Quadrant Model of Reality: Quadrant Model of Reality Book 26 Art and Cities

Art chapter

QMRThe concentric nomadic tent, called the yurt, is a reflection of the universe.

The traditional type of tent of the Mongolian nomads consisted of a circular wooden frame, which was covered by a felt cover. The word yurt in Turkic means ‘dwelling place’ (or homeland) and its construction was steeped in symbolism. The family’s length of ownership of the tent could be measured by the number of stains accumulated on the shangrak (or central ring). The shangrak is the most crucial part of the yurt’s structure and represents the universe. The supporting woodwork of the opening is often constructed in a tetradic way. The cooking place in the middle of the tent is the ‘square of the earth’.

The ceiling has a four part quadrant

QMRThe outlay of the community of Circleville (Ohio) after it was founded along the Scioto River in 1810. The octagonal courthouse is situated in the center. This situation only lasted for some twenty-seven years, when a change in the mood of city planning began to favor the more traditional grid pattern.

The Hopewell Indians lived in the first centuries of the Christian era (Middle Woodland, 300 – 500 AD). These indigenous people probably originated from Illinois and spread through southern Indiana to Ohio, where its culture ‘found its purest expression and its most intense apotheosis’ (Olaf Prufer). Mound building and earthworks pointed to an advanced culture (or cultural complex), which grew in complexity and refinement during the Late Woodland era (500 – 1620). The earthwork, on which the later Circleville was positioned, had a diameter of 350 meters.

The circular city with its radial streets was out of fashion in the mid-thirties of the nineteenth century and the Circleville Squaring Company was established to obliterate the traces of any round planning (fig. 534). They succeeded in 1856, marking one of the earlier examples of urban re-development in the United States. This distinct change in public sympathy from the circular (I) to the square (III) in city development stands out as a rare historical event, which has to be noted in the dynamism of division thinking, which takes place in the modern American cultural presence.

The outlay is in quadrants

QMRThe cross type of city (planning) is part of the family of geometric expressions to visualize the tetradic idea of division in space. The tabula rasa of the mind, which is the idealized expression of the First Quadrant, has to give way to division and subsequent symbolism in the Second Quadrant. A general qualification of the various ideas (mind constructions) in this four-parted quadrant (written in short as II, 1 – 4) can be linked to the geometric entities and is summarized here as follows:

——————- 1. The circle symbolizes the first part (II, 1)

——————- 2. The cross is the second part (II, 2)

——————- 3. The square/rectangle is the third part (II, 3)

——————- 4. The grid is the fourth part (II, 4)

QMRThe cross form of settlement is often directly derived from natural circumstances, like crossing roads. The original Latin expression of a quadrivium points to this particular situation. The cross is a four-division tool seeking to divide a given ‘space’ from a unity (a central point) into four (equal) quarters. The movement of creation is from the inside to the outside and the space is not enclosed (unlimited).

539

Fig. 539 – The basic layout of a Roman settlement, either military or civilian, consisted of two crossing main streets, the kardo (N-S) and the decumanus (E-W), and four blocks, called the centuria.

The Roman surveyors used a given set of geometric tools based on a cross, called the groma (or stella). This surveying instrument was depicted on a tombstone of Lucius Aebutius Faustus in the first century BC and was also found in a surveyor’s workshop in Pompeii during excavations in 1972. It is now in the Archaeological Museum of Naples (in a locked technical hall; DILKE, 1971/1992). The groma was used to determine right angles. The kardo maximus and the decumanus maximus were the most prominent to establish a new settlement (fig. 539). The former (KM) runs north – south, while the latter (DM) follows the east – west direction. These axes formed the structure for a centuriation (centuria) consisting – in an ideal case – of four times ten or twenty-five squares (‘Ab uno umbilico in quattuor partes omnis centuriarum ordo componitur’) (MÜLLER, 1961).

Deviations of this pattern are known and the direction of the layout (of the centuria) is sometimes changed in time, as was studied by CLAVEL-LÉVÊQUE and FAVORY (1992) in the areas of Nola (Naples) in Italy and Béziers in France. Three different types of networks were established in the latter area called the ager Baeterrensis. It is known that a scamnatio in centuriis (internal division and organization of a parcel of land) existed in the Béziers area at the end of the second and the first part of the first century BC. when the area must have been well populated. The direction of the roads followed the natural topographical features like rivers and streams, which is NW-SE and NE-SW (fig. 540). The Roman occupation in Gallia Narbonensis started with the campaigns of Julius Caesar from 58 BC onwards. Roman veterans of the VIIth Legion founded Béziers in 36-35 BC and their colonial presence had a marked influence on the countryside.

QMRThe division in the city of Rome along the lines of a kardo and decumanus seems rather artificial, since the historic city of Rome did grow in a natural way on the various (seven) hills. Nevertheless, it is possible to see the Via Papalis as the kardo, with the basilica in Lateran and the Vatican at the end. The decumanus runs from the churches of S. Paolo fuori le mura (St. Paul’s Outside the Walls) to S. Pudenzina. The Colosseum is situated at the cross point. Das ‘Patriarchalkirchenkreuz’, as proposed by Guidoni (1972), might be more the outcome of wishful thinking since the initial intentions of the builders are hard to prove.

It is also questionable if the medieval cross shape of many cities finds its origin in the antique Roman history of kardo and decamanus or was a reinvention of the tetradic principle in a Christian era. SCHIFFMANN (1985; p. 137) pointed out that ‘It was only in the cross shaped street plan of Palermo around 1600 – with the fountain in the Quattro Canti (Four Corners; fig. 544) – that the Christian meaning of the cross as signum became in the public domain. It seems that the clerical powers of that period took the opportunity to celebrate the cross as a Christian symbol in any city with a quadrivium (cross roads), regardless of its pedigree.

544

Fig. 544 – The ‘Quattro Canti’ or Four Corners (Piazza Vigilena) on the centre point of a cruciform town plan in Palermo (Sicily). The dedication to the sign of the Cross was celebrated in 1609 with two great processions in the streets.

quattrocanti

Part of the ‘Quattro Canti’ (Four Corners) in Palermo – Photo: Marten Kuilman (2012).

The Quattro Canti is situated at the intersection of Corso Vittorio Emanuelle and Via Maqueda, which is the traditional center of Palermo. Officially, the square is called the Piazza Vigilena, after the Spanish Viceroy, who had the plan of the ‘Four Corners’ executed in 1611. The sculptures on the facade of the building illustrated various themes: the Four Seasons and patron saints of Palermo’s four old quarters. This action can be seen as a historic moment of public awareness of an architectural intention with regards to the four-division. The ‘Quattro Canti’ is the hallmark of a (renewed) four-fold awareness-of-the-numerological-kind in Europe.

The medieval city, like Bristol (England) and many more, went to a period of transition around the year 1500 – the arbitrary year, which is given as the Pivotal Point in the European cultural history (fig. 545).

This outlay of the city of Bristol (England) is given by Robert Ricart (1506) on one of the earliest maps of an English town. The plan shows an original quadrivium (crossing of roads), which was upgraded in the Middle Ages to a fortified town with four gates: New Gate (Porta Nova), St Nicholas’ Gate, St Leonard’s Gate and St. John’s Gate. Only the latter, at the top of Broad Street, survived.

The colonial cities of the early sixteenth century were the result of the expansion movement of European countries, like the Portugal, Spain, England and Holland. They were created in the spirit of the time. The geometrical city plans, which were en vogue in the (post) Renaissance in Europe, could be put to practice in the new territories. Sometimes, as in the city of Tenochtitlan – now known as the capital Mexico City – indigenous ideas about cross patterns were already present (fig. 546).

546

Fig. 546 – The first map of the city of Tenochtitlan was given as a woodcut in the ‘Praeclara Fernanadi de Nova Maris Oceani Hispana Narratio’, published in Nürnberg in 1524. The original coloured illustration accompanied an edition of letters by the explorer Hernandes Cortes to the King of Spain.

The Spaniards found a rich cultural place on an island in a lagoon of Lake Texcoco when they reached the city in 1519. The Templo Mayor was situated at a square in the middle of town (see also fig. 124). The Codex Florentino (1578/1580) recorded Hernan Cortes’ admiration when he approached the city: “There are, in all districts of this great city, many temples or houses for their idols. They are all very beautiful buildings…’

The interpretation of the 1524-map of Tenochtitlan and subsequent maps of the capital of Mexico in the sixteenth century poses specific problems, which are relevant in the present investigation. The use of the symbolic cross (Second Quadrant), orthogonal planning (Third Quadrant) and/or the gridion (Fourth Quadrant) by either the autonomous urban civilization or its conquerors offers a challenge for a modern researchers.

QMRThe often-reproduced medieval city map of Jerusalem is from a Psalter fragment, dating from around 1200 and kept at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague (KB, 76 F 5). A Flemish map of the city, from around the same time (1170), is in the British Museum (MS Add 32343, fol. 15r; KRINSKY, 1970). A lesser-known map of Jerusalem is filed in the Uppsala Library (Sweden; C 691, folio LXXXVI) (fig. 549).

549

Fig. 549 – The round City of Jerusalem is given with a cross street pattern and a Y-fork in the upper left quadrant (Uppsala University Library, C 673, folio LXXXVI). The iconographic representation of Jerusalem in manuscripts of the twelfth and thirteenth century might have been the inspirational source for the symbolic map makers around Europe’s ‘Pivotal Point’ in 1500.

The four-fold division of the Holy City on this latter illustration shows a Y-forked road in a similar way as on the Bordones map. The map in Uppsala (and the British Museum, but not on the map in The Hague) names the forked road as the ‘Vicus ad portam Josaphat’, leading to the Vallis Josaphat, which was known as the place of judgement (vallis judicii).

An Icelandic map from around 1300 and now in the Arnamagnaeanske Institute in Kopenhagen (MS 736), indicates the same circle-and-cross patterns of Jerusalem, with a fork in the upper left-hand part. It seems that this feature was a returning iconographic element, which might even be the (hidden, intentional) reason for the drastic measures in Bordone’s ‘Islario’ to ‘mirror’ the 1524-Nuremberg map.

The Y-shape road – and the choice between two roads in general – became known as the ‘bivium’ (ESMEIJER, 1973/1984). It symbolized the choice between the wide (bad) and the narrow (good). The first goes to the left, the second road leads to the right. The theme also circulated as ‘the choice of Hercules’. The dilemma between right or wrong gained popularity from the fifteenth century onwards in works by artists like Sebastian Brant (Stultifera Navis, 1497), Cranach the Elder (Hercules at the Cross-roads, 1537), Johann Sadeler (1595) and others (PANOFSKY, 1930).

The line of the symbolism of the circle-and-cross city could be drawn even further if the activities of the Roman land surveyors (agrimensores) are taken into account. RYKWERT (1976) pointed to the ceremonial actions (contemplatio) that took place when a new encampment or city was planned. The ’templum’ was the name given to the diagram drawn by the augur. The Roman writer Marcus Terentius Varro (116 – 27 BC) elaborated on the ‘templum’ as a place where nature (sky), divination (ground) and resemblance (underground) came together. His heavenly templum has a cross form (fig. 550), but the directions do not necessarily have to line up with the cardinal points.

QMRA redrawn version of the ‘Templum of the Sky’ as given in a miniature depicting the ‘Constitutio Limitum’. The ritual of ‘making a boundary’ was described by the Roman writer Hyginus Gromaticus, a near-contemporary of Vitruvius. The Greek word ‘temenos’ had the same intention, pointing to a piece of land defined by boundaries and devoted to a particular purpose, a shrine. Hygius Gromaticus was one of the contributors to the Corpus Agrimensorum, a sixth century manuscript on surveying.

Social, political and intellectual events followed each other in quick succession in the sixteenth century, after Europe passed its Pivotal Point. Knowledge increased dramatically under the influence of the printing press on a scale, which can only be compared with the introduction of the Internet at the end of the twentieth century. The circular and its enclosed unity was a thing of the past. The linear moved in, pointing to ever-wider horizons. Oppositional thinking was followed to its most unforeseen consequences. The European Age of Discovery found its very roots in the psychological intention of ‘going all the way’. The will to reach the ultimate boundaries and a ‘testing to destruction’ (HEDGES, 1974) are typical characteristics of this process.

The ‘grid town’ – in itself a ‘Fourth Quadrant’ member in a lineage from the ‘Second Quadrant’ cross to the ‘Third Quadrant’ square – was implanted by the colonial powers into the Aztec culture. This culture, being in the ‘Fourth Quadrant’ of its own development, accepted the orderly approach of the Spaniards in a natural way. The ‘four division’ was well known to the inhabitants of Mexico. The tetradic sign was expressed in the four canals at the founding of Tenochtitlan and was given on the first page of the Codex Mendoza, illustrating the ‘centro geometrico de los cuatro calpullis’ (districts). The Codex Fejérváry-Mayer further elaborates on tetradic symbolism, with its famous first page as a historical tribute to the four-fold. The monumental calendar stones, of which a large number has been found, were devoted towards numbers (see also fig. 123).

The encounter between the Spaniards and the Aztecs can be described in the realm of division thinking. The Spaniards were representatives of a ‘Third Quadrant’ European culture around its Pivotal Point (in 1500 AD). They came in contact with the Aztec people, being the representatives of an indigenous American-Indian culture in their ‘Fourth Quadrant’ (see fig. 107 for a suggestion of the CF-graph of the Meso-American cultural period).

The outcome of this culture clash, in terms of winning or losing, was hardly surprising. Every cultural entity in its ‘Fourth Quadrant’ is bound to ‘loose’ in a power conflict with another group in its ‘Third Quadrant’. This universal lesson, which holds on all levels of human interaction, finds its very reason in the nature of the Fourth Quadrant. The position in the third part of the Fourth Quadrant (IV, 3), just before the end of the visible visibility, is a fragile one in which the knowledge of the past and the insight in the future leaves a culture (or person) in a vulnerable position in any ‘fight’, which is another expression of a full Third Quadrant encounter.

The cross concept, which was the subject of this chapter, remained a strong architectural tool in the ages to come. The example of Palermo and its Quattro Canti has been mentioned earlier. The classical practice of conrectio (‘a division in four parts – bringing the four directions together again by formula and gesture’; RYKWERT, 1976, p. 46) got a whole new lease of life in the minds of the post-Renaissance city builders. The ritual character of the (Roman) augur was a thing of the past, but the practical advantages of a cross-town – even with vague religious references to the Christian cross – were obvious.

