Kostof the city shaped pdf

The Grand Manner

and Paris under Haussmannization

Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street, Rainy Day” (1877)

This lecture will: • Provide an overview of Baroque urban design, also known as “The Grand Manner” • Explore the transformation of nineteenth century Paris under the influence of Emperor Napoleon III and Georges Haussmann. • Set the stage for understanding subsequent planning approaches that borrowed

from Haussmann’s restructuring of Paris. Note: Much of the content of this lecture come from the work of Spiro Kostof’s The City Shaped David Pinkney’s and Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris.

This week we will be narrowing our focus on the city of Paris in the 19th century. Paris is perhaps the most striking modern example of urban restructuring aimed at alleviating congestion and disorder. But in order to fully appreciate the vast physical changes that the city experienced over the course of just a few decades, we should first familiarize ourselves with some basic urban design elements that had been employed since antiquity, but which by the 1700s had become, according to architectural historian Spiro Kostof, “a rational system of urban design.” This system came to be called “Baroque Urban Design,” or “The Grand Manner” of planning. Consisting of a handful (10 to be exact) of clearly identifiable physical elements, the Grand Manner was most often an expression or a “staging” of political power.

1. The Straight Street An essential element of Baroque urban design was the that of the straight street. We have discussed the use of the grid before, but here we are talking about the carving out of a singular straight street in contrast to the surrounding irregularities of winding pathways. In Europe, Renaissance Florence was instrumental in the development of the straight street as an artistically conceived space – an urban space with its own integrity rather than the space left over between buildings.

The design advantages of straight streets included: 1.  …increased control over public order.

By avoiding or eliminating winding, labyrinthine streets, the ability or temptation to obstruct passages through barricades during times of riots was significantly weakened.

2.  …promotion of circulation of people, goods, transportation and military troops and artillery. As the industrial revolution placed pressure on cities through significant population increase, intense congestion in the city center followed. Carving straight streets through the center proved to be a common modern planning tactic.

Right: Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, 1703. The massive propor?ons of this street were intended to reflect the poli?cal power of Russia under Peter the

Great and his efforts to modernize his empire.

2. The Baroque Diagonal A more specialized use of the straight street in grand manner plans was that of the Baroque diagonal. Here, a broad, straight street runs at an angle to the established grain of the streets. This tactic not only creates a visual distinction for the street, but it also often serves to connect two prominent locations within the city that might otherwise be only connected through a zig-zagging of orthogonal streets.

Above is a view of Daniel Burnham’s 1909 plan for Chicago. His use of the diagonal emphasized the civic center and allowed for greater circulation into and out of the downtown. We will revisit this plan later in the semester.

3. Trivium and Polyvium A trivium is the meeting of three radial streets: either converging upon or diverging from a plaza. A trivium always features balances and symmetry; there is an axial street in the center with two side streets at equal relation on either side. A polyvium consists of four or more streets meeting at a square or rond-point. Here again, symmetry defines the visual effect of the polyvium. Below is a plan of Versailles, the royal country chateau and seat of political power of the French monarchy from 1682 to 1789. At the base of the map, a trivium converges on the palace in the center. At the top of the map, a polyvium meets at a circular garden feature on the vast and formally landscaped palace grounds.

4. Boulevards and Avenues Streets terms “boulevards” were originally tree-­‐lined, elevated promenades on the old sites of city walls or ramparts. The term boulevard came from the name of an old city for?fica?on in France. They became recrea?onal zones at the edge of the city. By 1800s, these boulevards became engulfed in the urban fabric as ci?es expanded, and they oQen became lined with theaters, cafes and luxury shops. Avenues were originally country roads line with tall trees that stood out from the surrounding forest or countryside. They were straight roads that oQen led to important features in the landscape, such as country palaces. Boulevards and avenues both eventually became a part of the urban fabric and the difference between the two blurred. Eventually they became standardized with macadam, underground sewers, and sidewalks.

5. Uniformity and the Continuous Frontage The individual character of buildings was downplayed in order to emphasize an overall visual con?nuity. This included con?nuous cornices and ground story arcades, along with iden?cal cadences in window spacing. A con?nuous and uniform building line on both sides of a street enhances the perspec?ve drive of the street. Early examples of iden?cal buildings along a streetscape could be found in rowhouses, and later in royal places. Berlin and Dresdon represent some of the most regimented of all European ci?es. Building permits were scru?nized with rela?on even to the street and to the surrounding buildings. In some cases, en?re neighborhoods were painted in the same pale gray color.

Above: Places des Vosges, Paris (1605-­‐1612). Here individual apartments, though built under the same development, contributed to an overall visual effect of uniformity. Paris apartment building would later emulate this con?nuous frontage under Haussmann, despite different architects and builders within one stretch of block.

6. The Vista The vista is created by framing a distant view through a composed foreground and a fixed marker in the distance. The marker is usually a prominent building or work of public art. The uniformity of the building facades or other streetscape feature draws the gaze down the street to the marker.

Decumadus Maximus in Timgad, Algeria (first century)

7. Monuments and Markers The strategic placement of a monument, column, obelisk or other prominent form of public art serves to accent a square or the end of a vista. Often triumphal arches were used at prominent entrances to a city in order to celebrate the military and political success of a particular regime. Below is a replica of Trajan’s Column in Rome places in the Place Vendome in Paris. The column was erected (1806-1810) by Napoleon I to commemorate the battle of Austerlitz, one of the most decisive battles of the Napoleonic Wars.

