Camillo Sitte

Camillo Sitte From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Camillo Sitte

Camillo Sitte (17 April 1843 – 16 November 1903 in Vienna) was a noted Austrian architect, painter and city planning theoretician with great influence and authority of the development of urban construction planning and regulation in Europe. Contents [hide]

1 Life 2 City Planning According to Artistic Principles (1889) 3 Books by him 4 Literature 5 External links

[edit]Life Camillo Sitte was an art historian and architect. He 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"). The richly illustrated book pointed out that the urban room around the experiencing man should be the leading motif of urban planning, thus turning away from the pragmatic, hygienic planning procedures of the time. Sitte emphasized the creation of an irregular urban structure, spacious plazas, enhanced by monuments and other aesthetic elements.

Sitte founded the Camillo Sitte Lehranstalt and the Camillo Sitte Gasse in Vienna, and also the magazine Städtebau in 1904. Camillo Sitte was the son of the architect Franz Sitte (1808–79) and the father of the architect Siegfried Sitte (1876–1945). Sitte is also credited with having invented the cul-de-sac.[citation needed]

[edit]City

Planning According to Artistic Principles (1889)

Fountain of Hygieia in Olomouc (in Czech: kašna Hygie), Camillo Sitte (plan) and Karel Lenhart (statue)

The work of Sitte is not exactly a criticism of architectural form, it is more precisely an aesthetic criticism of the nineteenth century's end urbanism. Mainly an urban planning theory book, it has a deep influence in architecture, as the two disciplines are deeply intertwined. It was also highly successful in its time. Between 1889 and 1922 it was edited five times. It was translated into French in 1902, but was not translated into English until 1945. For Sitte, the most important is not the architectural shape or form of each building, but the inherent creative quality of urban space, the whole as much more than the sum of its parts. Sitte contended that many urban planners had neglected to consider the vertical dimension of planning, instead focusing too much on paper, and that this approach hindered the efficacy of planning in an aesthetically conscious manner. Athens and the ancient Greekspaces, like the agora and the forum are his preferred examples of good urban spaces. He makes a study of the spatial structures of the cities, squares, monuments, and confronts the living beauty and creativity of the most ancient ones with the sterility of the new cities. In general:

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Sitte makes an analysis based on sensitivity aesthetics and is not concerned with the historical circumstances that generated such forms. Urbanism is to be lived today and thus must be judged according to today's needs and aesthetics;

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Criticizes the regular and obsessive order of the new squares, confronting it with the irregularity of the medieval city. "A square should be seen as a room: it should form an enclosed space";

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Criticizes the isolated placement of Churches and monuments, and confronts it with how monuments were formerly presented to the viewer;

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With examples from Italy, Austria and Germany, he defines a square typology, an "enclosed squares' system of the ancient times". He studies from a psychological viewpoint the perception of the proportions between the monuments and its surroundings, opposing the fashion of very wide streets and squares, and the dogma of orthogonality and symmetry;

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He fears that Urbanism would have become a mere technical task without any artistic involvement. He acknowledges an antagonism between the picturesque and the pragmatic, and states that these restrain the works of the artists. The building of another Acropole would become impossible, not only because of the financial means, but also the lack of the basic artistic generating thought;

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He stated that an urban planner should not be too concerned with the small design. The city should only take care of the general streets and structure, while the rest would be left to private initiative, just as in ancient cities;

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He Provides an example of his theories at the end of one of his books in the form of the redesign of Vienna's Ring, a circular avenue.

His theories were widely influential for many practiticians, like Karl Henrici and Theodor Fischer. Modernist movements rejected these thoughts and Le Corbusier is known for his energetic dismissals of the work. Nevertheless, his work is often used and cited as a criticism of the Modernist movement, its importance reemerging in the post-modernist movement of the late sixties.

[edit]Books

by him

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City Planning According to Artistic Principles, 1889

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The Birth of Modern City Planning. Dover Publications, 2006, ISBN 978-0-486-45118-3

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Gesamtausgabe. Schriften und Projekte. Hrsg. v. Klaus Semsroth, Michael Mönninger und Christine Crasemann-Collins. 6 Bände. Böhlau, Wien 2003–2007

[edit]Literature 

Karin Wilhelm, Detlef Jessen-Klingenberg (Hrsg.): Formationen der Stadt. Camillo Sitte weitergelesen (= Bauwelt Fundamente; Bd. 132). Birkhäuser, Basel; Bauverlag, Gütersloh u. a. 2006,ISBN 3-7643-7152-8

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George R. Collins & Christiane Crasemann Collins. Camillo Sitte and the Birth of Modern City Planning. Random House: New York, 1965.