Most settlers in America left a European culture, which was in a state of vibrant transition, experiencing the psychological extremes of the ‘Third Quadrant’ (III). Their motivation to leave Europe was a mixture of the spirit ‘to go all the way’ (in economic enterprise) and the will to escape the mounting political and social pressure. Hardships were generated by the inherent intolerance of oppositional thinking, both by the oppressor and the oppressed. Once the emigrants entered the wide-open spaces of a new land, they found themselves at the start of an ‘American’ cultural period. They had to discover the sense of their self-styled presence and find the road to a historical identity.

QMRA typical example of the tribulations of symbolism over the years and its outcome in architecture is found in the Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln, Nebraska (LUEBKE, 1993). Architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (‘No. 4’) won the nationwide design competition in 1920 and the building came to completion in four phases over ten years (1922 – 1932) (fig. 552).

552A

Fig. 552 – The cross-in-square plan of the Nebraska State Capitol is supported in the actual building by a wealth of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Biblical and Art Deco symbolism – pointing to a confused cultural identity.

552B

The cross-design of a settlement was much older than the efforts made by the Renaissance artists and sixteenth and seventeenth century popes to give this outlay certain humanistic or religious meanings. The circle-and-cross design was known from settlements dating from Carolingian times and thereafter (800 – 1050 AD), like the previously mentioned Viking settlement Trelleborg near Slagelse (Denmark, fig. 525). Another attractive example of this plan (of the ninth century) can be found in Oost Souburg, near Vlissingen in the Dutch province of Zeeland.

Furthermore, the southwestern part of France has a rich history of defense settlements, called ‘bastides’ (LAURET et al., 1988), which includes the cross layout. About four to five hundred new villages were built in the area between 1229 and 1373. The English occupation and the following Hundred Years’ War (1337 – 1453) left their mark on the way settlements were formed. Alain Lauret et al. distinguished four chronological phases in the building of fortified places (fig. 553):

Bastides of Raimond VII (1222 – 1249);

Bastides of Alphonse de Poitiers (1250 – 1270);

English bastides (1266 – 1324) initiated by Edward I, Duke of Aquitaine (1239 – 1307) and his successor Edward II;

French royal bastides (1270 – 1373) (fig. 554; fig. 556)

QMRQMRStandard Seoul Korean uses pitch only for prosodic purposes. However, several dialects outside Seoul retain a Middle Korean pitch accent system. In the dialect of North Gyeongsang, in southeastern South Korea, any one syllable may have pitch accent in the form of a high tone, as may the initial two syllables. For example, in trisyllabic words, there are four possible tone patterns:[16]

Examples

Hangul IPA English

며느리 mjé.nə.ɾi daughter-in-law

어머니 ə.mə.ni mother

원어민 wə.nə.mín native speaker

오라비 ó.ɾá.bi elder brother

QMR An overview of the various bastides in southwestern France, distributed in time under the consecutive French and English rulers.

554

Fig. 554 – The bastide of Solomiac, northwest of Toulouse, was founded by the French royals in 1332. It has the lay-out of a parallel cross, which provides space for the central market square. The church is on the eastern side of the inner octagonal defense system.

Many villages in the foothills of the Pyrenees, in particular the older ones of the first generation, tended to follow topographic heights (known as ‘pech’). The village was often protected by a fortress, like the famous Montségur (Ariège), known from its Cathar castle. Another Cathar stronghold, and one of the earliest bastides (1222), was Cordes-sur-Ciel (‘corte’ meaning ‘rocky heights’) in the Languedoc (Tarn). Small places, like Domme (Périgord), Castelnau-Bretenoux (Lot), Sainte-Mère (Gers) and Tournon d’Agenais (Lot-et-Garonne) also used topography to create safety.

The bastides of the second generation by Alphonse de Poitiers, in the middle of the thirteenth century, often showed a premeditated plan, which was less dependent from the local environment. Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, Villeneuve-sur-Lot and Villefranche-de-Rouergue are among the most typical of the total of about fifty bastides, which were built during his reign.

John REPS (2002) suggested that the move towards the fortified places comprised an element of real estate speculation and that the reason was not primary one of security. Most bastides were protected only by a palisade and a ditch. In fact, the search was for freedom (franchises), because the farmers, who moved their families into the city enclosure, were no longer vassals of the local lord. The landowners, on the other hand, gained income from taxes on trade, rather than the previous taxes on production (tithes).

1. The circular bastides – like Fourcès (Gers) – are rare, but many plans followed a concentric or oval pattern, often around a church, like Prayssas (Lot-et-Garonne), Martres-Tolosane (Haute-Garonne) and an important group of ‘circular villages’ in Gastogne, like Montpezat, Ayguetinte, Endofielle, Urdens, Gazaupouy and many others.

fources

A rainy day in Fources, a round bastide. (Photo: Marten Kuilman, 2009).

2. The (single) cross pattern (or cross roads, known in the Latin Antiquity as a quadrivium) has been the base of many fortified places, but the necessity of a market place (in conjunction with a church) presented new problems of urban design and called for a ‘widening’ of the initial cross. The resulting ‘modèle gascon’ (Gascogne model) is characterized by the ‘quadrillage’ of eight blocks of houses around an ‘empty’ center (fig. 554/555). It is remarkable that this French term, meaning a (rectangular) grid or raster, is also known as a technique of counter-insurgency, first used in the 1957 Battle of Algiers. This system denotes a method of dividing a counter-insurgency terrain into ‘squares’ to isolate the people within.

The small community of Cologne in the Armagnac area of France was built in the Gascon style with a market square, a market hall and arcaded buildings (fig. 555). The central part is enclosed in a (more or less) octagonal defense system. The place was founded in 1284.

QMRFig. 555 – The plan of Cologne, a small French royal bastide situated some fifty kilometers north west of Toulouse (France), shows a simple 3 x 3 grid pattern. The central square was reserved for the market, as the main raison d’etre for the new town. The location of the church moved to the edge of the external octagonal.

A further extension of the Cologne plan can be seen in the French royal bastide of Revel, in the Haute-Garonne. A second ‘ring’ of blocks has been added to the original 3 x 3 layout, forming a 5 x 5 grid. The (more of less) octagonal enclosure was smoothened out to a hexagonal ring (fig. 556). A similar setup was found in settlements like Geaune (Landes), Rabastens-de-Bigorre (Haute-Pyrénées) and Marciac (Gers). The hexagonal enclosure is in these latter places further developed into a semi-circular or oval girdle. The eccentric position of the church is typical for the Gascon type, whereas the church is still next to the square in the ‘modèle aquitain’. It shows that this town was primary developed for commercial reasons, with the market rather than the church in the central space.

556

Fig. 556 – The plan of Revel (Haute-Garonne, France) is a typical example of a French royal settlement, charted in 1342. The 3 x 3 grid is now extended to a rough 5 x 5 grid, with the church situated at the southwest and outside the grid.

Two examples of the ‘Aquitaine model’ will be given here, one from the English and one from the French side. The first is the bastide of Creon (Gironde), which was a stronghold of the English king. The plan of the settlement has an orthogonal quadrillé, which did not go into a full 5 x 5 grid, but only extended the east-west streets (fig. 557).

QMRThe bastide of Creon (Gironde, Bordelais) was founded by the English king in 1316 and had a double-cross pattern with a semi-circular enclosure.

Créon was situated on important crossroads from Bordeaux to Sauveterre and from Libourne to Cadillac. The building of the church started in 1316 and was finished in 1320. Its position is close to the central market square. The church was later extended in order to keep up with the stature of the place as the capital of the Entre-deux-Mers region. Initially, Créon did not have fortifications during the Hundred Years’ War (starting in 1337) and was therefore pillaged and burned, but this was remedied in 1351 when the place got a fosse, palisade and four stone gates. The covered houses around the market square dated of the sixteenth century. The gates were demolished in 1589.

The second bastide is Damazan (Lot-et-Garonne, Aquitaine), which was a stronghold of Alphonse de Poitiers. The city was founded in 1259 and had a parallel cross design with the church in the north-eastern corner of the adjacent market square (fig. 558). There are only traces of an enceinte (fortified ring), now the Boulevard du Midi. The design found a follower in the ‘English’ bastide of Vianne (Lot-et-Garonne), some ten kilometers south of Damazan. This pedigree proved that the cross design was ‘cross border’.

558

Fig. 558 – The ‘castrum comitale’ of Damazan (Lot-et-Garonne) was a creation by Alphonse of Poitiers in 1269 and is an advanced development of the Aquitaine model.

Alphonse, the Count of Toulouse and of Poitiers (1220 – 1271) was the son of the French king Louis VIII and brother of Louis IX. He had earned his credentials in a crusade (the seventh, 1248) to the Holy Land. After his capture and return, he organized the rebuilding of the southern part of France after the ravages of the Albigensian war (1209 – 1255).

This struggle, which was initiated by Pope Innocent III (1198 – 1216) to curb the growing influence of Catharism (and dualistic thinking in general) is an important marker point at the boundary of the Second (600 – 1200) and Third (1200 – 1800) Quadrant of the European cultural history. The Roman Church, as a representative of a (religious) form of fourfold thinking (in the Second Quadrant) took up arms in a heroic effort to fight a form of lower division thinking (in the Third Quadrant). The result was a temporary victory, but the seeds of lower division thinking – with its urge for visible visibility and power – were growing anyway. The cultural entity of Europe left its stage of adolescence and had to face adulthood.

These examples of the cross design in urban development disclosed the flexibility of the design in combination with circular, octagonal or hexagonal enclosures. This whole complex of delineations was sometimes placed in an outer square (like Solomiac) or further developed in an extended grid system (like Revel).

3. The square was the most common layout in the new towns of the thirteenth century. The rectangular street pattern of Monpazier is archetypal for these types of bastides. Monpazier was known as ‘the pearl of England’ in the Dordogne and is still one of the best-preserved bastides in France. The place was built in 1285 during the reign of Edward I (Confessor). It was part of the English defensive system in the southern Périgord, which also included the bastides of Lalinde (1267), Beaumont-du-Périgord (1272), Molières (1284) and Fonroque (1284) and the incomplete efforts like Pépicou, Roquine, Castelréal, Puyguilhem, Beaulieu and Labastide. The opposing French side in the area consisted of the fortified places of Rayet, Villeréal, Castellonnès and Montflanquin.

4. The octagon and grid-type of urban development are the ‘end’ members of respectively a cyclic or linear approach in a Fourth Quadrant setting. Both types occur, as could be noticed in the previous illustrations of bastides, in conjunction with other geometrical devices like the cross and the square. It is important to notice that these ‘advanced’ forms were part of the very early development of the fortified cities and do not seem to fit in a hierarchical order (in time).

A quadralectic appraisal of the various fortified towns in southern France had to employ a different angle then usually followed in literature. The four-fold division in a temporal setting by LAURET et al (1988) is valuable as a political division, but does not refer to architectural features. The four-fold division of the different types (Aquitaine, Gimontois, Gascon and Quercimois model) – as chosen by John REPS (2002) from a larger number distinguished by French scholars ‘with an almost Teutonic thoroughness’ – points to the regional character and geographical setting of the bastides.

The quadralectic attention should focus on the designer’s use of the four geometrical tools embodied in the circle, cross, square and octagon/grid. The absence of a hierarchical development is clear, just like signs of difference between urban designs from both sides of the ancient English – French border.

The architect Bernardo Antonio Vittone (1705 – 1770) won the first price in the Concorso Clementino in 1732 with a scheme of a city at the sea (fig. 559). This prestigious Concorco produced a number of interesting ideas between the years 1700 and 1750 (HAGER, 1982) and later when the concourse became an international competition for young European architects (STILLMAN, 1973). The Concorso was sponsored by the Acca-demia di San Luca in Rome and got support from – and was controlled by – the papacy, in particular Pope Clement XI (papacy from 1700 – 1721), who was a patron of the arts.

The various architects tried all types of geometrical forms over the years, covering the style periods from Late Baroque to Neo-Classicism. The Polish architect Kaspar Barzanka (1680 – 1726) won a first price in 1704 with a tetradic ‘Pubblica Curia’. The triangle (hexagonal) form was the theme of the Concorso in 1705. Filippo Juvarra (1678 – 1736) was the winner with his ‘Palazzo in villa per tre personaggi ’ (A palace for three noble persons of equal range). Carlo Stefano Fontana, the nephew of the famous Baroque architect Carlo Fontana (1638 – 1714), gained a second price that year.

QMRThis cross design of a city at the sea (Ancona) by Bernardo Antonio Vittone, an Italian architect of the Rococo period, won the first price in the Concorso Clementino in 1732. The fountain in the middle was a copy of Bernini’s ‘Four Rivers’ fountain on the Piazza Navona in Rome.

Vittone was a brilliant Italian architect, a pupil of Filippo Juvarra, and active in the Piedmont area. He attempted to prove the correct classic proportions of buildings in a mathematical way. The Capella della Visitazione at Vallinotto (near Carignano) is one of his masterpieces with a pagoda-like dome, and a hexagonal interior with alternating convex and concave chapels.

The cross, as the basic element of a plan, never lost its attraction in the Fourth Quadrant (IV) of Europe’s cultural history – starting in 1800. The sign was no longer a religious associated symbol, but became a tool for expression of the four-fold in the widest sense. It pointed to a new conception of space, which had found its own designated place in an infinite universe. The school of French architects at the beginning of the nineteenth century, like Ledoux, Boullée and Lequeu experienced the thrill of entering uncharted terrain on the boundary of Neo-Classicism and utopian dreams. The cross also featured in the design of futuristic cities, like Ledoux’s design for the city of Chaux and the model town ‘Victoria’ by James Silk Buckingham (1849; see fig. 666).

The comprehension of a wider field of division thinking at the beginning of the nineteenth century resulted in an explosion of creativity in knowledge, science, art and architecture. This (unconscious) process did not stop, but rather matured in the two hundred years of development. It is only now, in the context of the quadralectic philosophy, that the real meaning of the cross can be understood: it symbolizes the four division in the mind and provides a freedom of vision. The various quadrants are areas of different visibility (place), but also stages in a cyclic presence (time), which can be understood as unity.

The rigid cross was not the first choice in city development in the (European) cultural period after 1800. The fantasy of architects searched, in general, for either the mono-directed ‘axiality’ (like Haussmann’s developments of Paris in the 1860’s) or for curved lines, like the later English garden cities. Other large cities, like the Spanish Barcelona, favored the grid (Cerda, 1856). The checkered and cruel history of the German capital Berlin resulted in different types of city planning, notably in the period between the World Wars and after the reunion of East and West Berlin in 1989. Pluriformity was here the name of the game, searching for the use of new materials (like glass and concrete) and three-dimensional forms rather than a fixation of the plan.

