The Concise Townscape

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Not quite so brazenly cheeky asillusion is the Metaphor which onlyhints that This is That, but there isgreat scope here for the power ofsuggestion. In the three examplesshown on this opening the standardof suggestion and its aptness is notvery penetrating, I'm afraid, but atleast they convey the idea that theartillery shells surrounding a warmemorial might have been bollards,that a huge circular structure when Until such happy day arrives when people in the street throw theircaps in the air at the sight of a planner (the volume of sardonic laughteris the measure of your deprivation) as they now do for footballers andpop singers, a holding operation in two parts will be necessary. Cullen was born in Calverley, Pudsey, near Leeds, Yorkshire, England. He studied architecture at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, the present day University of Westminster, and subsequently worked as a draughtsman in various architects' offices including that of Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton, but he never qualified or practised as an architect. In enclosure the eye reacts to thefact of being completely surrounded.The reaction is static: once an en­closure is entered, the scene remainsthe same as you walk across it andout of it, where a new scene is sud­denly revealed. Closure, on the otherhand, is the creation of a break inthe street which, whilst containing the In articles in the Architectural Review and in books such as Townscape and The Concise Townscape, Cullen outlined these ideas. He spent a lot of time and space analyzing the buildings, streets, lanes and squares of towns, old and new, to demonstrate how they worked and what was good about them visually. With the aid of photographs and his own clear and evocative drawings, he showed how our experiences of urban spaces change as we move through them.

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grandiose vistaOf the gambits used to exploit Hereand There the vista is, of course, oneof the most popular. The Grandiosevista does just what the whitewashedwall did in Scotland, p. 34, but in itsown expensive way. It links you, inthe foreground at Versailles, to theremote landscape, thus producing asense of power or omnipresence. The term ‘townscape’ dates from a 1949 AR article by Hastings. Over the years that followed, Cullen’s artistic work for the magazine - including the monthly Townscape column and many other articles - provided rich material for the dense assemblage of photos, plans and free-hand illustrations that characterised the book. The collective gathered around Hastings sought to revive the picturesque, an aesthetic mode of regarding the world that was cultivated in the 18th century by an elite with a taste for foreign travel. While often associated with landscape, as Richard Williams points out in his study on the origins of townscape, the picturesque has also long been accepted as a mode of perceiving the city, with its visual power acting as a means of assuaging urban anxieties. The illumination halfway up thestructure draws our attention outwardand upward. What is this mystery ofthe commonplace? At least it takesour eyes off our toe-caps. Even themost ordinary means can be harnessedto the task of arousing in us the senseof otherness through the use of light,through pointing the finger. It is notthe thing pointed out but the evoca­tive act of pointing that arouses theemotions.Firstly we have to rid ourselves of the thought that the excitementand drama that we seek can be born automatically out of the scientificresearch and solutions arrived at by the technical man (or the technicalhalf of the brain). We naturally accept these solutions, but are notentirely bound by them. In fact we cannot be entirely bound by thembecause the scientific solution is based on the best that can be made of vastness of the sky and imbues thelandscape with its scale, detachmentand austerity, rather as the appearanceof the headmaster in a school class­

The Concise Townscape by Gordon Cullen | Goodreads

The faster a person moves the smaller the area on which they are able to focus their attention. At 25 mph, a driver can see a view approximately 100° wide; at 45 mph, the view drops to 65°; and at 65 mph, it drops to a narrow 40°, substantially reducing what is seen. – Guidelines for the Visual Impact Assessment of Highway Projects, US Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration (2015) [viii] room can change a chattering, rest­less and giggling group of jollychildren into a serious and concen­ No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to personsor property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any useor operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the materialherein. Because of rapid advances in the medical sciences, in particular, independentverification of diagnoses and drug dosages should be madethought of as the Colosseum might fitmore easily into the mental climate ofthe 1900s, which put even gas holdersinto period costume, and that theEnglishman's home, below, really ishis castle. Crude as these examplesare (and we could produce otherseven more banal) they yet contain agrain of guidance for the designer. Through numerous case studies of the streets and publics spaces of places such as Shepton Mallet and Basildon, and including Liverpool Cathedral precinct and a re-imagined London Bankside, Cullen explores the ‘art of relationship’: ‘Bring people together and they create a collective surplus of enjoyment; bring buildings together and they can give visual pleasure which none can give separately’. Cullen advocated an artistic approach to using environmental ‘elements’ including buildings, trees, water, traffic, advertisements and so on, each of which was to be woven together in such a way that drama was released. wider point of view we will see that tropical housing differs from tem­'It was the cause of bitterness between Lutyens and Baker. Dynamic viewpoints from moving vehicles: Clients want to see design outcomes from 1,000 locations under 100 options – our technology lets you walk, bike, fly or drive through the simulated environment from any angle or direction. This makes our technology useful for a range of purposes, such as testing views from new highways while driving at speed, or signal sighting workshops for railways. personality and uniqueness. Accepting the fact that most towns are ofold foundation, their fabric will show evidence of differing periods in itsarchitectural styles and also in the various accidents of layout. Manytowns do so display this mixture of styles, materials and scales.