Urban Planning

Chapter-4
Pioneers in planning theories;
Hilberseimer;
Background:
Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer (1885–1967) was a German architect and urban planner best known
for his ties to the Bauhaus and to Mies van der Rohe, as well as for his work in urban planning at
Armour Institute of Technology (now Illinois Institute of Technology), in Chicago, Illinois.

Hilberseimer studied architecture at the Karlsruhe Technical University from 1906 to 1910. He left
before completing a degree. Afterward he worked in the architectural office Behrens and Neumark.
Until 1914 he was co-worker in the office of Heinz Lassen in Bremen. Later he led the planning
office in Berlin. From 1919 he worked as independent architect and town planner and published
numerous theoretical writings over art, architecture and town construction.

In 1929 Hilberseimer was hired by Hannes Meyer to teach at the Bauhaus at Dessau, Germany. In
July 1933 Hilberseimer fled Germany for America. He arrived in 1938 to work for Mies van der
Rohe in Chicago while heading the department of urban planning at IIT College of Architecture.
Hilberseimer also became director of Chicago's city planning office.

Concept:

Street hierarchy was first elaborated by Ludwig Hilberseimer in his book City Plan, 1927.
Hilberseimer emphasized safety for school-age children to walk to school while increasing the speed
of the vehicular circulation system.

Beginning in 1929 at the Bauhaus, Hilberseimer developed studies concerning town construction for
the decentralization of large cities. Against the background of the economic and political fall of
the Weimar Republic he developed a universal and global adaptable planning system (The new town
center, 1944), which planned a gradual dissolution of major cities and a complete penetration of
landscape and settlement. He proposed that in order to create a sustainable relationship between
humans, industry, and nature, human habitation should be built in a way to secure all people against
all disasters and crises.

His most notable built project is Lafayette Park, Detroit, an urban renewal project designed in
cooperation with architect Mies van der Rohe and landscape architect Alfred Caldwell

The Decentralized City;

Hilberseimer’s Decentralised City was a respond to the problems caused by the Industrial age.
Pollution, insalubrities
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country, the second age should be directed towards decentralization and diversification of
production, both agricultural and Industrial, and to a closer relation between city and country. But it
is also an alternative of the garden cities and sub urbanization base d just on housing . He considered
the block or grid iron system as archaic; the new unit should replace it. The structure of such a unit
should be such as to permit a general solution of all the different parts of the city and their relation to
each other, allowing unlimited urban growth.

Relationship of residential areas to light industrial and commercial areas,

as proposed by H ilber seimer.

Ref:
1) http://www.a -u-r-a.eu/upload/research_radicalurbanism_100dpi_2.pdf
2) Wikipedia
3) Urban Pattern by Gallion
4) Google Images

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