Another characteristic of urban developments in the nineteenth and twentieth century was the scale: massality was at the base of many ideas. The Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier was probably archetypal in his approach towards city development. The majority of his initial plans did not materialize, but the spirit of his large-scale planning was present in innumerable urban development programs throughout post-war Europe. There is hardly any medium-seized or large city, which escaped the addition of army-like, planned suburbia to house the ‘masses’.

The cross-design functioned in the twentieth century building frenzy locally on a neighborhood or suburban scale, but this form did not pretend to dominate the field. There seemed to be no real need to express the four-fold ‘on the ground’. The religious component disappeared long time ago and the secular meaning of the cross as four compartments in space – with their own spiritual meaning – was not yet defined.

The acceptance of a quadralectic world view can change this trend. An understanding of its meaning brings the cross – as a distinct element in architectural design – back into the realm of public appreciation and might be subsequent inspire architects to use the sign again.

QMRThe square/rectangular model

The square in geometry is a regular quadrilateral. It has four equal sides and four equal (right) angles. The rectangular form is an offshoot of the square, characterized by unequal length of the parallel lines. The abstract movement in the visualization of a square is from the outside to the inside, making the space enclosed (limited). The difference in approach – either from the inside (cross) or the outside (square) – can be traced back to the difference in psychological setting between the second (II, 2) or third (II, 3) part of the Second Quadrant (see also fig. 184).

The city of Herat (Afghanistan) is a good illustration of the gradual nature of these two approaches in a historical urban setting. The inner city (madina) is enclosed by four walls with one gate in the east, south and west wall and two gates in the northern wall (GANGLER et al, 2004). The city is divided into four identical quadrants by two crossing main roads and the secondary streets originate from a regular grid pattern (fig. 560A-C).

560

Fig. 560A – A plan of the city of Herat (Afghanistan) combines a square outlay, following the cardinal points of the compass, with a cross pattern. The latter is formed by the two main roads, dividing the city in four quadrants. The original grid pattern is still visible in the secondary streets. The genetic history of the various geometrical elements is difficult to establish, just like the link with other square cities in the Middle East and China.

herat2

Fig. 560B – Herat. According to P.W. English (1970). ‘The Traditional City of Herat. Afghanistan”. Princeton Conference on Urban Planning in the Near East. ARDALAN, Nader & BAKHTIAR, Laleh (1973). The Sense of Unity. The Sufi Tradition in Persian Architecture. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago/London. ISBN 0-226-02560-8

herat3

Fig. 560C – Herat. Fig. 52 in: KOSTOF, Spiro (1991). The City Shaped. Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History. A Bullfinch Press Book/Little, Brown and Company. Boston, Toront, London. ISBN 0-8212-1867-0

GANGLER et al (2004) discussed the position of Herat in the context of similar cities like Bam and Zaranj (in Iran), Marv (or Merv; in Turkmenistan) and Bukhara (in Uzbekistan, see for their location fig. 405) and the many square cities in China. They dismiss the latter places as a source of influence, because the square Chinese cities only ‘have the geometrical division of the city space and the geometrical outline of the city walls in common’. However, a possible link with India cannot be excluded. There were close cultural contacts between India and Iran and knowledge of Indian treatises on architecture and urbanism (like the Manasara – The Essence of Measurements, ACHARYA, 1918) could have been present.

Michael E. SMITH (2007) made some valuable remarks about the ‘planned’ or ‘un-planned’ nature of ancient cities in his article on ‘Form and Meaning in the Earliest Cities’. He rejects the simplistic dichotomy of an orthogonal plan (planned) versus an ‘organic’ layout (unplanned). Further inquiry into the definition of urban planning leads to three levels of meaning (as identified by Amos Rapoport): respectively, a high, middle and low-level meaning in built environments.

The first, high-level meaning directs to supernatural symbolism and can be positioned – in a quadralectic interpretation – in the First (I) and/or Second Quadrant (II). The ancient cities were seen as images or ‘cosmograms’. Mircea ELIADE (1959), recognized four types of cosmological significance in his influential book (on the myth of the Eternal Return): 1. A parallel between heavens and life on earth; 2. The link between earth and cosmos in the axis mundi; 3. The cosmos as laid out in four cardinal directions and 4. The need for divination and augury to identify the sacred places on earth. The exploratory work of Eliade was carried further by Paul WHEATLEY (1971) and applied to the ancient cities of China.

The middle-level meaning refers to messages about identity, status and power. These things belong to the Third Quadrant (III) as the end members of a process of twofold comparison. The association in architecture is found in expressions of monumentality and formality. The former includes buildings whose construction uses more resources than would otherwise be necessary. The latter (formality) is a wide concept, which expresses itself in straight avenues (axiality), open plazas for public gatherings, symmetrical arrangements of buildings and sometimes enclosed areas with protective walls and gates. Michael Smith noted that ‘people developed a sense of identity with their city and ruler through their participation in such construction projects’.

The low-level meaning implies a negotiating of the built environment and is set in a general emotional context. The influence of a city and its patterns of access can be placed in a Fourth Quadrant environment. A modeling of (ancient) urban sites might reveal certain types of behavior, how people used their urban surroundings and give clues about the sociological and political setting. This theatrical aspect – familiar as a characteristic of the Fourth Quadrant (see the scheme in fig. 331) – is highlighted at this stage of inquiry.

Orthogonal city planning was singled out by SMITH (2007) because the use of right angles is often (wrongly) associated with a ‘planned’ approach. He distinguished various degrees of such layouts. They run from semi-orthogonal urban blocks (like Çatal Höyük in Turkey and Mohenjo-Daro, a Harappan city in Pakistan; fig. 561) to an integrated orthogonal plan (like Teotihuacan in Mexico or Angkor in Cambodia) to modular orthogonal plans. A great number of Roman cities, the Greek city of Olynthus and the pyramid town of Kahun (from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom) are examples of well-planned orthogonal city developments (CASTAGNOLI, 1971).

QMRFig. 561 – Part of the city of Mohenja-Daro, a Harappan city in Pakistan, shows semi-orthogonal urban blocks, which were only partly planned. The ‘Mound of the Dead’ is part of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization that flourished between 2600 and 1900 BC.

The square city – as a given entity – passes through various stages of meaning and can be assessed from different points of view. The religious and/or philosophical motivation is just one of the (four) feasibilities in the quadralectic school of thought. Ideas, materiality and sentiments are other vehicles of evaluation.

‘The Pivot of the Four Quarters’ is a scholarly work by Paul WHEATLEY (1971). It deals with the genesis of the city and the diffusion of city life during the Shang and Chou dynasties in China. The function of ceremonial centers is highlighted. The cultures of Meso-America, Central Andes, Africa, Mediterranean, Asia and eastern North America are brought together in a cross-cultural approach to search for a chronology of urban genesis. Finally, the cosmo-magical elements and symbolism of city planning (geomancy, orientation, axiality and the function of the center) are discussed.

The title of the book points to the importance of the capital surrounded by Four Districts. The Chou-Li (Rites of Chou), a classical book on politics, justice, army and religion, opens with the statement that the Emperor himself determined the four cardinal points. The subsequent quinquennial pattern of organization, which evolves from the four directions and a center, lifts the fourfold to a higher level, which is a hallmark of the Chinese culture.

These differences in division thinking might be one of the main causes of cultural misunderstanding between the East and the West. A formal definition in the quadralectic philosophy holds that a communication between partners with different forms of division thinking can only reach the level of the participant with the lower form. Even the four-fold way of thinking has to face this state of affairs.

Oracle bones dating from the Shang dynasty (1765 – 1123 BC) revealed a hierarchy of rectangular walled cities, indicating an early adaptation to this type of city plan. The term cheng referred to the inner enclosure of a city, while du was used for the capital. The syllable du is defined as a ‘walled town having an ancestral temple with the spirit-tablets of former rulers’. The term yi was used in the Shang and Zhou periods as an indication for small towns (STEINHARDT, 1990).

The square and grid-type was often used during the feudal empire of the Zhou (Chou) dynasty (1123 – 256 BC). A regional system of settlements was imposed upon the country with orthogonal land-planning methods and consisting of functional cellular units. The ideas behind the planning were practical (irrigation), but also had a philosophical and cosmological component (fig. 562). The world was seen as an infinite series of lines parallel to the cardinal directions. The results of this vision were highlighted in the ‘Tsing-tien’ land planning system by Meng-Tse (371 – 288 BC). The land was divided in sections of one ‘li’ (about 530 m) square, further divided in the form of the character ‘tsing’(#) into nine equal squares (or Fu) and each of these squares was divided into hundred lots or Mo.

562

Fig. 562 – The plan of the ideal city of Wang-Ch’eng followed a canonical plan as it was laid out in the K’ao-kung Chi (or Kaogong Ji, Record of Trades, presumably written in the first century AD), which is part of the Ritual of Zhou.

Xi’an (Hsi-an or Chang’an, meaning ‘Perpetual Peace’) was one of the Four Great Capitals of China (fig. 563/564). This city probably approximates most closely the canonical prescription of a Chinese city. The walls of Xi’an were first built in the T’ang Dynasty (618 – 907 AD) and repaired in the Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1644; see fig. 391 for an overview of the Chinese cultural history). The city conformed to the scheme of an ideal Chinese town with a quadrilateral (square) shape generated by a nine-square grid: three gates on each side, therefore, twelve in all.

QMRThe modern city of Xi’an in the central province of Shaanxi was once one of the old Chinese capitals and build according to the guidelines of the Ideal City. The city – here on a map drawn in 1982 – was an important center in the eighth century AD, at the eastern end of the Silk Road with over hundred Buddhist and Taoist temples, four Zoroastrian sanctuaries and two Christian churches and a mosque.

The traditional concept of Chinese urban planning reflects a cosmological order based on Confucian ethics and fengshui (geomancy). The former seeks a rational order with an emphasis on the centrality of relationship, while the second was focused on a harmony with nature. The ‘science’ of fengshui may literally point to ‘wind and water’. It can be a ‘mere short-hand for an environmental policy of “hindering the wind and hoarding the waters” (FIELD, 1998).

Stephen Field noted that fengshui had little to do with a physiological level, but required the belief in a force of destiny or fate. He would like to change the common (Western) translation of fengshui as ‘geomancy’ by the neologism ‘qimancy’, pointing to a divination according to qi – the concept of life’s energy or essence. The ‘breaths’ are everywhere and can be seen as a continually moving energy, circulating through the body. It would translate in quadralectic terms as the application of the CF-graph as the guideline of existence. The Chinese ‘ideal city’ was based on the very assumption that its squareness and subdivision represented the essential elements of living on this earth in much the same way as a quadralectic thinker would accept that (four) division and movement are omnipresent fundamentals.

The cosmic scheme was called the ‘Great Plan with its Nine Divisions’ (Hung Fan Jiu Chou), which was first mentioned in the ‘Book of Historical Documents’ (Shoo King). This ‘Great Plan’, with nine squares as its base, might represent an ancient Chinese categorical system (TZE-WAN KWAN, 1995). Spiro KOSTOF (1991) pointed, in his inspiring book on the city as a cultural artifact, also to the axial alignment, which is so typical in Chinese urbanism. The square or rectangular form was aligned in the four cardinal directions and a separation into functional zones (fig. 564) was eminent. Adjustment took place in line with topographical conditions.

564

Fig. 564 – A reconstruction of the city of Xi’an (Chang’an) during the Tang Dynasty (618 – 907 AD). The regular street pattern was a well-planned effort to reach for the Ideal City. The Ta-ming Palace is situated in the north eastern corner of the city with the Lotus Garden in the southeastern corner. The T’ai-chi Palace and the governmental centre lies on the northern part of the central axis.

The city of Xi’an became a model for the city of Nara (Heijokyo, near Kyoto (Japan). Emperor Shōmu made a new capital here (fig. 565). He moved again in 784 to Nagaoka due to the pressure of the Buddhists and their temple culture. Some ten years later he relocated one more time (in 794) to Heiankyo (capital of tranquility and peace, kyo meaning large city or capital). This latter place grew into the present-day Kyoto (Heian), situated on the central part of the island of Honshū.

The city was made up of quadrants

QMRFig. 565 – Heiankyo (Kyoto, AD 784) was a Japanese centralized town modeled after the Chinese city of Changan (Xi’an).

The period between 710 and 794 is called in Japanese history the Nara period, which was followed by the Heian period, lasting from 794 to 1192. The Heian period was an important era from an artistic point of view and the Japanese consider the period after the move to Kyoto as the epitome of their classical culture. The city became a focus of development of a kind of (religious) architecture, using mainly wood as the building material. The art of Japanese gardening had its influence all over the world. The Ryoanji (Deer Garden) and Daitokuji, both in Kyoto, are excellent examples of the kare-sansui style (dry landscape gardens), which have a highly symbolical meaning. The main elements of kare-sansui gardens are rocks and sand. The raked sand suggests rippling water and the rocks are chosen for their natural beauty and often named after various Chinese mountains.

Few temples were built in the original city of Kyoto during the Heian period, because the aristocrats did not like the Buddhist influences. This attitude had to change after the civil war when members of the samurai warrior class took power and moved the capital to Kamakura (near Tokyo).

This event in 1185 marked the beginning of the Kamakura period (1185 – 1333). The Zen sect of Buddhism became an important influence on the culture of that period. Many Zen temples – like the Kenchoji Temple and monastery and the Engakuji Temple – were built in Kamakura. Fires or earthquakes (1923) destroyed both original temples and the present buildings are reconstructions from a later date.

The Ashikaga shoguns took power in 1333 and moved the capital back to Kyoto. This part of the Japanese history is called the Muromachi period (1333 – 1573). Many Buddhist temples were built in Kyoto between the thirteenth and sixteenth century of which the Kinkakuji (Temple of the Golden Pavilion) is the most impressive. The present pavilion is also a replica (of 1955), since a monk set fire to the temple in 1950. Kyoto remained the capital and seat of the imperial court until 1868, when the emperor moved to Tokyo. Further imitations of Chinese (Tang) city layout can be seen in the plans of other eighth-century Japanese capitals, like Naniwa (Osaka), Shigaraki (Shiga) and Kuni (Kuni, Kyoto).

The Chinese influences in Japan seemed to diminish after the Nara period. However, the development of ‘geometric’ cities in China itself went through further stages. The square and rectangular layout was part of a wide range of city plans, which are distributed in time and place. Only a limited number are given here and further study is recommended.

