The City: Looking Backward

• Share

Time may make ancient good uncouth; more often it makes ancient commonplace the latest luxury. The airplane was the prestigious way to Europe 15 years ago—now the steamship has status value because it takes longer. At the turn of the century, only the rich had autos; now-only they can afford horses. Electricity has made the once lowly candle a symbol of gracious living, and fireplaces are included only in the most astronomically expensive modern apartments.

The latest discovery of the city planners is walking.

Closeness & Surprise. The automobile has so spread out stores and clogged up streets that the only solution is to cluster shops together again, the way they traditionally were, and let the shopper get out and walk. Shopping centers with "pedestrian malls" proliferate across the land. But too many urban planners seem to be still thinking of the automobile, laying out their malls with bleak, wide-open spaces that provide neither pleasure for the sauntering eye nor convenience for the foot-weary shopper.

In the current issue of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, M. R. Wolfe, professor of urban planning at the University of Washington, urges modern mall makers to abandon their sweeping vistas and their straight lines and do a bit of borrowing from the old cities of the world, with their twisting, narrow streets dominated by clock towers and opening into sudden squares.

The streets should be kept narrow both for "a sense of closeness" and because "this emphasizes the sense of bursting into those squares, which may be actually quite small but are sensed as quite vast by the psychological contrast." Such a "walking street" is Copenhagen's Strøget, with its squares and churchyards, from which the authorities have begun to exclude all vehicles at certain times.

Pedestrian malls should contain "elements of surprise," says Wolfe. "Not only should the streets jog, meander or curve, but the architectural features must change and probably not be absolutely repetitive and consistent." This produces a "system of arrested views." Wolfe feels that no vista should be longer than 600 ft. to 700 ft., as in what he calls "one of the most exciting walkways in the world": the route from the Piazza San Marco to the Rialto in Venice.

A Bit of Ye Olde. Water— in canals, lagoons, fountains — is "an excellent prop"; and arcades such as those flank ing Pisa's Borgo Stretto and Bern's Spitalgasse or covering Istanbul's Grand Bazaar provide not only protection from both sun and rain but an interesting play of light and shadow.

Implicit in Planner Wolfe's proposals, he concedes, is the creation of "a number of mood rooms in the shopping environ ment, and, to put it drastically, even a little bit of 'ye olde,' or, as for example is happening on the West Coast, the in dulgence in 'Japanesery.' This may even be tolerable, although derivative, eclectic, or full of gimcracks, when the alternatives are considered ... the chrome and glass, spit and polish, modular articulated, cur tain wall, mechanistic, slick finish, straight and endless directions which are spring ing up around us."