Townscape Revisited
Townscape Revisited
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Bob Jarvis
Bob Jarvis re-reads ‘Townscape’ as a book and explores the devices of word and image and its language and construction. Townscape begins with a casebook in which ‘serial vision’, shown below, are the rewards of the moving eye, but an eye which is open and not lazy’.
Bob Jarvis is a Senior Lecturer in Planning at South Bank University
There are only three urban design tests still in print after thirty three years. Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities[1] and Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City[2] are two; the third, and the one I want to “re-read” here is Gordon Cullen’s Townscape[3] now truncated and published on plan paper in soft wrappers as The Concise Townscape[4].
The other contributors to this tribute have written about Gordon Cullen’s professional, practical and theoretical importance to urban design. My task is rather different. I want to examine why a book I bought as a first year student (admittedly although perhaps significantly) alongside Tom Wolfe’s Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby[5] and a primer on optical illusions in the visual[6] is still in demand when the others on those yellowed reading lists have either disappeared (Chapin, Keeble, Abercrombie) or are now collectors items (Thomas Sharp’s The English Village, Design in Town and Village).
I want to examine Townscape above all as a book, as a piece of literature, and briefly explore the devices of word and image, the language and construction of the work itself.
This approach is quite different from the way Cullen’s work is usually placed in the context of urban design. Two substantial reviews of the subject emphasise Cullen’s other work – either his practice and the reports associated with it[7] or the ephemera (un-catalogued, unpriced and unobtainable) published by Alcan in the mid 1960s.[8] This is understandable: David Gosling is a long time collaborator with Cullen as his piece here and his forthcoming edition of Cullen’s work records; Broadbent’s wider concern is to establish a theoretical perspective that is essentially picturesque and pluralist: so it’s hardly surprising Broadbent concludes “that in comparison the Rationalists look more rigorous” rather than to point to the profundity of Cullen’s Message.[9]
Literature References
But whatever the theoretical strengths of The Scanner et al and the practical demonstrations of A Town Called Alcan and Maryculter (The Concise) Townscape is all that most readers will ever have seen. What did its 9 pages of introduction, 185 pages of glossy photographs case studies, and (deleted from the Concise Townscape … ) 117 pages of Town Studies and proposals, offer for the 56s. (£2.16s.od) I paid?
The Major difference between Townscape and everything that came before it is the authorial tone. Townscape is written from the heart, not the lectern. Though Sitte[10] and Unwin[11] had allowed glimpses of their personality and instinct – Sitte perhaps in his opening chapter, Unwin where in ‘Of the City Survey’ he writes of the designer walking the ground to be planned,[12] Giedion[13] no sooner offers glimpses of an irrational creative spirit than it is absorbed into a broader cultural Zietgiest that sweeps along everyone from Michelangelo to Jorn Utzon. The rest – even Thomas Sharp – are sets of lectures, instructions on what parts aspiring planners and designers should shape and place to create desired effects in villages, residential areas, towns and city centres.[14] Only Thomas Sharp’s The Anatomy of the Village, popularly rather than professionally published, written as a part of the Penguin populist wave of rebuilding Britain after the war communicates a sense of love of place.[15]
By contrast, all three of those books from that annus mirabilis, 1961, are centred in the individual, personal response, Kevin Lynch turns it into an area of scientific inquiry, Jane Jacobs stands as the street corner social observer. In Townscape we see the world though Cullen’s eyes (mainly, it underplays the other senses). Only after those exercises for the senses, after those critical reflections and sketches are there any proposals.
Maybe it wasn’t entirely chance that I bought it alongside Kandy-Kolored… like Wolfe, Cullen’s work had matured out of journalism, albeit the Architectural Reviews, rather than the New York Herald Tribune. Townscape in this analysis, stands like Wolfe’s New Journalism [16] against the diversion of ‘objective’ modernism and reasserts the reporting of experience.
Proposals for Westminster
and for Pimlico Gardens
Town Studies for Evesham
and for Shrewsbury.
Method and Approach
Townscape is an important book not because of its content, still less because of its influence (which Cullen himself dismissed in the Introduction to the 1971 Edition) but precisely because of its method and its approach. Broadbent emphasises the overt rational charting of The Scanner and Notation.[17]
The structure of Townscape is suppressed. There are no obvious divisions: there are no chapter numbers, the headings to the parts are identified only by capital headings in slightly larger typeface within the flow of short paragraphs well spaced alongside photographs and drawings. The articulation of the parts on the title page is hard to discern in the book itself. The reader’s attention is caught now by a photograph, now by a comment, now by a cartoon.
The text itself is fragmented. Outside the Introduction there is never more than a page without subdivision or heading. Most of it is alongside or sometimes written into illustrations. The content and language vary from theoretical and imperative categorization (at random ‘The essential function of a town should be visible from a single glance at the plan’ p.111) through sequential and analytical description to poetic reverie and reflection. Abstract nouns are given precise concrete expression in experience of space though time, analogy, metaphor and neologism are all used in the heading captions.
