Architect Paul Murrain's Presentation at the Movement for Israeli Urbanism Density Workshop

1. How urbanism learns
-and what that teaches us
Paul Murrain
Shenkar College of Engineering and
Design
Thursday May 7th 2009

2. There is no such thing as ‘good design’

3. “The measure of any great civilisation is in its towns and cities and a
measure of a city‟s greatness is to be found in the quality of its public
spaces, its parks and its squares”
John Ruskin.
Atlanta
The death of a collective
consciousness

4. Urbanism.
‘The design and construction of setting meant to support a civic realm’
William Westfall
Civic origin from civis ( citizen)
City origin from civis (citizen)
Civil origin from civis (citizen)
Civilise. Bring to an advanced stage of social development
Citizen an inhabitant of a Town or City
Based on the latin civitas
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5. “We have tried to make the fact of
being in private alone with ourselves
and family an end in itself. To know
oneself has become and end in itself
instead of a means through which one
knows the world.”
Richard Sennett. The Fall of Public Man

6. ‘The current crisis of disorder’
Jack Robertson,
„ Such is the residue of modern design in a culture that does not provide a larger
and governing vision in which to fit all the objects it produces; a culture gripped by a
devastating schizophrenia that finds no mediation between specific things and their
real or implied framework. We make very few successful places, only things.‟

7. What on earth is this? Utter desperation to be original
A combination of arrogance and ignorance
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8. „Cafes and bars will no longer be the fungus that eats up the pavements
of Paris‟ Corbusier 1923
„To have a new vision of the future it has always first been necessary to
have a new vision of the past. „ Theodore Zeldin
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9. Beware the new dinosaurs.
Gigantic and virtually extinct already
Urbanism is not giganticism.
How many are better than what was
there before?

11. Dense, tall, corporate
In the city but not of the city
Urban location yet anti-urban
in every way

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14. Melrose Arch Johannesburg SA
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15. Melrose Arch Phase One

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18. Melrose Arch.
Apartments over offices over shops

25. DIVERSITY
ADAPTABILITY
CONTINUITY OF CULTURE
EVER CHANGING YET
NEVER CHANGING
URBAN AND GREEN
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE
VIBRANT AND QUIET
URBANISM FOR ALL TIME
THE OPPOSITE OF FASHION
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30. Characteristics of the Industrial Economy
Derek Kemp

31. EMPLOYMENT AND URBAN FORM. THE RISE OF THE POST INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY
.
Derek Kemp
WE ARE WHERE WE ARE
What’s our agenda for one planet living? It must form the basis for assessing our
strategic urban design. If not, scrap the whole idea.

32. Skills, Risk and Certainty
Certainty lies in anti-urbanism. The skills lie there too.
We have condemned the traditional City as chaos and trained all
those who built its constituent parts, to fragment and isolate.
Each profession has become its own audience.
We have lost the knowledge
What is even worse ?
So many of those engaged in
‘Town Making’ don’t even know
they’ve lost the knowledge
Why has that knowledge gone?
Because we refuse to engage
the past
How cities are.

33. All we did was change
the rules
So change them back !
But they have to be RULES
Not sympathetic magic
Charleston S.C.

34. Industrialisation and Urbanisation
are NOT the same thing

35. ‘Nothing Gained From Overcrowding’
Confusion between density and overcrowding?
1872
Seven Dials London
2009

36. DENSITY AND AMENITY GO TOGETHER
Density makes the amenity successful
The amenity makes the density irrelevant

38. Town or Country?
Town and Country
“Along with the preservation of the
countryside the redemption of the
town must be attempted. The two
are interdependent; one rises to
beauty or falls to ruin with the other.
It is true to say that only through the
rehabilitation of the town can the
countryside be truly saved, thqt the
true way to save the countryside is to
build true urban towns”
Thomas Sharp
Thomas Sharp

39. Sherford
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40. BRE Sustainable Assessment

41. BRE Sustainable Assessment

43. UK Urban Task Force
„Towards an Urban Renaissance‟
A mixed use integrated neighbourhood.

45. Workplaces as good neighbours

49. Why do we build?
“Neighbourhoods towns and cities were
invented to facilitate exchange.
Exchange of information, friendship,
material goods, culture, insights, skills
and also the exchange of emotional,
psychological and spiritual support
For a truly sustainable environment we
must maximise this exchange while
minimising the travel necessary to do
it.”
David Engwicht. Towards an Eco-city
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50. ‘To the Vitruvian triad of commodity,
firmness and delight we postulate the
addition of a fourth ideal: restituitas
or restitution, restoration,
reinstatement; where the act of
building enhances its immediate and
the global environment in an
ecological as well as a visual sense’
Green Vitruvius

51. Layers of change Urban Assembly Kit
Stewart Brand Ray Gindroz
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52. Piazza Navona. Rome

53. The social logic of space. How settlements ARE. (the deformed wheel)

54. “The grid is the fundamental element of the urban buzz”
Oxford Street average of 9.8 changes of direction to arrive there.

55. The Traditional Structure of settlements. It is as natural as
a sand dune ecosystem. How Cities Are as opposed to half
baked „innovative theories.‟

57. Spatial Integration. Connecting space
Natural movement of the human species

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59. Local places -punctuations in the global system.
Harlow North
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60. Time, Grain and
incremental change.
Making the grain
of adaptation
small enough
The places where economies
Hoxton Square
innovate, thrive, live, work and play.

61. The grain of adaptation; a living city

62. The grain of adaptation

63. The Grain of adaptation ?

64. ‘We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence is not an act, but a habit.’
-Aristotle
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