How much do we need to notice, in any town, before we can consider ourselves to be intelligent townscapers? If we fail to notice enough details of places and lives, will we lose the inquisitive human instinct to look at, and value, the consequential (and apparently inconsequential) physical aspects of our towns? There is something both infuriating and naggingly intriguing about remarks such as these, and there are scores of them and so, Hastings’ ability to delineate architectural and human hodge-podges can appear simultaneously highly informative and ambiguous: the sheer weight of detailed observations in The Italian Townscape very nearly manages to overwhelm his purpose.īut his rants highlight difficult questions. ‘Teddy boys ganging up on a street corner are a pure gift.’ Wandering nuns are ‘sculpture of a high order, with associations which intensify their significance as townscape.’ Whereas, a plump lady in a floral dress in one of his photographs ‘is simple colour and pattern’. A picturesque beggar, he suggests, makes bad social sense, but good townscape sense, because he is good visual material in theatrical terms. He is somewhat barking in other respects. Hastings’ sections on street types, vistas, and the ‘wonderfully adjusted’ asymmetries of historic town plans remain highly instructive.Ī picturesque beggar, he suggests, makes bad social sense, but good townscape sense Its topic, the public life of private lives.’Īnd what better way to demonstrate this meshing of public and private than by taking us on a tour of Italian towns, and refusing to differentiate between the importance of washing lines, Vasari’s ‘evil’ Uffizi Piazza in Florence, and neon lighting in the arcades of Bologna. Hastings’ definition of townscape is stimulating, and conjures up a protean situation: ‘Townscape is not town planning, is not architecture, is the urban scene stock-piled with all its impedimenta, toys, trinkets, tools, services, conveniences, shelters, play pens, people. ![]() Townscape is not planning or architecture, it is the urban scene stock-piled with its impedimenta He was Hubert de Cronin Hastings, the portly, diffident, Berkhamsted School-educated son of Percy, an ad salesman for the publisher of The Architectural Review, who eventually rose to command the company. Ivor de Wolfe was 61 when he wrote that not that he was actually Ivor de Wolfe. From one point of view, valuable, from another a contraction of our legitimate interests in OUT THERE, one of which consists in the making of judgements as to how we want to make OUT THERE look – how, that is, to create our own OUT THERE, build our own world.’ ![]() ![]() On the other hand: ‘So vast are the responsibilities it is saddled with in getting the human soul safely through the crises and dangers of daily life,’ he declaimed, ‘that the eye quickly forms habits of selection under which the non-essential visual issues are shelved in favour of the vital ones (delicatessen with spit-chicken, car doing eighty, good legs). So, too, was achieving as much architectural and human congestion as possible. Towns were like stage-sets, he argued, and the relationship of foregrounds with backgrounds was of critical importance. How difficult is the concept of townscape? Ivor de Wolfe, who wrote The Italian Townscape in 1963, thought the subject should be founded on sophisticated visual readings – and imaginings – of buildings, spaces, perspectives, outlines, and activities.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |