Main entry:

Smets, Marcel, author.

Title & Author:

Foundations of urban design / Marcel Smets ; [translation from Dutch, Patrick Lennon]

Publication:

New York : Actar Publishers, 2022.

Description:

143 pages ; 23 cm

Notes:
Ribbon cluster -- Ladder start -- Network Polynuclear field -- Fabric citadel -- Tower Belfry -- Monument icon -- Island archipelago -- Oasis camp -- Market square parade ground -- Cape lighthouse -- Slope step -- Threshold -- Street road -- Path avenue -- Brook ditch -- River canal -- Current shelter -- Hole void -- Natural artificial -- Panorama perspective -- Appearance experience -- Use morphology -- Grid composition -- Creator curator -- Blueprint implementation incremental development -- Continuity change -- Growth improvement -- Reminiscence renovation.

Summary:

"The book is structured into twenty-nine essays, each dedicated to a pair of urbanistic concepts. Discussing historical and contemporary, interpretive and designerly approaches to urbanity, the notions composing the 29 pairs relate dialectically, as theses-and-antitheses. Still, we are warned, 'the presented antagonisms are not a priori in opposition, but rather complementary'. Smets' fundaments may be likened to emblems. A Renaissance genre, proliferating before the Industrial Age, emblems are complex knowledge repositories, their meaning emerging at the intersection - but not as 'sum' of - a title, a text and an image. The paired titles, the written analysis, alternating abstractions and historic references, together with Heinrich Altenmüller's pairs of essentialized computer graphics, neither completely 'explain', nor exhaust each other's suggestive capacities. Some of the pairs, such as Ribbon - Cluster, Ladder - Star, Fabric - Citadel, wide-span the history of the city, denoting quasi ubiquitous morphologies. Others, such as Monument - Icon, Street - Road, Hole - Void, address (the long) modernity, the second notion illuminating more recent developments. Flow - Shelter, Castle - Palace, tackle the city scale proper, while others, such as Network - Polynuclear Territory, Island - Archipelago, address the scale of the region, characterizing recent planning approaches, such as Landscape Urbanism or Infrastructure Urbanism. Finally, Destination - Morphology, Creator - Curator, Growth - Improvement, question processes and paradigms of making." Cristina Purcar, Planning Perspectives, 2021, 36,6"-- Provided by publisher.

ISBN:

9781638400332 (hardcover)
1638400334

Subject:

City planning.
Architecture

Added entries:

Lennon, Patrick (Translator), translator.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 318479
Call No.: 318479
Copy: 1
Status: Available