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City Planning According to Artistic Principles,
Camillo Sitte.
Originally published in 1889, Camillo
Sitte intended his book as a guide for locating monuments
in public spaces, particularly Vienna, but what resulted
is a criticism of modern city planning that valued logic
and mathematical solutions over artistic considerations.
He looks to Italy and its Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque
spaces as ideals (especially the Piazza della Signoria in
Florence and Piazza San Marco in Venice), though he realizes
that simply copying historical city spaces into modern plans
would not work. Although he has an apparent affection of
these and other spaces, they were generated under much different
conditions than his own, so he tries to learn from their
principles and find appropriate solutions to specific area
of concern in Vienna.
He concludes the book with a plan
for reshaping a portion of the Austrian city; along the
way he generates a number of rules pertinent to public spaces,
such as not locating churches, public buildings, or monuments
in the middle of squares, and that nearby buildings shouldn't
compete with the important building of the square. Piazza
San Marco (on the cover, at left) is a telling example:
the Church of San Marco is definitely the important building
of the piazza, engaged with its surrounding rather than
isolated in the middle of the space, with the remaining
building subservient to the church via repetitious bays
and other means. While these rules may no longer apply over
100 years after the book's publication, they are still a
fitting way of reframing historical spaces as a way to improve
contemporary spaces in a fitting manner.
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