Through this the author is always with the reader (‘… arouse one’s curiosity as to what scene will meet our eyes upon reaching…’ p. 49), but there are paradoxically few authoritative instructions or examples. Now that The Concise… has deleted Proposals as well as Town Studies this is even more the case: we are left walking down the Via dei Servi towards the Duomo early one morning with just three and a half pages of the Endpiece’s polemic to go.[18]
Post Modern
It is precisely this transparency and yet withdrawal that makes Townscape not a reactionary book but a truly post-modem one; so called architectural post-modems are still writing as author-dictacts, strutting and instructing, pointing to their projects, their rules, in just the same manner as Palladio or Pugin. Townscape has survived because it is an open work.[19] The leader not only has to make the work with the author but there is no fixed order or combination of the parts and devices. Doubly so, as there is no single order in which the places created might themselves be experienced.
The closest parallel to Townscape lies not in the literature of urban design (though de Wolfe’s Italian Townscape reinstated it [20]) but in literacy theory. Not only does Roland Barthes The Pleasure of the Text use a similar fragmented sequence but Barthes, like Cullen before him, champions the senses. ‘(Pleasure)… does not depend on a logic of understanding… it is something both revolutionary and asocial, and it cannot be taken over by any collectivity, any mentality, any intellect [21] Enjoyment is too readily by ‘the political policeman and the psychoanalytical policeman’.[22] Barthes’ texts, like Cullen’s towns and spaces are to be savoured, as sequences, rhythms, fluctuations of attention. There is no single prescription.
Maybe we have been wrong, deceived by the publisher’s imprint and the author’s professional practice to read Townscape as a handbook for designers. Perhaps it too is a blueprint for topographical bliss, an English picturesque variant of the line than runs from Baudelaire through Andr? Breton and Louis Aragon’s surrealist promenades to the psychogeography of the Situationiste derive.[23]
Conclusions
“Classics” easily become tokens, books to be cited but not quoted, let alone read or even used. Townscape repays rereading, closer and more careful attention. It has survived over thirty years in print perhaps as much for its authorial tone and its use of language and illustration as for its message – which has been summarised, disputed and re-written often enough. Re-reading it after the critical and theoretical revolutions of recent years, it emerges enhanced rather than diminished.
The essential reason for this is that Townscape, unlike so many urban design texts is not written with the arrogance of the author/architect, it is written from the heart of experience, to engage not subdue the reader who like Barthes, cruises its pages/spaces. The Italian edition is titled I passaggietti urbani.
Proposals to relieve Oxford by building a new road across the Cherwell and south of Broad Walk.
References:
1. Jacobs, J, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, first published Random House, New York, 1961.
2. Lynch, K, The Image of the City, first published MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1961.
3. Cullen, G, Townscape, first published, Architectural Press, London, 1961.
4. Cullen, G, The Concise Townscape, originally Architectural Press, London 1971.
5. Wolfe, T, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Jonathan Cape, London 1966.
6. Carraher, R G and Thurston, J B, Optical Illusions and The Visual Arts, Reinhold/ Studio Vista New York/London; 1966. Townscape is an art of three dimensional optical illusions.
7. Gosling D and Maitland B, Concepts of Urban Design, Academy Editions, London, 1984, pp. 48-5 1.
8. Broadbent, G, Emerging Concepts in Urban Space Design, Van Nostrand Reinhold (International), London and New York, 1990 pp. 217-225.
9. Broadbent, G op. cit. p. 219.
10. Sitte, C, “City Planning According to Artistic Principles”, in Collins, G R and Collins, C C, Camillo Sitte; The Birth of Modern City Planning Rizzoli, New York, 1986.
11. Unwin, R, Town Planning in Practice reprinted in facsimile, Benjamin Blom, New York, 1971.
12. Unwin, R, op. cit. p. 149-50.
13. Giedion, S, Space Time and Architecture Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass/OUP, London, 1967.
14. See for instance: Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Design in Town and Village, HMSO, London, 1953 and Gilberd, F, Town Design, Architectural Press, 1953.
15. Sharp, T, The Anatomy of the Village, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1946.
16. Wolfe, T, The New Journalism, Picador/Pan, London, 1975.
17. Cullen, G, Notation and The Scanner Alcan Industries, Banbury, 1966, 1968.
18. Cullen, G, op. cit., 1971, pp. 193-196.
19. Eco, U, ‘The Poetics of the Open Work’ in The Role of the Reader Hutchinson, London, 1981, pp. 47-67.
20. de Wolfe, I, The Italian Townscape, Architectural Press, London, 1963.
21. Barthes, R, The Pleasure of the Text, Hill and Wang, New York, 1975, p. 22.
22. Ibid, p. 57.
23. See Berman, M, All that is solid melts into air, Verso, London, 1983, (Part III), Benjamin, W, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, New Left Books, London, 1973; Irwin, A, ‘Surrealist Paris’, in Places Vol 6:2, Situationism pp. 56-57, 1990; Thomas, M J, Urban Situationism in Planning Outlook, Autumn, 1975, pp. 27-39, to trace this most radical re-reading.
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