Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Townscape Presentation
Townscape Presentation
Gordon Cullen
MUHAMMAD HAZIQ FARRUKH- F2017-061
ATHER AMNA- F2017-095
AIMEN KHURSHID – F2017-030
DANIYAL AHMED – F2017-080
The concise TOWNSCAPE
• This is a wonderful description of the components that make cities and towns work, from a point
of view that celebrates urban life rather than fears it.
• This book was a reaction to postwar (WW2) destruction of cities
According to Cullen…
“A city is more than the sum of its inhabitants. It has the power to generate a surplus of
amenity, which is one reason why people like to live in communities rather than in isolation.”
“…bring people together and they create a collective surplus of enjoyment; bring buildings
together and collectively they can give visual pleasure which none can give separately.”(7)
Golden Cullen describes three primary ways in which our environment produces an emotional
reaction key to the planner or architect:
Multiple Enclosure
• Spatial variations on enclosure
• Layers of here and beyond, then cloister walls
• i.e. interpenetrating spaces
• Especially useful in warmer climates where shaded/roofed
outdoor spaces are for living in
FOCAL POINT
• Outdoor Room and Enclosure
• - embodies ‘hereness’
• - Enclosure
• - device to instill sense of position
CONCERNING OPTICSM FOCAL POINT
The visualization and creation of the designer lies in the optimum utilization and articulation of
solids or voids in designing a central point of attention or interest or activity that acts as a landmark
amidst the cityscape.
• Few of these focal points include
• entrance pavilions,
• sculptures,
• landscape features
• tactile paving
• Braille information boards
• that offer visual cues for the respective pedestrians, bikers, specially-abled users to orient
themselves into the pathway
• Idea of the town as a place of assembly, social contact and gathering/meetings.
Focal point is the idea of the town as a place of assembly, of social intercourse, of meeting, was
taken for granted throughout the whole of human civilization up to the twentieth century.
CHANGE OF LEVEL
Cullen talks about a great levelling,
changes in the city after WWII
Closure
The sense of enclosure due to the interplay between here
and there.
CONTENT
• ‘the fabric of towns: colour, texture, scale, style, character, personality and uniqueness.’
• Content concerned within built quality of the various subdivisions of the environment.
• An examination of the fabric of the towns. Colors, textures, personality, scale, style, character and
the uniqueness.
DEFINING SPACE
• Walls, hedges, roofs are obvious ways
• Subtler ways include:
• Tree Canopies
• Lattice or trellis work
• Metal lighting frameworks, etc.
• Even the slightest gesture (fragility of material) can
• provide a sense of enclosure
HERE AND THERE
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.”
SILHOUTE
• Reacting against the Modernist building
as a drab slab block …
• "…whereas the tracery, the filigree, the
openwork ridge capping all serve to net
the sky, so that as the building soars up
into the blue vault it also captures it and
brings it down to the building…"
Grandiose Vista
• exploits ‘Here’ & ‘There’ concepts
• links foreground to background
• produces sense of power
• e.g., Royal Palace at Versailles,
France
“…grandiose vista: …it links you, in
the foreground at Versailles, to the
remote landscape, thus producing a
sense of power or omnipresence.”
(41)
MYSTRY
• glimpses of the unknown / half
revealed other
• puzzles & paradoxes
• where anything could happen…
THE MAW
• "Black, motionless and silent, like a great animal with infinite patience, the maw observes
nonchalant people passing to and fro in sunlight. This is the unknown which utter blackness
creates.“