The ‘Forbidden City’ in Peking (Beijing) was built in a similar fashion as Xi’an, but the two cities have also fundamental differences (STEINHARDT, 1986; KOSTOF, 1995). Xi’an (Chang’an) under the Tang dynasty (7th – 9th centuries) had the imperial palace at the north end of the central axis. Beijing and its capital scheme were of a much later date. It seemed that the Mongol ruler Khubilai Khan revived the old scheme in 1267, when he built his Mongolian capital Dadu on the present location of Beijing, just to confer his legitimacy of his non-Chinese regime. The later building of Beijing retained the resurrected type and the conservative Ming dynasty held on to the classical cosmology used for town planning. The palace is in Beijing in the center of the city (fig. 566).

The city was made up of quadrants

QMRFig. 566 – The two ancient schemes for Chinese imperial capitals, according to Spiro KOSTOF (1991). The royal palace of Chang’an is situated on the northern site of a central axis (top), while the palace takes a central position in the plan of Beijing (below).

Nancy STEINHARDT (1986) noted that the resemblance of the various imperial capitals was also due to the necessity of the rulers to ‘stick to the book’. Any deviation to the ancient plans could point to a doubt in the legitimacy of the government.

Beijing was laid on the principle of a cross superimposed on a square as was illustrated by Johann Fischer von Erlach (1656 – 1723) in his famous book ‘Entwurf einer Historischen Architektur’ (1721) (fig. 567). Fischer started the book in 1705 ‘as an innocent pastime’ and the publication took place in 1721. The work can be considered as the first worldwide approach to the history of architecture and tells something of the (scientific) scope of the European cultural unit-as-a-whole (see for the spirit of the time also fig. 498). The design of Peking (Beijing) – in Fischer’s book – was derived from a publication by Johan Nieuhof (1618 – 1672), working as a diplomat and draughtsman at the embassy of the Dutch East India Com-pany (VOC) to Peking in 1656. He published in 1665 an encyclopedic work (‘Het gezantschap … aan den groten tartarischen Cham’) containing some hundred and fifty prints, made after Nieuhof’s own sketches.

Fig. 567 – Design for the imperial palace in Peking, as drawn up by Fischer von Erlach at the beginning of the eighteenth century, after an illustration by Johan Nieuhof, an employee of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Beijing in 1656.

The city of Beijing has an archaeological history going back for more than three thousand years and its identification as China’s capital spans the Jin, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties (see fig. 391 for an overview of the Chinese chronicle). The ground plan of the capital shows through history a ‘moving’ square and rectangle (fig. 568). It started in the southwest part of present-day Beijing in the Liao Dynasty as Nanjing (the Southern Capital) in 936. Then it expanded in the Jin Dynasty in 1153 and was named Zhongdu (the Central capital). The position was in the area around Tianningsi. The Pagoda of the Tianning Temple, built in 1120, is an architectural master-piece of this period.

The city of Zhongdu was rebuilt, after the burning of the Mongols in 1215, by the founder of the Yuan Dynasty, Khubilai Khan in 1267. He called his capital Dadu (Great Capital). Khubilai was the grandson of Genghis Khan, the famous Mongolian ruler, who died in 1227. The place was known in Marco Polo’s accounts as Cambuluc. The Yuan Dynasty fell in 1368 and the city was later rebuilt by the Ming Dynasty (under the third Ming emperor Zhu Di) in 1421, when it got the name Beijing. The first emperor of the Qing dynasty, Shun Zhi, retained the capital in Beijing in 1664 (fig. 568).

The design was a cross

QMRThe various stages and positions of the capital Beijing through the ages. 1. Nanjing (Liao Dynasty); 2. Zhongdu (Jin Dynasty); 3. Dadu (Yuan Dynasty) and 4. Beijing (Ming-Qing Dynasty).

The palace complexes of the Forbidden City are an important element in the urban structure of Beijing, because they are situated at a strong north-south axis (of 7.8 km) in the grid pattern. Four temples flank the complex, one in each cardinal direction. The Yue Tan (Temple of the Moon) stands to the west. The Ri Tan (Temple of the Sun) stands to the east. Di Tan (Temple of the Earth) is situated in the north, whilst Tian Tan (the Temple of Heaven) stands to the south. The location of the temples was established during the Ming Dynasty and follows the philosophical school of the ‘Five Elements’ (Yin Yang Wu Xing).

Some other remarkable ‘planned’ Chinese cities will be mentioned here, but it should be noted that this selection is only a fraction of the many Chinese cities, which were built along geometric lines.

North of the city of Xiaguan is the small town of Dali (Yunnan province), which has a square shape. It was founded in 937 AD and was the seat of the independent kingdom of Dali in the tenth century. The town is situated on the western shores of a lake and is now a tourist centre.

Luliang in Yunnan Province (east of Kunming) is a well planned town with a bell tower in the center (SCHINZ, 1989; fig. 569). ‘The town was formerly a department (zhou) with special military functions. The Confucius Temple is situated in the northwest corner and the Holy East Mountain Temple (Taishan) was the main building on the east side. The southern part has the Temple of the God of War (Guandi) and the great Buddha Temple’. The southwestern corner of the city was modified to accommodate the changing river when the wall was built in 1382 AD at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty.

QMR The city of Luliang in the Yunnan province is a county town east of Kunming, which has all the characteristics of a planned town. This aerial photograph (from 1944) shows the square city, divided by a cross in 4 x 4 blocks with four gates. The walls were built at the beginning of the Ming dynasty in 1382. The design was modified in the southwestern corner to adapt to change in the course of the river.

Much further to the northwest in the Liaoning province of China has the town of Kaiyuan a special historical significance, because it was the place where the first Ming emperor reorganized the defense of the Great Wall in the fourteenth century. Kaiyuan, north of Liaoyang, had a strategic position and designed with a classical square plan (just like many other Chinese cities of that period). The County Magistrate, a Confucius Temple, City God Temple, a mosque and a tea market where all included in the walled area (fig. 570).

The city is a quadrant

QMRThe city plan of the old town of Kaiyuan in the Liaoning province, situated in the northeastern part of China, has a square layout and an internal cross, with four city gates. 1. County Magistrate; 2. Confucius temple; 3. City God Temple; 4. Drum tower; 5. Mosque; 6. Tea market; 7. The site of the proposed palace for the imperial prince of the Ming Dynasty. There are similarities of this plan with the city of Datong in Shanxi province.

Shenyang is the capital of Liaoning province and the most important city in northeastern China (fig. 571). The city was also known as Mukden (in the Manchurian language). Chinese settlers lived here from the first millennium BC onwards and the first imperial capital was established in 1625. The inner city walls and the palace were built shortly thereafter. The North Mausoleum of Abukai – who was the first Manchu emperor of China – and his palaces (1627 – 1643) are the core of the city. Both are centered along a central axis. The outer city wall was built in the eighteenth century to protect the urban area. Most walls were demolished since 1949, but two gates and one corner tower of the inner city have since been rebuilt.

The construction of the Mukden Palace (Shenyang Imperial Palace) followed the example of the Forbidden City in Beijing, but also has its own Manchurian style. The imperial residence moved to Beijing in 1644, when the Qing Dynasty replaced the Ming Dynasty (see fig. 391). The palace lost its status as an official residence of the Emperor, but Shenyang remained a prefectural city. In modern times, it has developed into a major industrial city. There are no slums or makeshift shantytowns because of the cold winters.

The city is a quadrant

This plan of Shenyang, the capital of Liaoing province, shows the square city enclosed in later expansions. A semi-circular wall around these extensions makes up a new unity.

The ‘Atlas of Chinese Walled cities’ (WALLACKER et al, 1979; KNAPP et al, 2000) is a storehouse of different city plans from all over China, indicating a whole range of geometric designs. The various plans in the book – from the circular, cross to the square and rectangular – proof that city planning was a well-developed art in the cultural history of the country. It is hard to guess, if the actual ground plans and layouts of the walled city represented some spiritual significance (like a reference to a square earth) or was born in a practical sense of enclosure and protection. Most likely, a combination of these factors was employed.

The circular defense system occurred in places like Haing-Tzu (thirty kilometers south of Chiu-chiang) and Chia-Ting Hsien (near Jiading, north-west of Shanghai). The latter walled city had crossroads inside, running NW-SE and NE-SW. The outline of the defense systems is still visible on aerial photographs (like Google Earth: 31º 23’00 00” N, 121º 15’00 00”). Kuei-Te (fifty kilometers east of Sui-hsien) was also defended by a circular moat, but the inner city was a square.

The square design is probably the most prominent within the complex of walled Chinese cities. The outlay of Beijing is well known, but there are many more examples, from large to small. Only a few plans are given here (fig. 572). Further examples can be found in KNAPP et al (2000).

The city is a quadrant

QMRThe cities of Feng-Yang-Fu and Feng-yang-hsien, some 105 kilometers southeast of Meng-ch’eng, discloses the proximity of two different types of city building.

The concept of the square city might have its widest application in China, but other parts of the world also used the same layout. The square (or rectangle), as the ‘Third Quadrant’ expression of division, has always been a powerful tool to create visible visibility (see fig. 242). Regular planning by orthogonal subdivisions has been a hallmark of urban design from very ancient times up to modern days. Often some governing body, dealing with the general distribution of land, is necessary to regulate the urbanization. The chessboard pattern (grid) is the most likely outcome if a spirit of egalitarianism prevails. The results are commonly more irregular if building is left to the individuals in an ‘organic’ process.

An interesting visualization of a square city is given in a manuscript in the John Rylands University Library in Manchester (Syriac Ms. 16, fol. 118r). The city of Jericho is depicted here with seven concentric walls and has reminiscence to a labyrinth (fig. 574). This illustration connects the (Third Quadrant) representation of a defense system (The Walls of Jericho) with the (Fourth Quadrant) theme of the labyrinth. The Biblical story that the city was eventually taken by betrayal adds a further psychological element to the efficiency of defense systems and labyrinths. Human wickedness can overcome the endeavors to create safety. Solutions to problems might just as well be found in the First or Second Quadrant, either in the form of (religious) faith or inventiveness. That is, in the end, the lesson of the Battle of Jericho.

The cities are quadrants

QMRThe cities of Feng-Yang-Fu and Feng-yang-hsien, some 105 kilometers southeast of Meng-ch’eng, discloses the proximity of two different types of city building.

The cities are quadrants

This plan of Shenyang, the capital of Liaoing province, shows the square city enclosed in later expansions. A semi-circular wall around these extensions makes up a new unity.

The city is a quadrant

QMRThe representation of Joshua for the city of Jericho is a historical theme, which has captured the imagination of artists throughout the ages. The Biblical story tells of the battle of Jericho, which was won with help of a prostitute, who gave entrance to the city after Joshua’s troops had encircled the city seven times.

Historic and relative simple examples of square designs are known from the countries under the influence of the Celts (ROSS, 1970/1986). The rectilinear earthworks, known in Europe as Viereckschanzen, date back to the second or early first century BC (fig. 575/576).

575

Fig. 575 – Plans of pagan earthwork precincts or sanctuaries in Europe as given by ROSS (1970/1986).

576

Fig. 576 – Several plans of pagan earthworks known as ‘Viereckschanzen’ in Germany as given by WIELAND (1999).

The German expression is composed of the word ‘rectangle’ (Viereck) and ‘entrenchment, redoubt’ (Schanze) and is sometimes abbreviated to VES. The places are regarded as holy places or sanctuaries, but a profane use cannot be excluded (like a cattle enclosure). The majority of the historic sites are situated in France, Southern Germany (Baden-Württemberg, Bayern) and Czechia (Bohemia). Some hundred and fifty VES’s are known from Germany alone. Furthermore, locations in France (Gournay), Belgium (on the Alfsberg near the municipality of Kontich near Antwerp), the Netherlands (near Nijmegen) and England (the bank-and-ditch enclosure in Ashill, Norfolk) have been studied. The latter location is a Romano-British site, which yielded many pieces of pottery (decorated daub) in two deep timber-lined wells (GREGORY, 1973).

Günther WIELAND (1999) gave a detailed description of a number of (German) ‘Viereckschanzen’, which had their square or rectangular layout in common. The length of the walls is in the order of 100 x 100 meters or less. The trench was about two meters deep and the walls were at least three meters high, originally probably covered with sharp-pointed wooden palisades. Wieland noted the relation of the housing pattern within the VES to the layout of the so-called Umgangstempel (see fig. 101 – 103) (fig. 577).

QMRFig. 577 – Plan and reconstruction of a building in the south-eastern corner of the ‘Viereckenschanze’ Bopfingen. The upper building to the right is a reconstruction with a pyramidal roof. The lower picture to the right has a higher middle part, like a Roman ‘Umgangstempel’. The period of occupation was probably between the third and the first century BC.

The square and rectangular design of settlements seems to be a universal human approach to city building. The practical aspect might be the main reason to go ahead along straight lines. For instance, the map of the thermal city of Dax (France) gives a layout with ramparts as an ‘enceite tetrarchique’ (square city walls) and four gateways. The diversion of the river Adour gave extra protection (fig. 578). The city was originally built in the fourth century around a ‘Fontaine Chaude’ (hot springs) and was reconstructed and modified in 1465 with forty-six turrets. The early ‘Roman’ city layout was smoothly adopted in the Renaissance to create a ‘new town’ with the square shape as its leading principle.

578

Fig. 578 – A map of the city of Dax, a thermal city in south-western France (l’Aquitaine) shows the practical application of the square design. The city had a Roman origin (Aqua Tarbellicae) and was improved in 1465 with forty-six turrets and four gateways.

The straightness of the square design got a new ideological impulse in the religious quarrels, which marred the European history in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Many of these troubles were based on a difference of opinion in the way of division thinking. The European cultural history had reached its Pivotal Point (PP) in – or around – the year 1500 (see fig. 267). Dualism reached a marker point and many lines of thoughts could now be pushed to their limits.

One of the consequences of this historical setting was the start of an age of unprecedented discoveries. Another was a deep confrontation about the interpretation of the dogmas of Christian belief. The revolution against the Roman Catholic Church was initiated in Germany by Maarten Luther (1483 – 1531) in 1517 and carried forwards by the Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli (1484 – 1531) and the French theologian John Calvin (1509 – 1564).