8. The Axis The emphasis on one or two streets as the major axes of circulation and traffic was often more than a tactic to improve transportation. OQen an axis was intended as a “royal way,” leading to a strong symbol of central power. These monumentally-­‐scaled streets were straight and wide, and were intended for ritual, parades, processionals. The proper?es along an axis oQen developed as commercial and residen?al corridors for the wealthy.

Above is a plan for the rebuilding of Berlin drawn by Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s architect. Though never implemented, Speer’s plans u?lized a grand axis that would have led to monumentally scaled public buildings. h`p://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/guide/gmillspc.html

9. Geometry One of the most consistent features of the Grand Manner of planning was that of the use of geometry for geometry’s sake. The rational, orderly arrangement of streets and building blocks gave the sense that the city was cosmically ordered with a purpose. This emphasis on rational design emerged during the Renaissance and can be connected to advances in astronomy, science and mathematics. At left is a detail from the 1807 plan for Detroit by Augustus Brevort Woodward, which prominently featured triangular designs. Urban planning historian John W. Reps speculates that although this early and unrealized plan might have proved to be too abstract and complicated, Woodward’s plan at least embodied a grand vision for the city that might have been useful as the city faced challenges of growth.

10. Theatricality City streets, plazas and squares serve as a sort of daily spectacle or theater. The urban historian Lewis Mumford has stressed the theatrical nature of cities, wherein citizens play out a performance of social action. The grand manner of planning harnessed this spectacular quality of urban space, and often appropriated techniques used in theater set design. Such techniques included establishing perspective, the use of open space of a street to frame a particular view, coherence of architectural styles or motif, and order through uniform street elevation. Above is a view of St. Mark’s Square in Venice, Italy by Gabriele Bella which emphasizes this theatrical element of the square. Renaissance urban designers even drew from stage construction in their creation of spectacular city landscapes.

The Grand Manner: City Plans Now that we are familiar with the many formal elements of the Grand Manner of planning, we’ll briefly look at few examples of city plans before narrowing in on the case of Paris. One of the earliest comprehensive efforts at grand manner planning is that of Renaissance Rome. In effort to revive the city economically, restore faith in the church and glorify the papacy, as well as improve circulation within the city for the many pilgrims visiting each year, popes began remodeling the city beginning in the 1470s. Under Pope Sixtus V (and his architect, Domenico Fontana) who was appointed in 1585, a plan to provide a unifying order to Rome was initiated. Rome had vastly shrunk in population since its height during the Roman empire, and the space within its walls were really more like grouping of little villages rather than a single urban landscape. The plan connected seven major churches and other significant sites with a new system of streets and piazzas (left). The prime example giving the city a new image of this was Bernini’s design for the colonnade in front of St. Peter’s Basilica (right).

Urban disasters often bring the opportunity for significant change. This was apparent in London after the devastating fire of 1666, although grand visions for redesign were ultimately trumped by property owners’ desire to rebuild as quickly as possible. Below is the architect Christopher Wren’s plan for London, featuring broad straight streets, a main axis, and a number of polyvium converging on plazas. Wren based his design on his observations during a trip to Paris, and organized his plan according to his expertise in astronomy, geometry and mathematics.

The most prominent American example of the grand manner is that of the original design for Washington D.C. In 1791, George Washington assigned Major Pierre L’Enfant the job of drawing up the plans for the new capital city of the United States. Thomas Jefferson had proposed a simple grid plan, but L’Enfant scoffed at this and set out to design a plan that, in his words, was “proportioned to the greatness which…the Capital of a powerful Empire ought to manifest.” L’Enfant operated under the Baroque planner manner in which the grandeur of political systems were to be manifested in the physical form of the city, through proportion, vistas, monuments and grand buildings.

L’Enfant’s plans were never fully realized; however, as we will learn later on in the course, his vision reemerged in the City Beautiful plans for the capital, designed by the firm McKim, Mead & White.

Now, to Paris. It is important that we set the stage for understanding that the changes in Paris didn’t take place in a vacuum. However, the dramatic transformation of Paris beginning in the 1850s was so comprehensive that our modern day mental image of the city of romance is based on the streetscapes and building types installed during this time. The new plan for Paris had an overwhelming effect on cities all over the world. Not only did American cities copy its monumentality, but the French themselves exported its urban design elements to its overseas colonial empires. The story begins not in France, however, but in England where in 1844 the soon‐to‐be Louis Napoleon III, France’s self‐appointed emperor, languished away in a high-class London prison. Ousted from his homeland for his role in trying to overthrow the monarchy of Louis-Philippe (known as the July Monarchy), Napoleon managed to escape from his English exile by 1846 and, wasting no time, had himself reestablished as President of France’s Second Republic by 1848. This would make many people in Paris very angry, and that anger will impact the city’s design (and Napoleon’s downfall). The easy part of Napoleon III’s rise to political power was thus completed pretty quickly. But France’s new ruler was immediately confronted with a number of pressing issues that demanded his attention or his authority might become threatened. He resided in Paris at a time when the city was experiencing the throes of industrial expansion and population growth more rapid than at any other point in history. As the inner city grew increasingly crowded and dirty, crime and disease climbed to alarming levels and workers experiencing an economic depression threatened to revolt. Louis Napoleon responded to the mounting tension by initiating a massive urban planning campaign meant to physically as well as socially and politically) reconstruct the entire city.

Making Sense of Haussmanniza1on