Grounded Figures

I recently came across this article:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/09/12/160996525/odd-things-happen-when-you-chop-up-cities-and-stack-them-sideways

I found it very interesting. When I was in grad school, we looked at cities at this scale and in this kind of context. This is called a figure-ground study, where you reduce everything to its most basic and simplistic elements - in this case, just streets and, well, not streets. This provides you with a stark contrast between what is otherwise relatively obscure.

You could also do the reverse with these images. I have chosen one image to highlight from the article. The original image looks like this:

The article then arranges the blocks thus created to show relative size, shape, and other interesting aspects of these teal colored blocks. The result (while not included here) is lovely and interesting. This image, though, is also lovely and interesting. It shows how the blocks relate to one another, how some spaces are informed and dictated by natural and man-made forms, including rivers and roadways. It also shows the organic nature of the way things developed in the city.

By way of contrast, I generated this image. This is exactly the same image as the one above, only the contrast this time has been given to the part of the city that is NOT blocks or other open areas. This shows the network of streets and highways, and also shows the large area in the center that is the river. The interconnection of the roads and the river are interesting, as is the organic nature of the highways - mainly developed in the 50s and 60s, which are both informed by the grid and also seem to disregard it completely. There is also a stark contrast in the rigid grid of Manhattan (with Broadway and 4th Avenue moving off at an odd angle and wanting to disrupt the grid's rigidity) and Brooklyn to the east, with it's obviously organically developed grid system - where there are several grids placed at odd angles to each other, forming convoluted intersections and other general fun. What is missing from this image are the bridges over the river - which you would not see in this kind of study because they are represented as the same color as the water way behind, but which would be interesting to note because of the way it pulls both sides of the image/city together.

I have written in the past about the need for people to impose their ideals on their lives and on their built environment. Le Corbusier wrote about the rational thinking person of antiquity who has moved in to a new area and begins to lay out streets at right angles to each other, which is at once aesthetically pleasing as well as practical and efficient. The above article seems to bear that out, for the most part.

But then you have places like Istanbul and Paris, where there are relatively few rigid right angles. Even Berlin, which is much more like New York than the others, still has a lot of sinewy curves and lines. These are places where people live and work and move around... They are not terribly efficient or right-angled, but they are still good cities.

My point is that we often get stuck in one particular model, and cannot think outside that model. It is good for us to occasionally step back and look at the big picture, as it were, and imagine what things COULD be like. We can also learn much from others and what they're doing. Different doesn't necessarily mean better, but it doesn't necessarily mean worse, either. The world is a wonderful variety of so many different things, different people with different ideas and ways of looking at things - shucks, even of living and building their cities.