Multiple Temporalities And The Making of Cityscapes (original) (raw)
TOWARDS A MULTI-SCALAR, MULTIDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO THE CLASSICAL GREEK CITY: THE OLYNTHOS PROJECT
Annual of the British School at Athens, 2017
Research on the cities of the Classical Greek world has traditionally focused on mapping the organisation of urban space and studying major civic or religious buildings. More recently, newer techniques such as field survey and geophysical survey have facilitated exploration of the extent and character of larger areas within urban settlements, raising questions about economic processes. At the same time, detailed analysis of residential buildings has also supported a change of emphasis towards understanding some of the functional and social aspects of the built environment as well as purely formal ones. This article argues for the advantages of analysing Greek cities using a multidisciplinary, multi-scalar framework which encompasses all of these various approaches and adds to them other analytical techniques (particularly micro-archaeology). We suggest that this strategy can lead towards a more holistic view of a city, not only as a physical place, but also as a dynamic community, revealing its origins, development and patterns of social and economic activity. Our argument is made with reference to the research design, methodology and results of the first three seasons of fieldwork at the city of Olynthos, carried out by the Olynthos Project.
The description of the sedimentation time of architectural works and urban spaces is not an innovation, but an exigency that in the field of history has had graphic examples of great interest, which can be defined as the forerunners of the timeline. Drawing challenges the conventional way of thinking about form and becomes a tool for the narration and classification of historical and cultural events. Here we present the results, following experimentation, of the GAIA research project entitled Young People for an Interactive Archaeology in Calabria aimed at the development of a new educational interface which, starting from 3D models of cities of the classical world, generates a system of signs/drawings capable of correlating places, buildings and objects far removed in space and time.
Traces on the palimpsest: Heritage and the urban forms of Athens and Alexandria
This paper compares four layers of the urban form of Athens in Greece and Alexandria in Egypt and uses the palimpsest analogy and a methodology that combines town plan analysis and GIS to investigate the interactions between the symbolic significance of heritage, urban form, and the distinctive spirit of place. The analyses reveal that the spirit of place remains constant as the urban form is reshaped. They also reveal that reinterpretations of the symbolic significance of tangible and intangible heritage, combined with innovative designs and urban rituals, transform the emerging urban form into a contemporary cosmic one.
This paper examines the inception and development of the Ancient Greek Cities (AGC) research project (1963–77) of Constantinos A. Doxiadis and addresses the novelty of its methodological approach to the study of classical urbanism. With the AGC project, Doxiadis launched a comprehensive study of the ancient Greek built environment to provide an overview of the factors involved in its shaping. The project produced 24 published volumes — the first two laying out the historical and methodological parameters of the ensuing 22 monographs with case studies — as well as 12 unpublished manuscripts, and through international conferences initiated a wider dialogue on ancient cities beyond the classical Greek world. It was the first interdisciplinary study that attempted to tackle the environmental factors, together with the social and economic ones, underpinning the creation, development and operation of ancient Greek cities. Doxiadis’s innovative approach to the analysis of the ancient city was indebted to his practice as an architect and town planner and was informed by his theory of Ekistics. His purpose was to identify the urban planning principles of ancient Greek settlements in order to employ them in his projects. This paper examines the concept and methodology of the AGC project as well as the ways in which Doxiadis used the study of ancient cities in relation to his contemporary urban/architectural agendas, and explains this important moment in the historiography of ancient Greek urbanism.
Ancient Cities surveys the cities of the Ancient Near East, Egypt, and the Greek and Roman worlds from the perspectives of archaeology and architectural history, bringing to life the physical world of ancient city dwellers by concentrating on evidence recovered from archaeological excavations. Urban form is the focus: the physical appearance and overall plans of the cities, their architecture and natural topography, and the cultural and historical contexts in which they fl ourished. Attention is also paid to non-urban features such as religious sanctuaries and burial grounds, places and institutions that were a familiar part of the city dweller's experience. Objects or artifacts that represented the essential furnishings of everyday life are discussed, such as pottery, sculpture, wall paintings, mosaics and coins. Ancient Cities is unusual in presenting this wide range of Old World cultures in such comprehensive detail, giving equal weight to the Preclassical and Classical periods, and in showing the links between these ancient cultures.
Neighbourhoods and City Quarters in Antiquity. Design and Experience, 2023
Studies on ancient urbanity either concerns individual buildings or the city as a whole. This volume, instead, addresses a meso-scale of urbanity: the socio-spatial organisation of ancient cities. Its temporal focus is on Late Republican and Imperial Italy, and more specifically the cities of Pompeii and Ostia. Referring to a praxeological and phenomenological perspective, it looks at neighbourhoods and city quarters as basic categories of design and experience. With the terms ‘neighbourhood and ‘city quarter’ the volume proposes two different methodological approaches: Neighbourhood here refers to the face-to-face relation between people living next to each other – thus the small-scale environment centred around a house and an individual. Neighbourhoods thus do not constitute a (collectively defined) urban territory with clear borders, but are rather constituted by individual experiences. In contrast, city quarters are understood as areas that share certain characteristics.
Cities are a palimpsest of tangible forms and intangible practices that can be built upon, and that can serve to develop new practices. Political leaders, historians, theoreticians, and practitioners explored, reused, and reinterpreted earlier urban forms even before the advent of the discipline of planning in the mid-19th century, creating design traditions and enacting a sort of planning history before the term. Ever since, the same groups of people, plus professional planners, have gone on to reference historical urban form explicitly to change ongoing practice or at least to inspire current discussion, occasionally picking up geographically and temporally distant examples. How planning professionals interpreted or understood past cities, and their inclusion or exclusion of specific references, usually derived more from their intellectual context and their political or social interests than from a scholarly concern for analyzing historical cities in their own terms. The distinct processes of design and historical exploration reinforce each other, leading to advanced knowledge on some places and traditions, and less on others. This has created cycles of repetition and reconfirmation, a feedback loop that has influenced both planning and planning history. Sites where planning history has been traditionally written, such as Europe and the US, have more power over planning traditions, and their references to the ancient past of Greece and Rome has both taken these traditions out of their historical networks, and given those cultures a strong presence in the collective conscience. For most of history, the use of past models to create or interpret the present—whether by rulers, architects, historians, or design practitioners—was a highly ideological practice. The past was not seen as something to understand on its own terms, but rather a source of ideas to reinforce contemporary ideas and practices. These references to the past have had a profound impact on the built environment, and in the past century they have often furthered the construction of nationalist goals and identities. This chapter explores the various motives for turning to planning history: to build new cities and buildings; for military, communal, religious, ideological or other reasons; and for aesthetic, cultural, nationalistic, and global inspiration. We identify two broad historical categories that we label ancient planning ideologies and modern planning ideologies. Our identification of these two types of ideological influence on planning is not intended to reify or essentialize a static " ancient-modern " dichotomy, but rather to talk about broad patterns in the use of the past by politicians, historians, and planners. Ancient planning ideologies focused on rulership, politics, and cosmic glory. They were present in most ancient and early urban traditions, from Mesopotamia to the Aztecs. Cities in these
The Equisolar Axis in Urban Morphology: Pompeii, the Solstices and Sunlight Irradiation Ilaria Cristofaro Università degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli orientation, sun, urbanism VIII AACCP (Architecture, Archaeology and Contemporary City Planning) Symposium CITIES IN EVOLUTION DIACHRONIC TRANSFORMATIONS OF URBAN AND RURAL SETTLEMENTS Programme Symposium Conference theme: Archaeology, architecture, survey, restoration and design, transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary studies Abstract The morphology of urban form is here approached with the critical tools of skyscape archaeology, within a broader discourse on the relationship between natural elements and the anthropised form. The morphological data focus of the investigation is urban orientation as delineated by the street system and network from the ancient times. The case study presented is the archaeological site of Pompeii, although the research has a wider perspective on specific solutions of orientation in the whole Campania plateau from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period (Bonghi Jovino, 2011). The orography of the terrain, the line of river and seacoast, the viability from and towards the countryside have been constrains to the urban morphology, together with the attempt to get the most equilibrate solar irradiation across the year. This study is considering the sun azimuth and altitude changing parameters at a precise latitude to put in evidence the coincidence with the settlement design and the sun path. Results show that the city of Pompeii had its main east-west axes diverging from the cardinal points in order to align towards the point above the local horizon where the sun rise at summer solstice with an intentional foundation ritual (Cristofaro and Silani, 2020). This precise choice may be interpreted through the lens of Gaetano Vinaccia’s idea, where microclimatic aspects were decisional criteria for ancient planning (Chiri and Giovagnorio, 2015; Montavon, 2010, pp. 21-22). Awareness of local winds and the sun thermal factor for urban morphology were already exposed in ancient text such as Hippocrates’ On Air, Water and Places and Vitruvius’ De Architectura. According to data acquired in the present investigation, Pompeii urban grid reflects Vinaccia’s equisolar axis for temperate climate, with the equalisation of sunlight among all the four sides of building blocks as the rule for an annual solar control (Vinaccia, 1939, pp. 210-215). This precise urban morphology produces a logical, rational, functional idea of the concept of city in the Archaic period strictly related with the observation of the sky, where the religious and ritual aspects of setting boundaries and diving space according to cosmological principles should not be seen in contradiction but in complementary dichotomy. In Pompeii foundation, urban pattern and morphology can be read as part of an environmental design related to orientation rules for a rationalised sun exposure. References Bonghi Jovino, M. (2011). ‘Ripensando Pompei arcaica’, in Corollari: scritti di antichità etrusche e italiche in omaggio all’opera di Giovanni Colonna, a cura di Daniele F. Maras, 4-13. Pisa: Fabrizio Serra. Chiri, M. G., and Giovagnorio, I. (2015). ‘Gaetano Vinaccia’s (1881–1971) Theoretical Work on the Relationship between Microclimate and Urban Design’, Sustainability, 7, 4448–4473. Cristofaro, I. and Silani, M. (2020) ‘Approaching Skyscape Archaeology: A Note on Method and Fieldwork for the Case Study of Pompeii’, GROMA, 5. Montavon, M. (2010). Optimisation of Urban Form by Evaluation of the Solar Potential (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Ecole Polytechnique Federale, Lausanne. Vinaccia, G. (1939). Il corso del sole in urbanistica ed edilizia. Milano: Hoelpi.