Читать книгу Resilience - Sandrine Robert - Страница 22

Toward the end of the 19th century, the Austrian architect Camillo Sitte, in Der Städtebau – published in English as City Planning According to Artistic Principles – emphasized the esthetic qualities of the medieval town, “rediscovered” by the Romantic movement (Sitte 1890). In Germany, Sitte’s contemporaries, the architect Joseph Stübben and the art historian Albert Erich Brinckmann, highlighted the interest of studying ancient city plans in order to identify models of successful urban arrangements (Stübben 1890; Brinckmann 1908). In England, Raymond Unwin demonstrated that ancient urban forms provided a valuable source of models for town development (Unwin 1981). In 1926, Lavedan aimed to lay scientific foundations for this approach in his seminal essay Qu’est-ce que l’urbanisme. The publication was accompanied by a selection of ancient, medieval and modern plans; the way in which certain forms, such as the checkerboard, appeared again and again was seen to be particularly notable (Lavedan 1926a, 1926b, 1941). This approach, labeled “culturalist” by the architectural historian Françoise Choay (1965), emphasized ancient city layouts with a certain esthetic value, giving them the potential to be used as models in developing an art of urban design.

In order to establish his history of urban architecture as a science, Lavedan needed to define a position for it among all of the other disciplines for which the town was an object of interest in the early 20th century (geography, sociology, economics, history, etc.). He chose to focus on one aspect of urban studies which, in his view, had been largely ignored in other disciplines: the notion of the plan from the perspective of material elements (road traces, arrangement and specialization of different districts, design of public squares and parks). However, given the proximity of this approach to geography, Lavedan chose to focus only on urban plans with a certain esthetic value, considered from an artistic perspective, in order to “establish, with respect to related disciplines, the possibility of an independent discipline in the history of urban architecture, written from a purely artistic and esthetic perspective” (Lavedan 1926a, p. 7)³². It was plans of this type that Lavedan selected for publication in later collections (Lavedan 1926b, 1941).