Class notes
Architecture & the City, lecture part, notes
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Complete notes of all lectures from first year first quartile course Architecture & the City, TU/e. Images included.
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Lecture 0City
- A large human settlement
- Extensive systems for housing, transport, sanitation, utilities, land use,
communication
- Roughly half of human population now lives in cities
- Most populated city – Shanghai
- The density of cities facilitates interaction between people, government,
organizations and businesses
Characteristics of cities
Kostof – family resemblance
A. “cities are places where a certain energized crowding of people takes place. This
has nothing to do with absolute size or with absolute numbers: it has to do with
settlement density”
B. “Cities come in clusters. A town never exists unaccompanied by other towns. It is
therefore inevitably locked in an urban system, an urban hierarchy”
Braudel – town only exists in relation to some urban system that is lower in
the hierarchy → it has to dominate an empire
C. “Cities are places that have some physical circumscription, whether material or
symbolic, to separate those who belong in the urban order from those who do
not. Even without any physical circumscription, there is a legal perimeter within
which restrictions and privileges apply.”
D. “Cities are places where there is a specialized differentiation of work‐where
people are priests or craftsmen or soldiers…. “
E. “wealth is not equally distributed among the citizens”
F. “Places favoured by a source of income ‐trade, intensive agriculture and the
possibility of surplus food, a physical resource like a metal or a spring, a
geomorphic resource like a natural harbour, or a human resource like a king.”
G. “Cities are places that must rely on written records. It is through writing that they
will tally their goods, put down the laws that will govern the community and
establish title to property‐ which is extremely important, because in the final
analysis a city rests on a construct of ownership.”
H. “Cities are places that are intimately engaged with their countryside, that have a
territory that feeds them and which they protect and provide services for. Often
the city‐form is locked into rural systems of land division.”
I. “Cities are places distinguished by some kind of monumental definition, that is,
where the fabric is more than a blanket of residences. This means a set of public
buildings that give the city scale, and the citizenry landmarks of a common
identity. Technological monuments are also important.”
SUMMARY OF CHARACTERISTICS
1. Crowding of people (not about absolute size but about density)
2. Clusters (urban hierarchy, dominating lower settlements)
3. Physical circumscription (material/symbolic, at least legal perimeter)
4. Differentiation of work
1
, 5. Wealth not equally distributed
6. Source of income – trade
7. Written records
8. Engaged with countryside (territory feeds them)
9. Landmark, monumental definition
Aristotle’s definition of the Polis in his Politics:
- Human beings – creatures who live in a city
- A city = a partnership of the free
- A city = a partnership of citizens in a system of government
- City comes into being for the sake of living, but it exists for the sake of living “well”
…
Architecture
- A discipline = an activity guided by rules an knowledge
- Both art and science
- Both intuitive and academic
- Nikolaus Pevsner – “the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a
view to aesthetic appeal”
- Paul Shepheard – Making landscapes (they take a long time to develop, can
accommodate many uses, transform as you occupy them) X Making machines (only
one use, get thrown away when they break)
- Arche tecton = chief carpenter
- Marcus Vitruvius Pollio – Architecture is made up of various disciplines and an
architect has to have various forms of knowledge
o One of the first things people discussed
o Architect+mechanical+civil+military engineer
- Le Corbusier – Architecture is a game of experts. Correctly played, a magnificent
game of volumes assembled under the light.
o Architecture goes beyond utilitarian needs
- Ivor Smith
Lecture 1
Concept
Concept = a word/image/ mathematical formula/entity together with its meaning with which
we try to understand some relationship between us and our environment through inferential
relations with other concepts
Concept = a word with its meaning
- Concepts help establish order in showing us how we might understand something
- They help us see things that we would otherwise not notice
A concept in design
- A word or description (word/image) with which we illustrate the essence of our future
design
- A good design must be assessed based on three criteria – utilitas, firmitas, venustas
2
,Sketch
- A drawing made by hand only using a pencil
- Parti sketch – sketch containing concept, against which all our design decisions need
to be tested
Diagram
- Schematic representation of information organized in a way
- The layered approach – distinguishing several layers in each landscape
- Relationship diagram with key – prioritizing connections between rooms and spaces
- Bubble diagram
- Circulation diagram
Situation drawing
Gordon Cullen, Townscapes, 1961, London, serial vision:
- Combination of a situation drawing that explains sketches of movement through a
city
3
, - Traditional situation drawing – putting the design into a context
Plan
- A drawing to scale of a horizontal section through a building taken at a given level
Abstraction
= an idea arrived not through observation but through a process of reasoning
(something that has an unclear relationship with observative reality)
Abstraction expresses a characteristic, quality or attribute that something possesses but
which we cannot experience in that form
An instrument of thought with which we try to understand our relationship with the world
around us
A reduction of something into something else which refers to its original
o Plan
o Elevation = how a thing looks from side (also abstraction)
o Section (lateral & longitudinal)
o Axonometric = method for visually representing three dimensional objects in
two dimensions
o Isometric (special kind of axonometric), axes x,y,z always 120 degrees from
one another
- Çatal Hüyük, Turkey, 6500 BC -might be the oldest known plan of a city (People
used holes in the roof to access their homes and the roofs themselves as streets and
squares)
4
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