Articles on Architecture and Urban Design

Aims and Means of Urban Design

Space and Anti-Space: New 2018

Although this article discusses our specific project for the Les Halles site in Paris, designed in 1979, it is really about the general intentions and purposes of Urban Design. These are simple: the continued reconstruction and future building of the dense, diverse, urban city.

Urban Design Tactics

As architects have become increasingly concerned with the emotional and cultural effects of their designs, they have rejected the ambiguous, abstract spatial configurations of Modern Movement architecture in favor of the making of 'places' which are enclosed and well-defined.

Urban design is a synthetic, inventive mapping of physical conditions that establishes and explores whole areas of the city. In other words, it is architecture – but encompassing more in scale, intention, and technique.

Perhaps Mies himself intended this philosophical interpretation when he said, "The role of the critic is to test a work of art from the point of view of significance and value. Truth is the significance of facts," implying that architecture embodied philosophical ideas.