Their protests are generally read in terms of religious bickering, but it is suggested here to interpret their efforts as a ‘struggle’ between different forms of division thinking. The eternal confrontation of the narrow and the wide, which is typical for any (quadralectic) communication, culminates in the third part of the Third Quadrant (III, 3). This position can be pinpointed for the European cultural history as the period from 1500 to 1650. The ‘victory’ (of the higher forms of division thinking) occurs subsequently in the fourth part (III, 4), which lasted in Europe from around 1650 to 1800.

The Huguenots were a group of French Calvinists, who had their own national organization. A conflict broke out with the French Catholic king in 1562, which resulted in an official recognition in 1570. However, this victory was short-lived because the queen mother Catherine de Medici instigated a hate campaign against the Huguenots, which culminated in the St. Bartholomew’s day (24 August 1572) when all Protestants leaders were killed, probably about twenty thousand people. This massacre can be interpreted as the zenith of oppositional thinking in Europe. The struggle for (political) power used the division in religious opinions to reach its goal.

The situation of the Huguenots improved in 1576 when they were granted religious freedom. The Edict of Nantes in 1598 legalized the situation and gave the Huguenots their rights and liberties. The Edict was revoked in 1685 by Louis XIV and persecuting of the Huguenots started again. Some four hundred thousand of them left the country. This historical situation provides an example of the internal differentiation in Europe, which is so typical for its cultural history.

Some of the exiled Huguenots brought their ideas into the open, like the German architect and engineer Georg Böckler, when he designed the town plan for the city of Onoltzbach (or Ansbach), situated to the southwest of Nürnberg (Bavaria, Germany) (fig. 579).

QMRFig. 579 – The city plan of Onoltzbach (Ansbach) by the German architect Georg Andreas Böckler (1686) had a religious inspired layout based on absolutist ideas.

The city had a reputation for a free printing press, which had such diverse books published like a Hebrew grammatical work by Joannes Meelfuherus (1607), Andreas Goldmayer’s ‘Harmonia Chymica’ (Onoltzbach, 1656) and Salomon Schweigger’s ‘Kurtzer Ausszug der Reysbeschreibung nach Constantinopel und Jerusalem’ (Onoltzbach, 1661).

Georg Andreas Böckler (1644 – 1698) was the editor of the first German edition of Palladio’s work (Die Baumeisterin Pallas, Oder, Der in Teutschland Erstandene Palladius: Kommentierte Und Illustrierte Ubersetzung Der Ersten Zwei Bucher Von Andrea Palladios I Quattro Libri Dell’architettura). He also wrote the ‘Architectura Curiosa Nova’ (1664), which set the trend for the hydrodynamics of fountains and provided designs for grottos and garden pavilions – a fashionable item at the time (see Ch. 2.3).

The city plan of Onoltzbach (Ansbach) by Böckler was never executed in the form he suggested, but a copper engraving by Johann Puschner and published by Johann Enderes in Schwabach in 1740, shows a rectangular city with a cross layout (fig. 580). It seems that at least the idea of a cross design had caught on. The historically interesting map of 1740 indicated a further park layout to the east along orthogonal lines, like it was fashionable in the beginning of the eighteenth century.

580

Fig. 580 – A city map of Ansbach (Onoltzbach) from 1740 shows a three division between a semi-circular northwestern part, a bastide-like middle part and an orthogonal park (Hopgarten) to the east.

A present aerial view of the city (Google Earth) still indicates the historical three divisions of styles, with modern parts of suburban housing added to the southwest and the southeast. The oldest part (Altstadt) around the St. Gumbertus Abbey (with its recently restored Wiegleb Organ) has a semi-circular street pattern, which is opened up to the south by the Medieval Herrieder Tor. The latter was transferred in 1751 into an octagonal Baroque building by Johann David Steingruber. The second part is the crossing of the Karlstrasse and the Karolinenstrasse, forming the intended extension of the city by Böckler, in a cross form. The third part is the square layout of the Hopgarten of the castle of the Margraves of Brandenburg-Ansbach (with the Orangery – built in the gardens from 1726 to 1743 – as its principal building. The modern suburban extensions can be regarded as the fourth member in a continuation of various ideas of city planning: from the circular (I) to the cross (II), limited to the square (III) and ending in the pluriformity of the linear-grid type (IV). The Roman figures between brackets point to the graphical expression of the quadrants (see also fig. 242).

The city development in the second half of the twentieth century never strayed far from the straight and linear. The plan of the Cidade dos Motores in the jungle wilderness near Rio de Janiero (completed in 1949) was designed by the architects Paul Lester Wiener and José Luis Sert. The plan is archetypal for the incorporation of the idea of the square in the post-war city development, which occurred on a worldwide scale (fig. 581).

The city is quadrants

Fig. 581 – The Cidade dos Motores (Motor City) in Brazil is a design plan by the American immigrant architects Paul Lester Wiener and José Luis Sert, which epitomizes the ideas of squareness in urban development in the second half of the twentieth century.

It can be said, to conclude this chapter, that the square cities of the world comprise a multitude of occurrences with their own history in place and time. It is a challenge to distinguish the position of an ‘original’ square city within the intermingling of various other types of city layouts.

According to KuilmanSome cities are born in the mind. The outlay of such a city, as given in descriptions and drawings, is a deliberate attempt to express certain ideas about living and the place of a human being on this earth. The subject of cities has connotations with a quadralectic environment, because it is in the multitude that an advance in the width of thinking can be most fruitful and effective.

The development of cities in the mind is, in essence, ‘unnatural’, because most things in nature grow in a ‘natural’ way. People are living in groups, building their habitats, as circumstances require. There should be a bond between the people, the geography (the earth) and the city in order to function. Cities in the mind defy these rules (or communication) and are therefore only possible when the bare essentials of living together as a community are solved.

The fictive development of a city can be a ‘wild’ idea of the Second Quadrant, but it can also be a structured plan developed in the Fourth Quadrant of a communication. Both quadrants are involved when a city is developed in the mind, but it is fair to say that the Fourth Quadrant setting is the most important in the present approach. A quadralectic researcher is not only interested in ideas as such, but also in the development of the ideas within a structured cadre of division thinking.

Many cities have never been built. There are times that one might regret the lack of persistence or possibilities in the past, but on other occasions one can also be glad that certain designs never made it past the drawing table, because the implementation would have been a disaster. Numerous architectonic designs have been produced to make a declaration – rather than expressing an intention of building. Architecture is in that sense close to art, which can also have a multitude of objectives of which the actual product is only a catalyst to make certain ideas visible.

From a quadralectic point of view there are four types of cities in the mind:

———————— The Ideal city —————– Ch. 4.1.4.1

———————— The Future city ————— Ch. 4.1.4.2

———————— The Virtual city ————— Ch. 4.1.4.3

———————— The Quadralectic city —— Ch. 4.1.4.4

QMRThese different types have some relation to the intentions (visibilities) of the various quadrants, but these connections should not be taken too stringent. There are many examples of plans, which cross the boundaries of the above-given division. Ideal cities can be projected in the present, but also in the future. Cities can be born in pure fantasy, but also labeled as visionary when elements of the design turned out to be useful. Virtual cities carry the message of an immaterial reality, which can be from the past, the present or situated in the future. Finally, the quadralectic city is the apotheosis of the previous types of cities, following the lines of (quadralectic) thinking on a conscious level and positioning the different types of cities of the mind in a structural and philosophical framework.

1. The first step in a creative process of city development can be envisaged as the mind (of an observer) wondering over the possibilities and coming up with certain ideas. These actions take place primary – but not exclusively – in the First and Second Quadrant of a communication. The Ideal City is the outcome of psychological inventories whereby the ‘best of all cities’ is chosen as number one. The direction in time is primarily backwards (which is the major characteristic of an inventory): we have seen it all, and now we pick the best. Despite the necessary actions to reach the final goal of the ‘ideal’, the overall outcome is static. A (single) choice is the end of the creative process.

2. The Future City, on the other hand, looks ahead. Lines of possibilities are drawn from the present to a point in time where certain aspects of the city are enhanced and perfected. Therefore, the search for the future will be dynamic, there will always be more: more time, more possibilities, more knowledge and more opportunities. The unbounded fantasy to reach for a historic identity is often a strong motivation to design these types of cities. Another necessity is a political will to create a vision.

3. The Virtual City – or a place, which only exists by actualization – is again a static affair. Elements are taken from the visible reality and put together in cyber space. Modern computer visualizations are able to create a complete virtual world, making the pictures look almost better than reality. This virtual world and the cities therein create their own ‘immaterial material’ world, which is no longer satisfied with the natural aspects of the world.

4. Finally, the Quadralectic City is a compilation of the previous types of cities of the mind. It takes the initial four-division of a physical and meta-physical reality into account. Clearly, such an approach can only be dynamic. It uses all the view points of lower division thinking and adds its own wider view. However, the very moment the Quadralectic City is put to the test of reality, it seems to disappear. The essence of the Fourth Quadrant is lost when the multiplicity of ideas about the (virtual) form is taken from the drawing board and given to the actual builders. The city is then a Third Quadrant entity, just like all the cities, which exists today.

The various cities of the mind will be discussed with a special reference to their position in a universal communication. The ‘classical’ entity of the Ideal City (I) will get most of the attention, proving that the ‘Renaissance’ (or Third Quadrant) outlook is still with us today. The feeling of achievement and the spirit of retrospection are strong (post) Modernist characteristics, which cannot be denied.

It seems that the enthusiasm for grandiose Future Cities (II) has left us at the beginning of the twenty-first century, hence its scanty coverage. It seems that the existing, mature civilizations of the world (like the Chinese and the European cultures) have other interests in their ‘old age’. Their priorities are not geared towards the future. They enjoy the insight of a long temporal presence and its subsequent wisdom. But why are future cities not planned in the United States or other upcoming Asian cultures? Large-scale ideas about future development are at present only found in the oil-rich states around the Persian Gulf.

The medium of the Internet has significantly contributed to the idea of the Virtual City (III). Many games – which are basic forms of a Fourth Quadrant communication – are set in futuristic environments and virtual life becomes almost real in the Internet society of the game Second Life.

The quadralectic city (IV) is at present totally unknown, since the quadralectic philosophy has not yet seen a breakthrough.

QMRThe phenomenon of the ‘ideal city’ has haunted many civilizations in particular those that reached a certain stage of maturity. It can be said, as a statement, that cities represent in every civilization the hallmark of their success and are proof of its achievements. Once this assertion is realized on a collective scale – which is on a time-scale after cities have made their mark – thoughts can linger on the actual character of the city. The reality of the city-as-phenomenon can be subject to contemplation and questions can be asked regarding its being. The idea of an Ideal City is part of the total interactions of human togetherness.

Plato’s ideal city, as sketched in his ‘Republic’, is probably not the best example to introduce the ideal city in relation to its counterpart of bricks and mortar. The ideal city is used in his book as a metaphor of the polis, an abstract notion of the community. The philosophers’ recommendations were never written down with the intention of actually building a physical city. Plato (c. 427 – 347 BC) wrote the ‘Republic’ (in Greek: ‘Politea’) when he was about forty years old and had reached maturity (in the Third Quadrant of his life). A further development of ideas was – at the Pivotal Point in 387 BC – still ahead of him.

The main themes (in Plato’s ideal city) are concerned with justice, rules and the division of power. He examined the state by analogy to the soul. The city-state was in his view macrocosmos on the same level as the soul was microcosmos. The latter had – as Plato already proposed in his ‘Phaedrus’ – three parts, which corresponded to three different kinds of interests, three kinds of personalities and three kinds of virtues (fig. 624).

624

Fig. 624 – An interpretation of various three-divisions, as given by Plato in his book ‘The Republic’ (ROSS, 1996/2002), but now placed in a quadralectic context. The invisible invisibility of the human soul (I, First Quadrant) takes shape in a particular human interest (II). The division of interest gives rise to different types of human characters in a class (III). The latter can be typified by various virtues, depending on their position in the class (IV).

Justice, as the fourth member in the Fourth Quadrant, applies to all previous subdivisions, and offers the ‘solution’ to the problems created by opposition in lower division thinking (rulers – citizens; corrupt power/tyranny – rule of the Guardians, etc.). The root of all evil is, according to Plato, an unlimited desire, which can only be held in control by justice.

The position of ‘justice’ indicates that Plato’s three-division, born in the spirit of the Third Quadrant, reaches short of its aim. The limit of a division based on opposites has to include the virtue of temperance, or moderation, but who will define and execute a limitation to the desires? Only a sense of justice can transcend the arbitrary nature of a boundary. Plato felt intuitively that such an entity should be ‘above’ the visibilities of the other virtues. A transgression into the world of four-fold thinking would solve the problem of limitation once and for all.

The archetypal ideal city should be based on the four principles of wisdom, courage, discipline and justice. The ideas about an ideal city point towards an escape, away from reality and starting afresh in the imagination (or make it happen). The Greek spirit of colonization made such an option quite plausible, like it did for all colonialists after them, who invaded foreign lands and started building their dream (city).

The second reason for starting an ideal city could be philosophical, i.e. a test case of the process of finding the essence in the phenomenal reality and transpose the principal ideas to a new level. This option is also a form of ‘escapism’ but more inner-directed, searching for the quintessence of the already existing.

La ville idéale of Francesco Eiximenic, a Catalan friar living from ca. 1340 – 1409, is an early example of a European effort to create an ‘ideal’ urban environment (fig. 625). His ideas were already employed for over a century in the bastides of southern Europe and could not be called very originally. The ideal city of Eiximenic is a synthesis of elements from the city of Carcassonne (the position of the chateau), the bastides of the Aquitaine (the position of the church) and those of the Gascone (quadrillage).

Fig. 625 – La ville idéale of Francesco Eiximenic is a synthesis and apotheosis of different urban designs, which were used in the grand expansion movement of the twelfth and thirteenth century in (southern) Europe.

The attraction to the gridiron plan and a 8 x 8 checkerboard division of his city layout suggests a possible sympathy of Eiximenic for the four-fold, but the rest of his intellectual message – as expressed in numerous works of which the five-parted El Crestiá (About Christ) was the most ambitious – has a strong oppositional flavor, pointing to lower division thinking. The thirteenth century in Europe was, above all, an age of reform. Eiximenic brought the ideas of the founder of the Franciscan order, Franciscus of Assisi (1182 – 1226) to its finest fruitation. Francis’ ideas about poverty, peace and tolerance were admirable, but their direct inspiration sprung from their opposite sources, like wealth, war and intolerance.