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Michael Mönninger: Vom Ornament zum Nationalkunstwerk. Zur Kunst- und Architekturtheorie Camillo Sittes. Vieweg, Wiesbaden 1998, ISBN 3-528-02423-2

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Leif Jerram: From Page to Policy: Camillo Sitte and Planning Practice in Munich. Manchester Papers in Economic and Social History, No. 57, September 2007. ISSN 1753-7762. An introduction to Sitte, alongside an analysis of how his ideas were actually used. Available online at http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/subjectareas/history/research/manchesterpapers/ .

Camillo Sitte (1843-1903): City Building According to Artistic Principles

First published as Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen in 1889

A précis by Rabaz Khoshnaw

Sitte’s book “City Building According to Artistic Principles” established basic principles of urban design. He strongly criticized the modern city planning that valued logic and mathematical solutions over artistic considerations. He considered contemporary gridiron subdivisions as monotonous and leading to the maximizing of land exploitation. He considered the proportions of town squares, monuments, and churches. Planning should be a creative art and the interplay between public buildings and open spaces was paramount to good planning.

The relationship between buildings, monuments and their plazas Sitte emphasized that the centre of plazas must remain permanently vacant, simply because of the desire to leave the line of vision free and not blocked by monuments. Otherwise, in his opinion, not only would such monuments interfere with the view of buildings but the buildings would present the worst type of background for the monuments.

He also criticized the way of building churches or public buildings in the centre of the plazas, because they spoiled the view of the plaza and there would be no adequate space distance to see the façade of the building very well. Simply he called this as representing a lack of judgment.

Proportional relationship between the buildings façade and the dimensions of the squares In a very large square the mutual relationship between the plaza and its surrounding buildings dissolves completely, and they hardly impress one as a city plaza. However, he admitted that this kind of proper relation is a very uncertain matter, since every thing appears on the subjective viewpoint and not at all on how the plaza appears in plan, a point which is often overlooked.

The size and shape of plazas According to Sitte’s classification there are two categories of city squares, the deep type and wide type, and to know whether a plaza is deep or wide the observer needs to stand opposite the major building that dominates the whole lay out. Thus Piazza S.Croce in Florence should be regarded as a deep plaza since all of it is components are designed according to their relationship to the main façade. So the classification is not about dimensions but is dependent on the relationship between the plaza and its surroundings.

Streets and visual succession Streets in old cities have grown through the gradual development of the main routes of communication leading from countryside to their organic centres, therefore avoiding an infinite perspective view by the frequent displacing of the axis. An examples for this is the Rue des Pierres in Bruges leading from the Grand Place to the cathedral of Saint-Sauveur. There is nothing of the uniformity of modern streets and all the façades pass in succession before the eye. Another example is Breite Strasse at Lubeck where a steeple dominates the entire street. For the pedestrians walking along the street the steeple is brought out at one moment. Afterwards it disappears again and the structure of the church never dominates the view because of the curving street path. It is necessary to emphasize that straight streets cannot offer such scenery. Therefore the lack of this kind of charming route and visual succession is one of the reasons which has lead to the lack of picturesque effects in our modern urban plans.

Modern cities

In Sitte’s view the main problem of contemporary planning was the ignoring of aesthetic values and the absence of concern with city planning as an art. It was increasingly treated as only a technical problem with the straight lines and right angles of the gridiron characterising cities, and therefore urban life. For example the modern boulevard, often miles long, seems boring even in the most beautiful surroundings, simply because it is unnatural. In contemporary city planning Sitte states that there are three major methods. They are the gridiron system, the radial system, and the triangular system. Artistically speaking not one of them is of any interest, for in their veins pulses not a single drop of artistic blood. A network of streets always serves only the purposes of communication, never of art, while the demands of art do not necessarily run contrary to the dictates of modern living (traffic, hygiene, etc.).

Plazas in the modern system What artistic value is there in an open plaza when it is congested with foliage? So, as one of the basic principles of design trees should not be an obstruction to the line of sight. Sitte criticized the modern public garden which was surrounded by open streets. It was exposed to wind and weather and was coated with street dust. Formerly there were private gardens that belonged to palaces and were secluded from traffic, and such gardens fulfilled their hygienic purpose despite their small size. Thus all these open modern parks failed completely in their hygienic purpose and the fundamental reason for this was the block system of planning. The relationship between the built-up and open spaces is exactly reversed. Formerly the empty spaces (streets and plazas) had an entity and impact. In the contemporary planning process of laying out buildings the left-over irregular wedges of plots often become plazas!

Artistic limitation of modern city planning Sitte’s analysis developed in response to the following contextual factors. Commercial activity had increasingly abandoned public open space. Public affairs were discussed in the daily paper instead of plaza. Economic growth led to the regular parcelling of lots based on purely economic consideration. Works of art were straying increasingly from streets and plazas into the art cages of the museums. And above all the enormous size to which the larger cities grew led to a consequent inflation in the size of streets and squares.

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.