book review of The Art of Building City

1. CAMILLO SITTE
THE ART OF BUILDING
CITIES
DONE BY
MADHURI & M.SNEHA
M.ARCH 1ST SEM

2. IDEA OF CAMILLO SITTE
 Straight lines are unnatural, do not follow terrain
 Need both art and function to make cities appealing
 Lack of urban public space in cities
 Isolated block of buildings & no unifying factors, boring
spaces

3. THE ART OF BUILDING CITIES
 ‘A city should be built to give its inhabitants security
and happiness.’
-Quoted by Sitte
 Book mainly focuses on details of public spaces, grouping of buildings
& streets that work

4. CH 1-The relationship Between Buildings,
Monuments and Public Squares
 Highlights the importance of the public square in
community life
 Contrasts the squares that work well from the past with
those that don’t from his present

5. CH 2-Open Centers of Public Places
 Explores the many examples of monuments and fountains
that are off to one side
 Also applies to churches
 Looks at both stone and emptiness and the way one relates
to the other

6. CH 3-The Enclosed Character of the Public Square
 The old plazas produce a collective harmonious effect
 there are many advantages to an arrangement of street
openings in the form of turbine arms

7. CH-4 The Form and Expanse of Public Squares
Two forms of square:
 Those that are deep
 Those that are wide
 Deep plazas are better facing a church of slender form
 City halls require broader, more expansive ones

8. CH-5 The Irregularity of Ancient Public Squares
 Disruptions in symmetry are not
unsightly
 On the contrary, they arouse our
interest as much as they appear
natural

9. CH-6 Groups of Public Squares
 The groupings of squares
 Wonderful to move from one enclosed, irregular square to
another
 Best example: Venice

10. CH-7 Arrangement of Public Squares in Northern
Europe
 In northern Europe churches
tend to sit more separately,
usually because they have been
surrounded by graveyards
 Often a large plaza in front to
set off the façade

11.  Every modern university or
group of public buildings laid
out around large and small
open spaces generally follows
some variant of the Wurzburg
Residence plan — a large
court or yard at the center
with smaller courts at either
side
CH-7 Arrangement of Public Squares in Northern
Europe

12. CH-8 The Artless and Prosaic Character of Modern
City Planning
 Open space that should serve everyone actually belongs to
the engineer and hygienist
 All of the art forms in town building have disappeared one
by one so that we have scarcely a memory of them left

13. CH-9 Modern Systems
 These systems accomplish nothing except a standardization
of street patterns
 They make no appeal to the sense of perception, for we can
see their features only on a map

14. CH-10 Modern Limitations on Art in City Planning
 Many of the old structural forms are simply out of the question for
modern builders
 Decorative construction without vital function is but temporary and of
questionable value
 Time makes inexorable changes in community life, and these changes
alter the original significance of architectural forms
 Intense human concentration has meant intense increase in land value
 Street after street has been cut through old districts, giving birth to
more and more city blocks

15. CH-11 Improved Modern Systems
 Our study has already indicated the obvious need for innovations to
overcome the effects of the ill-famed rectangular system
 Open plazas, where street openings draw in wind from every direction
(like the new City Hall Plaza of Vienna) feature beautiful wind spirals
throughout the year

16. THANK YOU