Most of Eiximenic moral recommendations are based on the implicit assumption and firm acceptation of bipolar thinking. His eschatological ideas and millenarian spirit are a direct result of such simplifications (he foretold the coming of a thousand year Sabbath). Furthermore, his approach to the reign of the Islam was seen in an oppositional setting. He regarded the Islam as a Saracen sect, with an enticing materialistic religion, prone to hedonistic excess. He foretold a rather short lifespan for this religion.

The main shift in the thirteenth century in the European cultural history was a downgrading of division thinking from the multiplicity (and higher division thinking) of the Second Quadrant (600 – 1200) to the limitations (and lower division thinking) of the Third Quadrant (1200 – 1800) (see also fig. 267). This enormous collective move was the base (and ‘explanation’) of many of the theological and social reforms of that era, on the one hand, but also of the frantic building of new town and cities all over Europe, on the other hand.

A large bibliography of the ideal city is available, since the topic has many references with social and political points of view. A recent book by Günther FEUERSTEIN (2008) is highly recommended as an introduction of the various aspects of the ideal city. He deals with the subject in an exhaustive way, starting with the myths and legends in Antiquity, to the expression in the Middle Ages and Renaissance and continuing into modern times with the visualization of ideal cities by philanthropists, dreamers, travelers, artists, innovators and visionaries. The book provides a wealth of data related to the ideal city, but does not position the phenomenon in a particular environment of division-thinking. In addition, the books by Hanno-Walter KRUFT (1989) and Ruth EATON (2001) provide well-documented overviews of the Ideal or Utopian city.

C.A.O. van NIEUWENHUIJZE (1966; Chapter III; pp 74 – 148) started in his reflections on ‘The Ideal City or the Varieties of Metasocial Experience’ with a distinction between cities in terms of an idealistic and/or empirical entity. He noted that the city agglomeration is not only a demarcation from the countryside, but also from barbarism. The root of the word ‘city’ is found in the Latin ‘civitas’ and its association to civilization points to a deeper level of ‘the crude facts of human conglomeration’. A city can be seen in an empirical sense as an urban concentration of people (1), but also as ‘an organized society in which one socio-cultural entity achieves its own self-realization’ (2). The latter intention is maintained in the French word ‘cité’, with its connotation to ‘society’.

The dual aspect of a city (ideal – empirical) as given by van Nieuwenhuijze, is, from a quadralectic point of view, a distinction between the position of an observer in the Second and/or Third Quadrant. It would, in modern quadralectic setting, be necessary to extend the view on the city to include the First and Fourth Quadrant. Van Nieuwenhuijze noted (on a Third Quadrant level) an interaction between the empirical city and the ideal city, which can be presented as a range of degrees of ‘congruence’.

This computational setting has a familiar ring to it, since the meaning of the CF-graph (a representation of a communication cycle between two four divisions) is also expressed in terms of approach (intensio) and alienation (remissio). Van Nieuwenhuijze called the ‘extremes’ positions now ‘mutual confirmation’ (congruence) and ‘mutual rejection’ (contrast). His description of the process has a reference to the intermediate character of higher division thinking. ‘The confrontation between ideal and phenomenal city may either entail the conformation of the latter or its rejection; but usually the judgment will end up somewhere in the balance between the two extremes’.

The main trends in relation to an existing social order are given in fig. 626 (van Nieuwenhuijze (1966; fig. 6). The fourfold representation has certain similarities with the (quadralectic) quadrants, but its way of generation is different. The diagram gives in fact a double pair of opposing entities, which are ‘crossed’ and result in a four-division. The first pair consists of contrast versus congruence and the second of (constructive) consolidation versus (destructive) disintegration. These pairs ‘provide a continuum fit for location of positions and thus capable of serving as a frame of reference for a typology of ideal city phenomena’ (p. 79).

Fig. 626 – The main trends according to which the various types of ideal city conceptions can be distinguished. Two ranges of positions (contrast – congruence and consolidating – disintegrative) are combined in a (four-fold) cross setting to offer a psychological measure of concern for any existing social order (van Nieuwenhuijze (1966; fig. 6).

The combinations provide, indeed, a field of interaction. However, their generation is a combination of two-divisions, while the quadrants in the quadralectic field of interaction are born in a dynamic interplay (shift) of two four-divisions. This fundamental difference in terms of division thinking should be noted.

The outcome of van Nieuwenhuijze’s double-oppositional combination is a typological chart where the subdivisions of his four types of ideal city conceptions can be positioned. These four types (views) are:

—————————— 1. Pragmatist ————————— speculative

—————————— 2. Normative ————————— speculative

—————————— 3. Mythical-idealist —————— speculative

—————————— 4. Practical —————————— practical

The various types will be discussed briefly, following the line set out by van Nieuwenhuijze (1966). His kaleidoscopic examples, although given in a pseudo-quadralectic environment, are noteworthy and relevant for the present discussion of a special kind of architecture.

Fig. 627 – This diagram of predominantly pragmatist approaches points to trends of socio-economic action. The scheme was given by van Nieuwenhuijze (1966; fig. 7). The different axes (NS and EW) have the same meaning as in fig. 626.

1. The first setting of van Nieuwenhuijze’s concept (fig. 627) exhibits a concentration of pragmatists’ approaches in the center of the field, which is fairly uncommitted to the various determinants. Liberalism (of the laissez-faire type, I A in fig. 627) places the phenomenal reality in an optimistic light and does not want a movement of the (static and conservative) facts to an uncertain, dynamic-idealistic order. The present order should be kept in a state of freedom, allowing enterprising individuals to reach their personal goals. This type of liberalism led the United States and subsequent the rest of the world into a crisis at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The unchecked and blind greed of financial institutions in a fast moving international market came to a (temporary) halt in 2008 when the world-wide pyramid game collapsed.

Social thinkers, like Adam Smith (1723 – 1790), pointed – in his influential book ‘The Wealth of Nations’ (1776) – to the division of labour as a means to improve production. That was not an ideal, but a given fact in every day’s reality. His historical position in the European context was situated at the end of the Third Quadrant (1200 – 1800). The French Rationalists (Physiocrats) searched in their Encyclopaedie for (past) facts and figures. Rationalism and moralism came to the forefront, with little reference to revolutionary achievements.

This attitude changed dramatically in 1789, when the French Revolution opened the gates to a much wider and creative way of thinking. The following period is now defined as the Fourth Quadrant (1800 – 2400) of the European cultural history. An Age of Idealism (1775 – 1850) started, with Germany leading the way in the person of Goethe (1749 – 1832) and others.

Four subvariants of the pragmatic approach were distinguished by van Nieuwenhuijze, depending on the influence of the existing order. The ‘pre-established harmony’ of the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646 – 1716) reflected a move in a direction with increasing congruence and consolidation (I B in fig. 627). He defined a doctrine saying that the present state is ‘the best of all possible worlds’. His definition of the monad as a non-interacting, ‘window-less’ and immaterial substance is similar to the notion of the First Quadrant.

A revisionist-social trend is found in the area of increasing consolidation and growing contrast (I C in fig. 627). There is a maximum of real concern about the existing order, which might take shape in welfare state planning and large building projects.

Finally, there is also a disturbing version of socio-economic movement, with increasing contrast and disintegration. The categorical minimization of the existing order (I D in fig. 627) is defined in the lower left-hand corner of the diagram of the main trend (fig. 626). The French philosopher and author Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778) is a representative of this frame of mind. His reaction against corruption of social customs and institutions was a preliminary expression of the things to come. He noted, in contrast to Leibniz, an established disorder, and he suggested a social contract as a solution.

2. The normative element means that the ideal city features as a norm in regard to the phenomenal city. The positions (of the concept) are situated on the vertical line that goes through the center of the scheme (fig. 628).

QMRThe third type of the mythical-idealist view (towards the relation between real and ideal cities) occurs in four variants as given by van Nieuwenhuijze (1966; fig. 9) and here reproduced as fig. 629. Four ‘extremes’ can be recognized. These positions (in fig. 629) include: 1. A maximinization of existing order (III A, myth, ritual); 2. A minimization of existing order (III B; millennium expectations, revolutions); 3. A minimum real concern about existing order (III C; apologetics, cultural pessimism) and 4. A maximum real concern about existing order (III D; post colonial, nationalism).

629

Fig. 629 – The ideal approaches in the relation between the phenomenal and ideal city are here represented by four extreme positions in the typological chart (van Nieuwenhuijze, 1966; fig. 9).

In the upper right hand corner (of fig. 629) is the relation between the existing habitat and an ideal city transparent: the community is the center of the universe. Congruence and consolidation are both well-developed leading to a state of natural confidence. Or, like the French anthropologist Claude LEVI-STRAUSS (1955) put it: ‘One’s own world is the center of all worlds, center of total divine-cosmic order and harmony’. Lévi-Strauss (1908 – 2009) studied in the years before the Second World War a village (Kejara) of the Bororo tribe on the Rio Vermelho (Brazil). He found a circular placement of huts around the men’s house as the kernel of their social and religious system (fig. 630 left).

Left: A map of the Bororo village called Kejara on the Rio Vermelho (Brasil), showing a circular placement of huts. Right: The village of Tumbang Lahang of the Ngaju Dayak of Central Kalimantan (Borneo, Indonesia) is reduced to the basic directions in this ‘holy’ drawing with supernatural importance (after Schärer, 1946). It is a quadrant shape

When the Salesian missionaries converted the Bororo people and ordered them to leave their village and live in huts in parallel rows, they lost their cosmic bearings. It can also be argued that the conversion had something to do with it. The geographic setting had a universal value placed within a natural tradition. Social structure and religious belief coincide in the expression of the buildings and is celebrated in myth and ritual.

Another example of a close relation in the existing order between the phenomenal and the ideal (city/village) was given by a missionary, who studied the understanding of divinity by the Ngaju Dayak people of Central Kalimantan (Borneo) (SCHÄRER, 1946). The original/phenomenological village (Tumbang Lahang) became structured in a four-fold way in the superior/ideal world (fig. 630, right). Everything surrounding the village was foreign and horrible (OTTO, 1917/1936; p. 70).

Completely different is the notion of those people, who see the ideal city as a necessary alternative for the visible abode. They are prepared to give up the present order and/or accept a miracle (from above) to reach for the new type of spiritual existence. Religious groups with visibility expectations are the more prominent specimens in this part of the specter (fig. 629; III B).

The prophet Mohammed, as the founder of Islam, is an example of a person, who believed that he could transfer the existing Arabian society by a revolution – and was successful as well. His initially powerful movement resulted in a spiritual heritage, which found its way in a ‘cité islamique’, the Islamic way of life (as indicated in subdivision fig. 628; II A). However, the use of force, which was so popular in the early days (seventh century), is still part of the cognitive luggage of the movement/belief.

Developments in the early twenty-first century – like the destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York (11th September 2001) – prove that the ideals of an Islamic Society could have a grim, revolutionary face. However, very few people understand that this act of terrorism had nothing to do with the message of the Islam. It is, in bare essence, an attack on higher division thinking, which is now prevalent in the Western society.

The French Revolution (1789), at the end of the European Third Quadrant, was also born out of a demand for reform and the acceptance to overthrow the existing order by force, but here the direction was just opposite and the aim was a widening of division thinking. The outcome can be seen – in hindsight and despite losses in terms of human lives – as successful. Europe, as a cultural entity, was about to enter its Fourth Quadrant and needed the perceptual freedom and width of thinking to progress.

Less revolutionary, but still concerned with a radical change in society, are those people who keep an ideal and real city far apart and are interested in neither. They have a minimum real concern about the existing order (fig. 629; III C). This state of mind often leads to cultural pessimism, brought out by people, who despair about their own culture. The defeatists can be found in any cultural setting, but a certain width of thinking is necessary to escape and exceed the bonds of the ideal and the real. The pessimists with a synoptic view feel, for this very reason, at home in a Third and/or Fourth Quadrant setting.

The Islamic civilization has a long tradition in fighting against its ‘decadence’. The Western tradition did not stay behind with an upsurge of apologetic books in the early twentieth century. Prolific writers like Oswald Spengler (1880 – 1936), Arnold Toynbee (1889 – 1975), Jose Ortega Y Gasset (1883 – 1955), James Burnham (1905 – 1987) and Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) made their name in the field of a pessimistic cultural history. All of these writers were effectively Fourth Quadrant thinkers rebutting the constraints of lower division thinking, but were severely damaged by the Third Quadrant events (World Wars) in their phenomenal world.

The very opposite to this detached attitude is found in the lower right-hand side of the diagram depicting the idealist approaches (fig. 629; III D). The interaction between the ideal city and the reality is intense up to a degree of worrying (is this the Promised Land?). The spirit of achievement is found in many declarations of independence (of former colonial countries): the revolution is over and the ideal city is about to begin in reality. New development plans can now be made, in earnest. The problem of the once-fresh leaders – like Nasser (in Egypt), Kemal Atatürk (in Turkey), Nkrumah (in Ghana) in the past century and Mugabe (Zimbabwe) in the present one, is the inspiration to keep the candle burning. Often their idealistic spirits are traded in for the principles of power once they have reached their direct political goals.

QMRFig. 631 – The position of the new city from a builder’s point of view. The area to the left in an attempt by van Nieuwenhuijze (1966; p. 138, fig. 10) to fit anarchism in the scheme. The hatched area to the right includes the practical efforts to materialize the ideal city.

4. The fourth type of ideal city conceptions is the practical approach. The people, who are ready to build them, maintain the most realistic attitude towards the ideal city. Their place in the typological chart is astride the horizontal line (see fig. 631; IV). Nieuwenhuyze followed, in his builder’s approach of the ideal city, an oppositional course: the left side forms the destructive, dysfunctional and disintegrational part of the scale (anarchism) and the right side stands for consolidation and construction in a functional setting. The situation is rather black and white here, while history gives sufficient examples of realistic designers with a wider point of view.

The Scottish biologist and innovative thinker Patrick Geddes (1854 – 1932) is mentioned by van Nieuwenhuijze (1966; p. 128) as the father of modern town and country planning. His ‘Charting of Life’ (published in 1927) consisted of four steps: Acts – Facts – Thoughts (Dreams) and Deeds. These entities were placed in a swastika-type of cross with a 9 x 9 division, not unlike the Chinese division of the ideal city (see fig. 562). Some (undated) sketchy material of his thinking process is given in an informative book about Geddes by Volker WELTER (2002).

An anti-clockwise movement through the quadrants is envisaged to get the linear sequence as given above. It seems that this direction was a one-way affair and any clockwise movement (like it occurs in higher division thinking) was missing. Geddes’ ideas about the social side of living and the clearing of slums brought him to the very beginning of the meaning of city life: civics. The civil society needs a fuller co-ordination and harmony, in Geddes’ view, like the instruments of the orchestra. He regarded the city as a living entity aiming for its highest sensory perceptions (fig. 632).

