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Denise Scott Brown |
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Robert Scott Brown |
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This Modern house is where I grew up. I climbed its steel columns and
played ships on its spiral stair and deck. You can have mythic allusions
in houses with flat roofs and you can also play on the roof. |
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This shows the African rural life that paralleled ours. The contrast between
the two was ever present in South Africa. |
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Denise Scott Brown |
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Denise Scott Brown |
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This was the kind of African urban scene my art teacher thought we should
paint... |
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...but this other landscape is what we discovered ourselves. When we returned
from England, Robert Scott Brown and I began taking photographs of African
popular culture. This shows African blankets for sale in a rural store in
Natal. |
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Denise Scott Brown |
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Robert Scott Brown |
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This beautiful African urbanism is a village of the Mapoch tribe. On
the gateposts are Mapoch interpretations of Western suburban houses. Beside
them are Gillette razor blade patterns. |
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This is an African interpretation of the city of Bulawayo in Zimbabwe--high-rise
buildings and a train station. |
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Philadelphia City Planning Commission (PCPC) from Census Data 1950 |
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Chicago Area Transportation Study 1959 (CATS) |
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Form, forces, and function--nineteenth and early twentieth century urban
form was railroad dependent. |
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This pre-computer map from the Chicago Area Transportation Study diagrams
transportation-related regularities. The graphics from this study are as
beautiful as Klee paintings. |
These and the next few slides illustrate some patterns an urbanist must
understand in order to plan. They can be an evocative muse for urban designers. |
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CATS |
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G.K. Zipf Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort, reproduced
in Walter Isard's Methods of Regional Analysis: An Introduction to Regional
Science, 1960, p. 503. |
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More regularities: urban travel, primarily the journey to work. The two
poles are home and work. A few more people always come home than go to work.
The dip in the middle is lunchtime. |
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An illustration of the "principle of least effort." The regularities,
in this case, are to do with potential--some function of size and distance
dictates relationships between 29 different pairs of cities, and generates
a regular distribution of points on the graph. |
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Walter Isard's Methods of Regional Analysis: An Introduction to Regional
Science, 1960, p. 502. |
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CATS |
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More notions of potential: the influence of New York City. (Oh, have
we seen that recently!) |
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The desire lines of people going from home to work. |
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Robert Scott Brown |
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PCPC |
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An aerial view of a subsistence economy: no roads, no train. |
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The very opposite: an advanced trading economy held together by its movement
systems. |
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The notion that form follows forces shows starkly in these illustrations. |
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Denise Scott Brown |
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Denise Scott Brown |
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In a city, density is conditioned by geometry. When everyone wants to
be at the center, at the market place, they face the problem that, in a
circle, there is less area at the center than at the edges. We get hysteria
at the center and anemia at the periphery. Theorists of regional science,
starting in the early 19th century, pondered the effect of the geometry
of the circle on agricultural crop-growing patterns.
Rent theory, which developed from these ideas, posits patterns of density,
"rent tents," which look like the New York skyline before the
World Trade Center was built, which is when I drew this diagram. This pattern
is, I believe, basic. But it distorts. If at the center of town, there's
a lake, as in Chicago, or a University, as at Princeton, the pattern adjusts
around it. But there's always a marketplace, a center of activity, of highest
accessibility, even if it becomes multiple centers, as in Los Angeles. |
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University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts, Urban Planning
Studio project, 1960 |
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Reproduced in Walter Isard's Location and Space-Economy, 1956, p.
272. |
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In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, we trace a pattern of towns set concentrically
around a regional market center--a "central place." |
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Lösch used hexagons to relate Christaller's conceptual geometry of
central places to a landscape. Lancaster County follows the regional scientists'
principles to some extent, perhaps even today. |
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PCPC |
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Aerial photograph of upper Las Vegas Strip, Landis Aerial Surveys |
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The complexity of the land use pattern of central Philadelphia--and
these are only ground-floor uses. As Chester Rapkin, my professor of urban
economics, used to say, "It looks like a bruise." |
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The complexity of Las Vegas and the Strip; you can see the casinos. |
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These are two patterns we've pored over considerably. |
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