places: Reality and Realism in City Design, Berkeley, 1998, Part I, pp. 1-99.

I. Urban Space and Form in the Pre-industrial City Week 2 Lecture: Reading: The Classical City and Its Monuments: Civic Space, Public Infrastructure, and the Urban Empire Aristotle, The Politics, Book VII. Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, Book V. Paul Zucker, Town and Square: From the Agora to the Village Green, Cambridge, 1959, pp. 1-62. Harvard Project on the City, How to Build a City: Roman Operating System, in Mutations, Barcelona, 2001, pp. 10-23. Week 3 Lecture: Reading: The Renaissance City and the Perspective Field: From Medieval Enclave to Modern Urban Space Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, Book VIII. Dora Crouch, Spanish City Planning in North America, Cambridge, pp. 619. Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture, Cambridge, 1967, pp. 75-106. Edmund Bacon, The Design of Cities, New York, 1967, pp. 93-161. Week 4 Lecture: Reading: The Enlightenment City and the Urban Stage: Power, Performance and Public Life Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, Los Angeles, 1977, Chapters V-VI, pp. 121-145. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism, New York, 1974, Chapters 1-2, pp. 3-44. Michael Dennis, Court & Garden: From the French Hotel to the City of Modern Architecture, Cambridge, MA, 1986, Chapter 4, pp. 79-123. Edmund Bacon, The Design of Cities, New York, 1967, pp.170-215.

II. Critique and Planning in the Industrial City Week 5 Lecture: Reading: The Industrial City and Its Critics: Mapping Urban Pathologies Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, U.S.S.R., 1973, pp. 63-113. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, New York, 1958, Chapter VII, pp. 130-158. Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, Oxford, 1988, Chapter 2, pp. 13-46. Francoise Choay, The Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century, New York, 1969. Week 6 Lecture: Reading: The Modern Capital City and the Invention of Urbanism: Planning Urban Growth Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, in The Arcades Project, Cambridge, MA, 1999, pp. 3-13. Camillo Sitte, City Planning According to Artistic Principles (1889), New York, 1965, Chapters XI-XII, pp. 113-159. Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, New York, 1980, Chapter II, pp. 24-115. Donald J. Olsen, The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna, New Haven, 1986, pp. 7-85. Week 7 Lecture: Reading: The Capitalist City and Progressive Urbanism: Reforming Urban Life Frederick Law Olmsted, Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns, in Civilizing American Cities: A Selection of Frederick Law Olmsteds Writings on City Landscape, S.B. Sutton, ed., Cambridge, MA, 1971, pp. 52-91. Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, Oxford, 1988, Chapters 4-6, pp. 86-202. Werner Hegemann and Elbert Peets, The American Vitruvius: An Architects Handbook of Civic Art (1922), New York, 1985, Chapter VII, pp. 285-293.

Week 8 Lecture Reading: The Avant-garde City and Modernist Urbanism: Reinventing Urban Form Le Corbusier, The Radiant City(1933), New York, 1967, pp. 89-173. Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter (1941), New York, 1973, pp. 41-105. Alison Smithson, ed., The Team 10 Primer, Cambridge, MA, 1968, pp. 48-73. Constant, A Different City for a Different Life, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, Tom McDonough, ed. Cambridge, MA, pp. 95-101. Spring Break III. Spectacle and Sustainability in the Post-industrial City Week 9 Lecture: Reading: The Urban Turn: Architectural Theory and the Critique of Modernist Urbanism Jane Jacobs, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, Chap. 9, pp. 178-186. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge, 1960, Chaps. III-IV, pp. 46-117. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City, Cambridge, MA, 1978, Chapter 3, pp. 50-85. Tom Schumacher, Contextualism: Urban Ideals and Deformations, in Casabella, 1971, pp. 359-369. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, Cambridge, 1982, pp. 29-61. Anthony Vidler, The Third Typology, in Rational Architecture, Brussels, 1978, pp. 28-32. Week 10 Lecture: Reading: The Uses of the Past: Preservation, Spectacle and the New Urbanism Vincent Scully, The Architecture of Community, in The New Urbanism, Peter Katz, ed., New York, 1994, pp. 221-230. Leon Krier, Architecture: Choice or Fate, Chapter IV, pp. 84-119. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory, Cambridge, MA, 1994, pp. 421-476.

Week 11 Lecture: Reading: The Bilbao Effect: City of Enclaves and Icons Reyner Banham, Megastructures: Urban Futures of the Recent Past, London, 1976, Chapter 3, pp. 33-69. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattanism, New York, 1978, pp. 67-197. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, New York, 1990, Chapter 4, pp. 221-263. Margaret Crawford, The World in a Shopping Mall, in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, Michael Sorkin, ed., New York, 1992, pp. 3-30. Week 12 Lecture: Reading: The City and the World: Globalization and Mega-cities Rem Koolhaas, Whatever Happened to Urbanism? in S,M,L,XL, New York 1995, pp. 958-971. Edward J. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, Chapter 9, pp. 222-248. The Endless City, Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, eds. London, 2008, pp. 102-133. Week 13 Lecture: Reading: The Sustainable City and Region: Small Interventions in Large Systems Charles Waldheim, Landscape as Urbanism, in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Charles Waldheim, ed., New York, 2006, pp. Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton, The Regional City, Washington, DC, 2001, Part I, pp. 15-41. John Kaliski, The Present City and the Practice of City Design, in Everyday Urbanism, John Chase, Margaret Crawford and John Kaliski, eds., New York, 1999, pp. 88-109. Timothy Beatley, Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities, Washington D.C., 2000, Chapters 1-2, pp. 3-75.