QMRA DJ mixer is a type of audio mixing console used by disc jockeys (DJs). DJs playing music for dancers at a club use the mixer to make smooth transitions between different songs which are played on sound sources that are plugged into the mixer. These sound sources could be turntables, CD players, or iPods. A "scratching" DJ uses the mixer in combination with turntables or specialized DJ CD players to create unique sound effects. The DJ mixer also allows the DJ to use headphones to cue the next song before playing it. Most DJ mixers can only accommodate two turntables or CD players but some mixers (such as the ones used in nightclubs) Can accommodate up to four turntables or CD players.

QMRThe Masterplan of Chandigarh as developed by the American architect Albert Mayer in the years 1947 – 1951. La Corbusier further developed the basic outlines of this plan when he took over the assignment as official advisor and planner in 1951.

The French architect Le Corbusier (pseudonym for Charles-Édouard Jeanneret; 1887 – 1965; see also fig. 315) took over in 1951 as the principal ‘architectural and planning advisor’. He used the fundamental elements of Mayer’s original plan, but made major changes as well. The city had a checkerboard pattern (fig. 637) and sectors (neigh-bourhood units), which were divided by function. There were four zones besides the residential sector: a political, an industrial sector, a commercial zone and an educational sector. This hierarchy was probably chosen for the same socio-political reasons as given earlier for Doxiadis’ development of Islamabad.

It is made up of quadrants

QMRFig. 637 – The city of Chandigarh has a grid-like structure, but irregular shaped areas soften the intermediate space of the separate blocks. The actual work started in early 1951 and most of Phase One was completed by 1965.

The capitol sector (Sector 1), flanked by the Rajendra Park and the Sukhna Lake, comprises four major buildings by Le Corbusier: the Punjab and Haryana Secretariat, the State Assembly Halls (fig. 638), the High Court and the Museum of Knowledge, and is situated closest to the Himalayas foothills, but distant from the town center proper (higher numbered sections).

QMRThe rear side of the Legislative Assembly of Hariana and Punjab in Chandigarh. The monumental concrete portico faces the central esplanade of the government complex. This picture does not show the combination of a pyramid, a hyperboloid – resembling the ’cooling tower’ of an electricity station – and a lift tower, which sits on the roof of the Hall. They are supposed to evoke the idea of ‘astronomical instruments’, but are a rather messy lot. Le Corbusier did not design any heating or cooling in the buildings, since the architecture should give a natural ventilation. However, the concrete absorbs and retains heat and cold, leaving the rooms hot in summer and cold in winter.

The Sections 22 and 23 were two of Chandigarh’s earliest neighborhoods. The houses are distinguished by latticed brick or tile sunscreens covering the exterior walls. This type of sun protection was at the time also pioneered in Venezuela and known as the ‘Breathing Wall’ (ARONIN, 1953) (fig. 639). Le Corbusier’s concept has since been found not very practical and replaced in modern Chandigarh by deep verandas, which keep out rain and sun and allow life to move in and out (as propagated by Aditya Prakash, head of Chandigarh’s College of Architecture).

639

Fig. 639 – The concept of the ‘Breathing Wall’ was pioneered in Caracas (Venezuela) in the middle of the twentieth century. It was used by Le Corbusier in the older sections of Chandigarh.

A curiosity in the city of Chandigarh is Sector 45, which is saved from ‘Chandigarhisation’ and is still a real village. However, the Chandigarh Tribune (of June 29, 2001) described the living conditions in Burail Village as ‘Corbusier’s nightmare’ with unhygienic conditions, filth and crime. The authorities blocked off and searched the area for the Jaipur bombers in May, 2008 – without any result other than intimidation.

One may ask on this occasion if there is, indeed, some truth in the relation between architecture and the ways of living. A place like Burail Village may act as a last resort for the criminal side of society, where authorities do not have sufficient access and control. This dark, but real side of inter human communication will always be present. The participants, either deliberately or in a desperate attempt to survive, will search for – or is condemned to – the architecture, which suits them – in the same way as the middle class looks for decent houses in save neighborhoods and the upper class prefers exclusive villas with large gardens on secluded sites.

The ‘ideal cities’ of India and Pakistan, which were realized some half a century ago, can be placed in the psychological-religious setting of the population of these countries. The cyclic nature of the Hindu world view means that any ‘progress’ causes problems (COLENBRANDER, 2003). The European culture searches for new forms, whereas the creative people of the Asian subcontinent use old forms repeatedly. Hinduism is – from a Western point of view – a religion of defeat and stagnation. However, this time-bound impression might change when quadralectic thinking, including a cyclic awareness, becomes more widespread in the last stages of the European cultural visibility (1950 – 2250).

The Islam (of Pakistan) is a linear affair with a strong sense of unity. This dedication can be traced back to a lower form of division thinking. The Islam was, in essence, a revolt against the higher type of division thinking of Christianity in its years of formation. Early Christianity looked for a compromise between the Judaic and Hellenic point of view (DELISLE BURNS, 1947), which resulted in the acceptation of the doctrine of the Trinity – or three-division. It should also be noted that the initial message of Christ – based on giving love and living in peace – was born under the historical influence and within the context of the Roman cultural period in the fourth part of its Third Quadrant (1 – 125 AD; see fig. 88).

Mohammed and his followers in the seventh century AD believed in one undivided God and saw in the Christian ‘solution’ of the Trinity a form of polytheism. The message of Islam aims at a form of ‘oneness’, which can be reached by reducing the number of divisions in the initial way of thinking. The ‘heresies’ of the eastern Churches, like the Arians and Monophysites – of which hardly anybody understands now the crux of their learning – were attempts to compromise with the Semitic conception of the unity of God. In the end, all their efforts had to do with a ‘struggle’ for a particular form of division thinking – of which the importance for the communication of God and men was well understood at the time. Every type of division thinking tends to have its own god(s) and beliefs.

The ‘oldest’ of the four twentieth century realizations of an ‘ideal city’ is the capital of Canberra in Australia. Again, a politically motivated need of urgency to establish a national identity was the main reason for the project. Competition between the existing colonial capitals of Sydney (New South Wales) and Melbourne (Victoria) could not allow the other to become the capital of the Commonwealth, so the idea of the founding an entirely new capital was born. A site was chosen at the end of the year 1909 after ten years of struggles and an international competition for its design was initiated in May 1911. A year later Walter Burley Griffin (1876 – 1937) won the competition (fig. 640). The breathing wall is made of quadrants

QMR The ‘ideal city’, as seen so far in an executed appearance, is a political affair. This observation is even more so in the lesser-known, communistic town planning projects, which were built in the last century. The urban process in Russia and the countries under their influence was fundamentally part of a political-economic system. (Ideal) city building and planning became an expression of social and bureaucratic relations, wherein the state was the main land developer and provided the housing. J.C. FISHER (1962) noticed four basic operational principles in the materialization of this condition in his article on the planning of a socialist city:

—————————- 1. Standardization

—————————- 2. Restrictions in size of town

—————————- 3. City center is civic not retail centre

—————————- 4. Divisions into neighborhood units

The planned development of an urban society was part of the political decision making in the USSR (BATER, 1980). The Russian revolution of 1917 changed the ideological blue print for society and egalitarian Marxist-Leninist thinking put its marks on society. One of its aims was a removal of the differences between town and countryside. The nationalization of the land implied that the land use allocation was in the hand of planners and was not dictated by economics. Any form of privatism was socially undesirable. Self-interest was subordinate to the interest of the society as a whole and conformity was rewarded with the benefits of socialism. The abolition of the private sector also mends an absence of competition in marketing and a preference for public rather than private transport.

Tsar Peter I (1672 – 1725) introduced European rationalistic town planning into Russia, when he founded Saint Petersburg in 1703 at the mouth of the Neva River. The city became the administrative capital in 1712. The French architect and garden designer Jean Le Blond (1679 – 1719), a student of Le Notre, was appointed as the ‘Architect-General’ of the new city in 1716. His plan of St. Petersburg (fig. 641) was never approved, just like the projects for the parterres of the Summer Garden and a residence for the tsar at Strelna. Only a cornerstone was laid in 1720, a year after Le Blond died of smallpox and the project was abandoned. Le Blond’s design for a formal garden at Strelna was implemented nearly three centuries later (2003) as part of the reconstruction of the Constantine Palace.

QMRFilarete’s ground plan for the city of Sforzinda is inspired by the octagon with eight towers and eight gates at the end of a radiating street pattern of sixteen streets.

Antonio Averlino (c. 1400 – 1469) or Filarete wrote his architectural treatise ‘Trattato d’Architettura’ between 1451 and 1465 for Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan. Filarete’s ideal city was called Sforzinda (1461 – 1464) and is generally recognized as being the first in his sort. The ideal city of Sforzinda has an octagonal ground plan generated by two squares turned over forty-five degrees (fig. 645). It comprised eight towers at the tips of the circumference and eight gates (porta) in between. The gates have four turrets just like the cathedral (duomo). There are sixteen main streets radiating from a central piazza. Midway each street is an open square, eight of which have a church in the center. The civic places are divided in governmental, administrative, religious and economic quarters.

The well-known plan of the city in figure 645 is just one possibility, because Filarete also considered another design, where the city is represented as a 3 x 3 grid on – what seems to be – a rough map of the earth (fig. 646). The central part is surrounded by a labyrinth-like pattern, with no entrances or exits. The earth, firmly enclosed in the four pillars at the end of the earth, is surrounded by ‘the great unknown’. The city of Sforzinda is in this picture situated in the greater part of Africa and the Middle East. Filarete, being a Christian, might have envisaged the position of Jerusalem in the middle of a 3 x 3 grid. The variation in designs reveals, if nothing else, a searching soul lost in a numerological labyrinth, fascinated by geometrical patterns as messengers of order.

16 is the squares of the quadrant model

QMRFig. 646 – This ideal city by Filarete had a 3 x 3 grid, and was situated on a map of the world and placed in a labyrinth. This setting offered, just like his more familiar setting of an octagonal in a landscape, sufficient food for thoughts about living in a new order.

The idea of the octagonal shape of Sforzinda as a geometrical element was used as an inspiration of ‘Kontext Kunst’. The artist Sabine Siegfried (born 1955) applied the sign in her project ‘Längsache,’ as part of the ‘Hamburg Projekt 1989’. She expanded the motive of an octagon, which was originally part of the early nineteenth century Bleichenbrücke (Bleichen Bridge) over the Alsterfleet in the centre of Hamburg. A recovered octagonal element was then placed between two adjoining figures, which were probably part of the building when it was used as the head quarters of the Gestapo in World War II. Without the element in place, people often called the police, thinking of an attempted suicide (fig. 647).

It is set up as a quadrant

QMRFig. 649A – The circular version of Albrecht Dürer’s ideal city as given in his book ‘Etliche underricht, zu befestigung der Stett, Schlosz, und Flecken’ (Nuremberg, 1527).

The city is in the shape of a quadrant

QMRFig. 649B – The square version of Albrecht Dürer’s ideal city, in the same book as given in fig. 649A.

Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528) gave in his book ‘Etliche Underricht, zu Befestigung der Stett, Schlosz, und Flecken’ (1527) a description of a city, which had a reminiscence to Morus’ Amaurotum, the central city in Utopia (fig. 649B). He called his quadratic outlay a ‘Festschloss’, pointing to the kingly castle, which was surrounded by a hierarchical set of buildings. Morus’ description, on the other hand, aimed at decentralization. People were forced to move house at regular intervals for the sake of equality. Dürer did not stick to a square version, but also suggested a round city (fig. 649A).

The toying with geometric forms seemed the main motivation in those early days of the Ideal City. However, soon the intentions shifted – under the pressure of increased city development – to more practical applications. The element of defense, executed in elaborate patterns of city walls, grew in importance during the sixteenth century. Even so, even here, the idea of defense was often more pressing than practical intention. The outlines of city walls acted in that respect in the same way as the perspective: they provided an occasion to develop pleasing geometry. Some models of ideal cities by various authors are given in fig. 650.

QMRFig. 650 – Ideal cities from the Renaissance with the emphasis on defense (city walls). 1. La Sforzinda by Filarete (1460 – 1465); 2. Fra Giocondo (Giovanni of Verona), c. 1433 – 1515; 3. Girolamo Magi (or Maggi) (c. 1523 – c. 1572) (1564); 4. Giorgio Vasari (1598); 5. Antonio Lupicini (c. 1530 – c. 1598); 6. Daniele Barbaro (1513 – 1570); 7. Pietro Cattaneo (1537 – 1587); 8/9; Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439 – 1502).

Dürers’ ideal city was taken to the test some fifty years later when Chancellor Jan Zamoyski (1542 – 1605) founded the city of Zamosc in southeastern Poland in 1579. The Venetian architect Bernardo Morando, a native of Padua, modeled the place on Italian theories of the ‘ideal city’. Zamosc is now a perfect example of a late sixteenth century ‘Renaissance’ town. Its prosperous past is reflected in the Armenian merchant’s mansions, which line the town square (measuring 100 by 100 meters) The Polish city had a hard time during World War II when Himmler decided in 1942 to make the place the First Resettlement Area (Himmlerstadt). Subsequent ‘ethnic cleansing’, to make room for German nationals, resulted in the death of some thousand residents.

Zhovkva, a city in the Lviv Oblast (province) of western Ukraine, is another example of a Renaissance ‘ideal city’. It was founded in 1594 by the Polish military commander Stanislaw Zolkiewski as one of the fortified towns to protect the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The city has the outlay of a human body with the castle as the head and the church as the heart. The four entrance gates in the town walls were the arms and the legs. The church of St. Lawrence was turned into a warehouse under Soviet rule, but restored after Ukraine became independent in 1991. Zhovkva is since 1994 a heritage site and restoration work is now a first priority.

Pietro Cataneo (1510 – 1569) – in his book ‘I quattro primi libri di architettura’ (1554) – noted that ‘a city is ideal if it is capable of defending itself, if it can’t be occupied, plundered, and burned down. However, that means the city has to be a regular polygon, a quadrangle, pentagon, hexagon, or decagon, and the bastions and outworks are their quoins’. He gives forty-three woodcut plans of ideal fortified towns in his book with no particular preference for a geometrical form. Most of them were loosely based on the Roman ‘castrum’ idea and Cataneo referred specific to the ‘Castrametatio’ from Polybius.

