in
Olomouc (in Czech: kašna Hygie), Camillo Sitte (plan) and
Karel Lenhart (statue) In 1889, Sitte published
The Art of Building Cities. Richly illustrated with sketches and neighborhood maps, Sitte drew parallels between the elements of public spaces and those of furnished rooms, and he made a forceful case that the aesthetic experience of urban spaces should be the leading factor of urban planning. At the same time, he was highly critical of the patterns of industrial urbanism in Europe at that time, including the development of many site plans along the Ringstraße in his native Vienna. Sitte was one of the first urban writers to consciously emphasize the value of irregularity in the urban form. He challenged, among other things, a growing tendency toward rigid symmetry in contemporary urban design, including the isolated placement of churches and monuments in large, open plots. He also identified and advocates a host of traditional approaches to creating public spaces that had grown out of the town planning traditions of Europe. He illustrates these approaches with examples through sketches and diagrams of numerous neighborhoods (mainly in Italy and Germany). Sitte believed in an incremental approach to urbanism, formed by the aggregation of many sophisticated site plans within a more general scheme determined by street patterns and other public factors. Building on some of his principles, he follows his criticism of contemporary development on Vienna's Ringstraße with proposals to improve the spatial and aesthetic dynamics of some of its major sites. Sitte's book had an impact on European conversations about urban planning and architecture. Eliel Saarinen notes that
The Art of Building Cities was familiar to German-speaking architects in the late 19th century. At least five editions were published between 1889 and 1922, including a 1902 French translation. An English translation was not published, however, until 1945 -- a factor that may explain his relative obscurity in the British Empire and the United States in the years before World War II. Nevertheless, Sitte's ideas made their way into the English-speaking world through the writings of the British urbanist,
Raymond Unwin, who was deeply influenced by
The Art of Building Cities. Sitte's theories influenced other subsequent urbanists, including
Karl Henrici and
Theodor Fischer. On the contrary, Modernists rejected his ideas, and
Le Corbusier, in particular, is known for his dismissals of Sitte's work. For Sitte, the inherent, creative quality of
urban space is its most important factor, with whole effect being more than the sum of its parts. Sitte contended that many urban planners had neglected to consider the spatial dimensions of urban planning, focusing too much on paper plans; and argued that this approach hindered the efficacy of planning in an aesthetically conscious manner. Although most of his examples come from the urbanism of Medieval and Renaissance Europe, he also cites Classical urban forms like the
agora of
Athens and the Roman
forum as examples of well designed urban space. The book's
colophon is a picture of a winged snail. This alludes to the ancient adage
festina lente and also the Viennese delicacy,
Helix pomatia, which would be sold in the snail market and cooked with butter and garlic as "poor man's oysters" and as an alternative to meat at
Lent. == Books by Sitte==