Urban Scale Architecture is design at the level of the city at large. Without it there can be no city. It supports the importance of living in community. It makes sense of the city for its users by underlining and clarifying the political, social, commercial, and civic order by which the inhabitants strive together to live the best life. While this blog will explore urban design at each of the city's scales, it will be ordered by an understanding of the ongoing significance of the urban scale in the provision of coherence and value in civic life.
Saverio Muratori and his Italian tradition of urban morphology have explored the meaning of “architettura a scala urbana.” According to this approach to urban morphology fully developed cities operate on three scales, the urban, the architectural, and the building. The building scale relates to the elements (doors, windows, cornices) of individual buildings and the architectural scale to the way those buildings are assembled and realized. Design at the urban scale is manifested in at least three ways: (1) by the provision of specialized buildings to serve the civic and political life, (2) by the placement of these buildings in relation to each other on a scale larger than that of the urban fabric, and (3) by a deliberate overlay of serial, rhythmic design to unify the urban tissue.
According to urban historian Carroll William Westfall, design at the urban scale serves the city by emphasizing to the individual citizen by underlining a hierarchy in which the civic life takes precedence over the private. It is the elements of design at the urban scale that make cities not only meaningful but legible, even after centuries of alterations and more recent decades of forgetfulness and crisis. In addition to supporting civic activities, special civic buildings such as churches, courts, and capitols also organize and provide models for the formative language employed for buildings serving private interests at both the architectural and building scales. Shops and houses show the interrelationship of the private and public worlds by taking part in the architectural hierarchy of the city.
The search for architectural unity at the scale of the city began in ancient times and continued over time with an increasing architectural organization of civic precincts like the agora in the Greek city, developed to a high degree of regularity in the Hellenistic era. Likewise, Roman forums, while differing in their shapes, took on greater regularity and architectural unity in the Imperial period. The cities-states of Italy rediscovered ancient principles of urban design during the Renaissance. The humanists extracted from the ruins around them and from the difficult texts of the only ancient text, that of Vitruvius, a broad range of solutions to civic architecture. Renaissance rulers and architects used a selection of elements derived from classical buildings and cities, such as temples, processional ways, columns, arcades, fountains, and forums, to differentiate and polarize the dense fabric of medieval towns. Their model was simultaneously the urbane order they could perceive in Imperial Rome and an emulation of heavenly Jerusalem. While the new cities failed in many ways to hit the mark, they were better suited to the pursuit of the good life.
The elements of the city recovered and elaborated by the Renaissance humanists were the building blocks of our traditional cities, adapted and conformed to local conditions. The tradition of building employed by the citizens of Colonial Virginia included some elements directly inherited from the Renaissance and many from medieval Britain, modified collectively by local circumstances and informed by the familiarity of civic leaders with an ever-expanding body of texts, illustrations, and of examples of ancient and modern architecture.
Virginia cities, like those along the eastern seaboard, were provided with a specific repertoire of urban scale features suited to the newly settled landscape of the American continent. These features were limited to planned squares, public markets, manipulated street widths, malls, and axially placed public buildings. Buildings and squares were placed in significant nodal and anti-nodal positions. Americans, however, delimited civic places differently from Europeans. An essential feature was the connection to the surrounding landscape. Public buildings tended to be placed within that landscape and surrounded by planted grounds open to views.
The small population, the lack of capital, and the greater diffusion of power in colonial Virginia prevented the expenditure of public funds on a large-scale public works for many years. When that wealth materialized with nationhood at the end of the eighteenth century, the structure of American political life ensured that the manifestation of civic architecture would be related but substantially different from that of the old world. In spite of a largely deferential social order based on wealth and ability, the nature of private property dictated that the inherited tendency to embody a unitary architectural design would be mostly restricted to the architectural level, corresponding to the size of the tract or lot on which the proposed building or complex was to be built.
