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Martino Fine Books The Art of Building Cities by Camillo Sitte Translated by Charles T Stewart
2013 Reprint of 1945 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Camillo Sitte (18431903) was a noted Austrian architect painter and theoretician who exercised great influence on the development of urban planning in Europe and the United States. The publication at Vienna in May 1889 of Der Stadtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsatzen (The Art of Building Cities) began a new era in Germanic city planning. Sitte strongly criticized the current emphasis on broad straight boulevards public squares arranged primarily for the convenience of traffic and efforts to strip major public or religious landmarks of adjoining smaller structures regarded as encumbering such monuments of the past. Sitte proposed instead to follow what he believed to be the design objectives of those whose streets and buildings shaped medieval cities. He advocated curving or irregular street alignments to provide everchanging vistas. He called for Tintersections to reduce the number of possible conflicts among streams of moving traffic. He pointed out the advantages of what came to be know as turbine squarescivic spaces served by streets entering in such a way as to resemble a pinwheel in plan. His teachings became widely accepted in Austria Germany and Scandinavia and in less than a decade his style of urban design came to be accepted as the norm in those countries.show more