City Planning
Ancient Romans used a consolidated scheme for city planning for both defense and civil convenience; however, the roots of this scheme go back to even older civilizations. At its most basic, the grid system of streets, a central forum with city services, two main slightly wider boulevards, and the occasional diagonal street were characteristic of the very logical and orderly Roman design. Ancient facades and building layouts were oriented to these city design patterns and they tended to work in proportion with the importance of public buildings.
Many of these urban planning patterns found their way into the first modern planned cities of the 18th century. Exceptional examples include Karlsruhe and Washington DC. Not all planned cities and planned neighborhoods are designed on neoclassical principles, however. Opposing models may be found in Modernist designs exemplified by Brasilia, the Garden city movement, levittowns, and new urbanism.
Read more about this topic: Neoclassical Architects
Famous quotes containing the words city and/or planning:
“Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“Few men in our history have ever obtained the Presidency by planning to obtain it.”
—James A. Garfield (1831–1881)