Читать книгу Resilience. Persistence and Change in Landscape Forms онлайн

44 страница из 59

Among urban planners, there was an idea that certain types of town plans provided a means of combatting aging and decay. Michel Parent, museum conservator of relief plans, writing in 1948, considered that the knowledge of ancient could be seen as an “applied science of curation”:

The past can serve the future in all cases, on the condition that we do not make a tyrant of it: firstly, it highlights tried-and-tested postulates or permanent laws which are helpful in finding solutions to new problems; secondly, in specific cases, awareness of a pathological evolution of a city or district enables us to distinguish between healthy and sick parts, providing urban planners with genuine remedies.ssss1(Parent 1948, p. 282)

These approaches place a particular emphasis on one time of plan: that of planned cities, considered in this case of works of art.

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.