18ARC75 - URBAN DESIGN

MORPHOLOGICALAPPROACH

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 MORPHOLOGICAL APPROACH

• Urban Morphology is the study of the physical form of a city, which consists of street patterns, building
sizes, shapes, architecture, population density and patterns of residential, commercial, industrial and other
uses, among other things.

• Special attention is given to how the physical form of a city changes over time and to how different cities
compare with each other.

• Urban morphology is considered as the study of urban tissue, or fabric

• Tissue comprises coherent neighborhood morphology (open spaces, building) and functions (human activity).
Neighborhoods exhibit recognizable patterns in the ordering of buildings, spaces and functions (themes), variations
within which nevertheless conform to an organizing set of principles.

Fig shows
• Grid –Iron
• Radial
• Geometrical
• Centralized

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 MORPHOLOGICAL APPROACH

The definition of a figure ground drawing, simply put, is any drawing which uses contrast to show the
relationships between positive and negative spaces, solids and voids, or shadows and light

The figure-ground theory of urban design and urban morphology is based upon the use of figure ground
studies.

It relates the amount of "figure" to the amount of "ground" in a figure-ground diagram, and approaches urban
design as a manipulation of that relationship, as well as being a manipulation of the geometric shapes within the
diagram.

A figure-ground illustrates a mass-to-void relationship.

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 MORPHOLOGICAL APPROACH

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 MORPHOLOGICAL APPROACH

SHAPE
TYPES OF LAYOUT PATTERN OF KINDS OF SPACES

The manner in which these spaces are arranged can clarify their relative
importance and functional or symbolic role in the organization of a building.

The decision as to what type of organization to use in a specific situation will

depend on:

a.Evolution of the city/town

b.Geography of the site
c.Economic and social patterns

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 MORPHOLOGICAL APPROACH

TYPES OF SHAPES
CENTRALISED
A central, dominant space about which a number of secondary spaces
are grouped

LINEAR
A linear sequence of repetitive spaces.

RADIAL
A central space from which linear organizations of space extend outward
in a radial manner

CLUSTERED
Spaces grouped by proximity or the sharing of a common visual trait
or relationship

GRID
Spaces organized as modules within the field of a structural grid or
other three-dimensional framework

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 MORPHOLOGICAL APPROACH

Plan of Char Minar, Hyderabad Plan of Connaught Place,

New Delhi

CENTRALIZED
RADIAL Rajpath New Delhi
LINEAR

CLUSTERED
Plan of Secretariat,
GRID
New Delhi

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 MORPHOLOGICAL APPROACH

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 MORPHOLOGICAL APPROACH

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 MORPHOLOGICAL APPROACH

Ex:Le Corbusier as the "Ville Radieuse"

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 MORPHOLOGICAL APPROACH

SIZE AND SCALE

1. When we see a large building, we are impressed by their sizewhichthey are due to their purpose like:

a. Palaces - their subject

b. Temples& Cathedrals – serve the power bigger than the man
c. Railway stations - because of the purpose
d. Some are made for their prestige purpose

2. Theconcentrationof big buildings without any openspaces results in a cold and impersonal environment.

3. Low rise buildings with openspaces are more human in scale.

4. If we talk of urbanscale we refer to the size of a project in the context of a city,or neighborhood scalewhen we
judge a building appropriateto its locale within a city,or street scale then we note the relative sizes of elements
fronting a roadway.

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 MORPHOLOGICAL APPROACH

INTIMATE SCALE MONUMENTALSCALE

URBAN SCALE

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 COLION ROWE

• COLIN ROWE
(1920-1999)

British-born, American-naturalised
architectural historian, critic,
theoretician, and teacher;
acknowledged as a major intellectual
influence on world architecture and
urbanism.

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 COLION ROWE

COLLAGE CITY
Colin Rowe & Fred Koetter

In Post Modernism period, Collage city was one of the influential American
most theories written by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter Urban

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 COLION ROWE

COLLAGE CITY
Colin Rowe & Fred Koetter

Rowe began urban form analysis through the rediscovery of

“FIGURE- GROUND”. Figure ground could begin to show the
tissue Fabric and the coarseness or finesse of grains of the
Urban form.

Figure grounds of modern city and older cities present contrasting

images: one is almost all white and the other almost all black. One is
an accumulation of solids in largely unmanipulated void; the
other an accumulation of voids in a largely unmanipulated solids.
In each of the cases the ground promotes an entirely different category
of figure- an object and other space.

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 COLION ROWE

Collage city uses modernist city as a point for criticism COLLAGE CITY
Colin Rowe & Fred Koetter
The writing was influencing the designers and the urbanists
and Re-Injecting the Morphological lessons of the
Traditional city into a design era that has lost its way.

They used Drawings as tools which emphasized the role of

public and private space in determining the character of
the city and admired the traditional urban model of Rome.

In the process, they discovered that Modernist urban

planning had inverted the ratio between figure and
ground with a disastrous result at the ground level. Tall
overpowering towers did not embrace the value of
human scale, culture, history and spirit of the city.

