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Unit-III - L01 - Key Texts On Imagability, Serial Vision & Collective Memory
Unit-III - L01 - Key Texts On Imagability, Serial Vision & Collective Memory
Presentation on lecture by
HARISH KUMAR C
THEORIES AND TEXTS ON IMAGEABILITY AND VISION
M.ARCH [URBANDESIGN]
SASI CREATIVE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE
VII SEMESTER
Discussion on
• Kevin Lynch Imageability
• Elements of City
• Serial Vision
movement theme. Later on he wrote and published the “Townscape” book in 1961.
• He was a key motivator and activist in the development of British theories of urban design
• After his death, David Gosling & Norman Foster collected various examples of his work and
one of Gordon Cullen’s masterpieces, illustrated with over 300 works selected from the
• This anthology documents his influential career as an Urban Theorist, artist and illustrator
from 1930 to 1990. The majority of his drawings have never been published before except
in professional reports
• This book contains numerous drawings executed for the pleasure of observation as well as
• He believes the movement can be read as pictorial sequence , he showed how our perception of time passing and distance travelled
• “Group of buildings can collectively give visual pleasure which none can give separately. One building standing alone in the countryside is
experienced as a work of architecture, but bring a half dozen buildings together and an art other than architecture is made possible. Several
things begin to happen in the group, which would be impossible for the isolated building.
• We may walk through and pass the buildings, and as a corner is turned an unsuspected building is suddenly revealed. We may be
surprised, even astonished with a reaction generated by the composition of the group and not by theindividual building.”
1. OPTIC
2. PLACE
3. CONTENT
CONCERNING OPTIC
Serial Vision is to walk from one end of the plan to another, at a uniform
cityscape
that offer visual cues for the respective pedestrians, bikers, specially-
the visitor.”
surprise
elements i.e. pathways, street network, etc. within a town into a more
The concealed life of private spaces created in between the built structures
• E N C L O S U R E furnishes a complete
an abrupt surprise.”
Closure, may be differentiated from Enclosure, by contrasting ‘travel’ with ‘arrival’. Closure is the cutting up of the linear town system (streets,
passages, etc.) into visually digestible and coherent amounts whilst retaining the sense of progression. Enclosure on the other hand provides a
Full Enclosure
450 (1:1)
• “The practical result of so articulating the town into identifiable parts is that no sooner do we create a HERE than we have to admit a THERE, and it
is precisely in the manipulation of these two spatial concepts that a large part of urban drama arises.”
• “Man-made enclosure, if only of the simplest kind, divides the environment into HERE and THERE. On this side of the arch, in Ludlow, we are in the
present, uncomplicated and direct world, our world. The other side is different, having in some small way a life of its own (a with-holding). ”
• “The human mind sensitively reacts to the surrounding environment when it perceives two images of vivid contrast (the street and Courtyard)
simultaneously. The sense of space becomes more meaningful with the created drama of juxtaposition.
• Variation observed in spatial configuration, form, texture, color, etc. plays an important role.”
• “The infiniteness of the sky cannot be felt as one observes a clear sky from rooftops or open grounds, as effective as a dramatic visual sense of
infiniteness in the sky that can be felt by a human brain as one perceives while walking, or looking sky in the backdrop of a building or a part of it.”
• Both Lynch and Cullen argued that the landscape of the city acquires form
spatial elements and the interaction between them, the memory of the past
movement.
• Both researchers focused substantially in visual form only and the uptake by
blocks.
• Proposes a return to reason & logic, history & memory, & the city
THEMES
• Time has escaped, but the objects remain like childhood memories, at once tiny and gigantic, or rather measured by an unchanging scale of
their own.
• Rossi defines architecture as designs (forms) which have persisted over time to become types. Those types constitute the history of the city
or its memory, and the culture of the present. Functions vary over time but form remains.
• It is the desire for permanence that is so characteristic of his work. The history of the city is composed by those designs which persist over
memory - Urban facts which are permanent; those which withstand the passage of time and eventually become
monuments.
monuments - These give meaning to the life of the city through memory.
"Change is within the very destiny of things, for there is a singular inevitability about evolution ...The singular
authority of the built object and the landscape is that of a permanence beyond people
SASI CREATIVE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE Urban Design [ theory ]
“ CITY AS AN ARTICRAFT”
Permanence of Form –
believes
Urban Element
• Unrealized
• Reminiscent of De Chirico
TIME
• Permanence of form
• Time
• Architecture by Rossi is simply being understood by asking how architecture thrived or evolved.
• A concept that emphasizes the set of fragments that build the collective memory for a city.
• The city is not only seen as the physical artifacts, but also as a representation of human aspirations in time and space. With its
traces that abandoned by a city, Rossi introduces permanence as a continuity of urban types in history
• Rossi depicts a new perspective towards an architecture that should not be seen as a lifeless element but as a dynamic and alive
one.
• The presence of piazza, buildings, even a city should not be interpreted as an element that appears as such but is understood as
• Architecture by him is formed by memory, the fraction of information that obtained by each individual senses.
• The relationship that built by each individual will construct the information or memory and blend together into a collective
memory, which is a notion or thought that has been processed as collective thoughts by community or society.
• This notion then becomes the basic elements in architecture, starts from structure, function, to the building shape.
• Not only that, a lot of buildings will appear until becoming a town and then grow much more until becoming a city.
• The city becomes the locus of the collective memory, which is a space that easily grasps as the memory
• To make it easier, human’s thinking pattern is distinct corresponding to its relation to time and space.
• Modernism is a renewal philosophical movement corresponding to prior society’s thought pattern that believes ornamentation is
• Adolf Loos, as an architect, play a role as an individual that has the notion.
• The collective modern thoughts then unite with Loos’ so there is a shift in architecture at that time, especially correspond to its