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 COLION ROWE

CHARACTERISTICS - COLLAGE CITY COLLAGE CITY

Colin Rowe & Fred Koetter
Elements that maintain nostalgia, realizing that collective memory
is a powerful tool to design and plan cities

Memorable Streets: Activity, event, density,

architecture, historical importance, edge conditions
etc.
Stabilizers: Linear progression should have
some stabilizers (open spaces) which act as
pause areas.
Public Terraces: Which command a view from a height
or open to landscape.
Objects of memory: Lights, posts,
Interminable Set Pieces which act as markers of
clocks, towers, religious structures
either a linear space or a large open space.
Ambiguous or Composite Buildings

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 COLION ROWE

CHARACTERISTICS - COLLAGE CITY COLLAGE CITY

Colin Rowe & Fred Koetter

Public Terraces Interminable Set Pieces Ambiguous or Composite Buildings

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 COLION ROWE

The book refers to how the historic cities were constructed COLLAGE CITY
Colin Rowe & Fred Koetter
overtime through the processes of
1.Accretion (Growth additional layers)
2.Fragmentation
3.Overlay
Different patterns and building sets introduced incrementally by
generation of city builders.
By studying the fragments of the Imperial, Renaissance and
Baroque with valued historic urbanism; to construct
“COLLAGE CITY” as a critique of

1. Totalizing Urban Design

2. Aesthetic Purity
3. Reductionist abstraction of Modernist designs

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 COLION ROWE

TRADITIONAL CITY , City of Rome COLLAGE CITY

Colin Rowe & Fred Koetter
FIGURE VOID (VOID IN SOLID) : subtractive process

• Scattered Irregular blocks fit in site

• Emphasize the space and de-emphasize the Building volumes
• Blur division between different land use
• No zoning
• No mono-functional spaces
• Humanistic – Human scale usage

The collage city sees the act of city building as a series of

strategic and incremental juxtaposition of smaller projects
layered onto a larger whole, rather than a utopian or
Totalitarian project.

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 COLION ROWE

“Modern City”, which was to be shining, scintillating and brilliant, a COLLAGE CITY
city of glass and concrete, a city which would- as a Triumph over Colin Rowe & Fred Koetter
injuries of time (2nd World War)- arises an entire and pure, a city in
which plenty and benevolence were for ever to prevail.- Le Corb.

The Ill effects of modernism as elaborated giving Ville

Radiuse as an example.
He states that the Idealist Imaginary city put forth by the
architects was:
•SQUALID EVOLUTION : Extremely dirty and unpleasant
especially as a result of poverty and neglect
• Was this the NECESSARY DENOUEMENT
• Was this prophetic imagination really conceived as Literal
Prescription

He said that Le Corbusier and others might have been constructing anideal
city which they believed to be IMMIENT, but in the processes, their Ideality
was reduced to PLATITUDE and its Poetry that they were mentioningabout
has been rendered as the most Brutal Prose.

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 ALDO ROSSI

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 ALDO ROSSI’S NOTION OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY
Aldo Rossi (born 1931), one of a set of influential architects during the period 1972- 1988, has
accomplished the unusual feat of achieving international recognition in three distinct areas:
theory, design and architecture.

Aldo Rossi received his architecture degree at the Polytechnic University in Milan in 1959
and became a faculty member in the School of Architecture in Milan in 1965 and at the
University in Venice in 1975.
In 1966 Aldo Rossi published the book The Architecture of the City. In which he criticized the
lack of understanding of the city in current architectural practice. Aldo Rossi argued that a city
must be studied and valued as something constructed over time; of particular interest.
They are urban artifacts that withstand the passage of time.
Aldo Rossi held that the city remembers its past and uses that memory through
monuments; that is, monuments give structure to the city. This understanding of the city
and its elements, its monuments, and its permanence, were core of Aldo Rossi's own
designs for public buildings.
The primary elements of architecture are repeated again and again in his work as Rossi
engages in a determined search for essential forms based on what he refers to as "repetition
and fixation.”

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 ALDO ROSSI’S NOTION OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY

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 ALDO ROSSI’S NOTION OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY

Architecture, Aldo Rossi claims, helps make sense of the lived reality of the world.
In addition it provides the fixed scene of human events, which the architect
historically has not been able to foresee.

Aldo Rossi emphasizes the parallel between public, urban scale

and the theater as a smaller version of the city.

Rossi has been able to follow the lessons of classical architecture without
copying them; his buildings carry echoes from the past in their use of forms
that have a universal, haunting quality. His work is at once bold but ordinary,
original without being novel, refreshingly simple in appearance but extremely
complex in content and meaning.

According to Rossi, architecture should provide the backdrop against which

they can be played out.

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 ALDO ROSSI’S NOTION OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY

Architecture of city refers to the way the city has been structured over a period time, it is
not about architecture within a city but city’s architecture itself. The city needs to be
understood as architecture.

In the process of time, the concept of “permanence” affects individual

artifacts in different ways; housing is permanence even though individual
houses are temporary. In case of a monument the monument is
permanent and the surrounding areas are temporary.

The city is seen as an archeological artifact- as an object. Architect is seen as a neutral

subject. History is seen as a skeleton ( which can be measured for time etc), buildings
as types become instruments of measurement.

History exists as long as the object is in use; when the use is severed object remains, but
history shifts to memory. Hence a city history can be seen as collective memory of
events, singularity of a place and the sign of place as expressed in the form.

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 ALDO ROSSI’S NOTION OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY

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 ALDO ROSSI’S NOTION OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY

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 ALDO ROSSI’S NOTION OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY

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