A collection of examples of ideal city plans appeared some fifty years later by the French Huguenot Jacques Perret (de Chambery), consisting of twenty-two plates engraved by Thomas Le Leu and called ‘Des Fortifications et Artifices Architecture et Perspective’ (1601). Polygonal defense features with quadratic and radial layouts were descendants of similar examples of the Italian Renaissance. These designs were also a further development of a geometrical theme, which was present in the mediaeval bastides of France. It was the Bolognese engineer-architect Girolamo Marini, who combined (in 1545) Renaissance and French ideas into the city of Vitry-le-Francois (Marne) at the orders of king Francois I. The city had a gridiron plan (612 x 612 m) around a central square (117 x 117 m). The Calvinistic Duke of Sully (Maximilien de Béthune) used a similar city plan in 1608 in the foundation of Henrichemont (Cher).

all of the ideal cities are based off of quadrants/crosses

QMRVitry-le-Francois was designed in 1545 by the Italian engineer Hieronimo Marino. Fig. 1 in: REPS, John W. (1965/1969). Town planning in Frontier America. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. LCCN 68-20877

Vincenzo Scamozzi (1552 – 1616), a follower of Andrea Palladio and one of the most successful and prolific architects of Venice, further enhanced the building of fortifications and fortified cities along geometrical lines. The design for the garrison city of Palma Nuova (1593), near Udine (Italy) was of a masterpiece. The treatise ‘L’Idea della Architettura Universale’ (The Universal Idea of Architecture) was his opus magnum and was published in 1615 in Venice. It can be seen as the last of the Renaissance works on the theory of architecture and its influence was widespread over Europe (OTTENHEYM, 2006/07).

The construction of Freudenstadt, in southwestern Germany, started in 1599 as a ‘Vierzeilenplan’ by Heinrich Schickhardt (fig. 651). The ideas of this basic design should be placed in the geographical and political situation of the time at that part of Germany. The Germanic area was in the seventeenth century a patchwork of some three hundred loosely organized sovereign territories. One of these areas, in which Freudenstadt is situated, is called the Palatinate (Pfalz) and includes territories on both sides of the Rhine River between the Main and Neckar tributaries.

The city is a quadrant

QMRFig. 651 – The outlay of the ideal city of Freudenstadt, SW of Stuttgart (Germany) was designed by architect Heinrich Schickhardt (1558 – 1635), following a commission of Herzog Friedrich I of Wurttemberg. The central square is divided by a cardo and decumanus in the tradition of the Roman geometers. This lay out resembles the board game of Merels, also known as Nine Men’s Morris or Mills.

Freudenstadt

The city is a quadrant

QMRFig. 652 – The city of Christianopolis, as proposed by Valentin Andreae in 1619, was an ideal city situated on the island Caphar Salaman. A harmonic life along the lines of the Rosicrucian, aiming at universal knowledge, was imagined.

Johann Valentin Andreae (1586 – 1654) visualized in his ‘Christianopolis’ (1619) a Calvinistic society like Geneva, with obedience to civic authority. His Societas Christiana was a response to the Rosicrucian society, which had an influence early in his life. Later he dissociated himself from the movement. Christian Rosencreutz had published two pamphlets in 1614 and 1615, the Fama Fraternitatis and the Confessio Roseae Crucis. They sparked a sense of enthusiasm throughout Europe as a secret society with an alternative for the Christian belief. Christianopolis had a laboratory as its central building rather than a temple. Andreae-as-a-person had a bifurcated life, changing from a young esoteric thinker into an orthodox Lutheran preacher around the year 1634.

Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) contributed to the idea of a utopian city by the creation of his ‘New Atlantis’. The book was written in a first draft about 1614 and posthumously published in 1626. Since that year, the forty-page book was reprinted thirteen times between 1627 and 1685. Bacon lived in a world of opposites and was convinced that most men are torn by contraries and antagonisms, but he regarded himself as an intermediary. His ‘New Atlantis’ was just an effort to achieve that goal, ‘an image of himself made perfect’. The result is a formal and detached society, with little or no emotion. All people are happy in Bensalem, the city of peace, and ‘there is not under the heavens so chaste a nation as this of Bensalem, nor so free from all pollution or foulness’. Bacon offers a four-fold scheme to the visitors:

‘God bless thee, my son; I will give thee the greatest jewel I have. For I will impart unto thee, for the love of God and men, a relation of the true state of Salomon’s House. Son, to make you know the true state of Salomon’s House, I will keep this order. First, I will set forth unto you the end of our foundation. Secondly, the preparations and instruments we have for our works. Thirdly, the several employments and functions whereto our fellows are assigned. And fourthly, the ordinances and rites which we observe’.

Salomon’s House was ‘ the noblest foundation, as we think, that ever was upon the earth, and the lantern of this kingdom. It is dedicated to the study of the works and creatures of God’. A centralized scientific organization constitutes the core of Bacon’s fantasies. The thirty-six Elders of Salomon’s House were an independent collegiate body dealing with the discoveries and put them to good and holy use. His secretary William Rawley recalled, after Bacon’s death in 1626, that his master deserved to be an architect, but was forced to be a workman and a laborer ‘to dig the clay and burn the brick’.

Tommasso Campanella (1568 – 1639) was a Dominican monk from Calabria in Southern Italy. He studied the Aristotelian arguments on the immortality of the soul and regarded Aristotelian doctrine as false, because it clashed with the temporality of the Christian soul. His dialectical dispute is a typical exercise in the third part of the Third Quadrant (1500 – 1650) of the European cultural history. He felt attracted to the empiricism of master Bernardino Telesio of Cosenza (1509 – 1588), who taught that knowledge is a sensation and that all things in nature possess sensations. Campanella published his first work ‘Philosophia sensibus demonstrata’ (Philosophy demonstrated by the senses) in 1592, in defense of Telesio.

His belief in the coming of the Spirit (in the year 1600) had a strong millenarian character. This eschatological view resulted in twenty-seven years of imprisonment, during which he wrote a number of books. The most famous is the ‘Civitas Solis’ (The City of the Sun, 1602/1623). This book is a poetical dialogue between a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitallers and a Genoese sea-captain as his guest. The latter tells of a place called Taprobane (possibly Ceylon or Sumatra) immediately under the equator. The inhabitants led him to the City of the Sun, divided into seven rings named from the seven planets. The City had four streets and four gates, pointing to the main directions of the compass. Palaces filled the levels. Steps led up a hill with a spacious field with a circular temple in the middle.

Campanella continued to describe the system of government under the great ruler Hoh or Sole (Metaphysic) with three princes of equal power: Pon (Power), Sin (Wisdom), and Mor (Love). ‘All business was discharged by the four together, but in whatever Metaphysic inclines to the rest are sure to agree’ (THOMAS, 1998). Campanella apparently had some sort of tetrachy in mind here. Science had a crucial position in the ‘Città del Sole’ and occupied the majority of the managers of the state.

The sense of commune was important. The race in the City of the Sun was managed for the good of the commonwealth, and not for the benefit of private individuals. Domestic affairs and partnerships were of little account. Campanella was, despite his sympathy for the multiplicity, a firm believer in the art of war. It can also be argued, if a society in which women, who dye their hair or use high-heeled boots, are condemned to capital punishment, is a pleasant place to live. On the other hand, the idea that everybody has only four hours of duty everyday, while the rest is spent in learning, debating, walking and play, sounds admirable.

Campanella was released from prison in 1626 and lived in Rome until 1634, after another imprisonment of three years in the Italian capital. Then he fled to France and was received at the court of Louis XIII. He got protection of Cardinal Richelieu, which enabled him to die in peace in a monastery on the rue Saint-Honoré in Paris in 1639. His illusion to establish a universal organization of society under a new papacy, as set forth in his treatise ‘Monarchia Christianorum’ (1593), remained a dream and the return of mankind to a state of innocence turn out to be a chimera. His life was that of an idealist with sympathy for the expression of the senses, but chained by the limitations of his (lower) division thinking.

The city of Richelieu in Central France (Indre-et-Loire) was a town planning effort by the eponymous church leader Cardinal Richelieu (1585 – 1642) (fig. 653). The city might qualify as an ‘ideal city’ of the later, ‘sentimental’ type – in this case an expression of political power transformed into stone. Cardinal Richelieu was since 1624 the First Minister of the king Louis XIII. The reign of this duo straightened the way to absolutism in the name of raison. Richelieu adhered to the maxim that ‘the ends justify the means’ to reach his political goals. His three division of the specific roles in society consisted of 1. Nobility, which could use arms under the control of the king; 2. The clergy, which kept to religious matters and 3. The common people living in obedience, following the laws. The authority of the crown was secured by force. Political repression was the result in a zero tolerance policy of which the Huguenots were again victims when their resistance was crushed in 1631.

The city is a quadrant

QMR According to KuilmanFig. 654 – A view of the position of some Ideal Cities on the CF-graph of the European cultural history between 1200 – 2100 related to the mechanisms of imagination and the characteristics of the subdivision of the Third Quadrant. OP = Observational Present, or the position of the writer of this book at the time of presentation.

The four stages of the development of the Ideal City in the Third Quadrant (III) of the European cultural history (1200 – 1800) are determined as follows:

1400————————————————————————————————-

1. The Ideal City as a psychological entity becomes only feasible after the city-as-phenomenon had reached a widespread appearance in Europe. Francesco Eiximenic (c. 1340 – 1409) proclaimed the ‘bastide’ type of city as ‘la ville idéale’.

Alberti’s De pictura (1435) was first written in Latin and then translated into Italian under the title Della pittura (1436). It opened the mental road to perspective as a tool to visualize the city and toy with architectural forms. His other book De re aedificatoria was a large and expensive book, which was not fully published until 1485, after which it became a major guide to architects. In Alberti’s view ‘the architect-planner was the high priest of the ideal’ (MANUEL & MANUEL, 1979).

Piero della Francesca (c. 1412 – 1492) gradually gave up painting some twenty years before his death and started to study the theories behind the laws of perspective and proportions. His book De prospectiva pingendi (On Perspective in Painting) was published between 1474 and 1482 and was dedicated to his patron, the Duke of Urbino. His treatise ‘De Corporibus regularibus’ is a further analysis of the foundations of his pictures.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519) never drew an ideal city – except some elements on Ms B fol. 16r and 37v in 1488 – but his descriptions are vivid enough to enable modern scholars to make a reconstruction. His city was characterized by rigorously geometric urban planning, with a network of canals, which were used both for commercial purposes as well as a sewage system. Furthermore, his division in an upper and lower section of the city is noteworthy.

1500 ————————————————————————————————–

2. The Ideal City as a utopian city was first proposed by Thomas More in 1517. It was a critical review of the city with an optimistic outlook about reforms. The city – as a representation of society – became an instrument to generate ideas. There was no direct need to shape the city in mortar and brick or aim otherwise on visibility. In stead the architect-visionary searched for a new expression of aesthetic values. Some of these ideas had a political and/or psychological nature, while others were directed towards technical improvements, which could be used one day in the real world. Symbolic forms, both in a geometrical as well as a biometrical way, were used to experience the classic beauty, like it was given by Filarete in his description of Sforzinda and also surfaced in the work of Francesco di Giorgio and others.

1550 ————————————————————————————————

3. The Ideal City as a construction of defense was already recognized by Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519) when he was in the service of the Duke of Milan between 1482 and 1499. He advised the Duke on architecture, fortifications and military matters and used his skills as a hydraulic and mechanical engineer. Leonardo’s imagination wandered over the ideal city and preferred decentralization of crowded cities (like Milan) into separate communes. His sketch of a two-level city with a lower level for the commoners and an upper level for the aristocracy is obviously inspired by some form of oppositional thinking.

The aspect of defense and fortification became increasingly important after Cataneo’s ‘Four Books on Architecture’ (1554) and reached a zenith in the ‘art of war’ as visualized by Simon Stevin in his books on ‘De Stercten-bouwing’ (Leiden, 1594) and ‘Castrametatio, dat is Legermeting’ in 1617. The design of the ideal city was left in the hands of the architect-engineers. A combination of geometrical Spielerei with lines and angles and its practical application in fortifications brought the essentials of an ideal city further into the background. Cities like Scamozzi’s Palmanova and later Menno van Coehoorn’s Coevorden, Groningen, Zwolle, Nijmegen, Breda and Bergen op Zoom in the Low Countries were pragmatic cities. Their ‘geometry in the service of war’ was devoted to the needs of the day.

The hexagonal city of Grammichele (1693), near Catania on the island of Sicily, was built after the destruction by an earthquake of the old town of Occhialà. It is a remarkable example of a city in which the spirit of the ideal city was not corrupted.

The hexagonal plan of Grammichele (Magnus Michael), Sicily (Italy). In: BURKE, Gerald (1971). Towns in the Making. Edward Arnold. ISBN 0 7131 5816 6

Grammichelle2

Central hexagonal square of Grammichele (Sicily, Italy) (Photo: Marten Kuilman, 2012).

The modern circular town of Nahalal in Israel – designed by Richard Kauffmann and founded in 1926 – also had some of the idealistic spirit of geometry left, not aiming at defense.

Many fortifications in France, on the other hand, which were supervised by the French military engineer Vauban (1633 – 1707), hardly qualified to be included in the concept of the ideal city. However, it cannot be denied that the roots of these elaborate city plans, like the city of Lille (1709), are firmly embedded in its psychological background.

1600 ————————————————————————————————

4. The Ideal City as a spiritual escape was noticeable in the diffusion of More’s ideas in the second half of the sixteenth century. La repubblica immaginaria of the Italian poet Ludovica Agostini (1536 – 1612) dated from 1585 and was caught in the new ascetic-egalitarian spirit of the Counter-Reformation. Agostini’s manuscript of his Christian ideal republic was kept in Pesaro for nearly four centuries and only printed in 1957. The Croatian polymath and philosopher Patrizi of Cherso was mentioned as a fore bearer of an ideal city as the carrier of social and political ambitions, but was far away from its actual architectural realization.

The Christian utopia of Andrae’s Christianopolis, Bacon’s New Atlantis and Campanella’s City of the Sun surfaced around the annus mirabilis of the genre in 1620. The rather vague sketches of Swedenborg in the second half of the eighteenth century were probably the last of the sentimental uttering on ideal cities in the Third Quadrant. Maybe idealism was not dead at that time, but it changed its expressions. The city as a representative of the society (polis) had lost its appeal and Romanticism took its place. The mood shifted towards the manipulation of Nature and a search for its esthetic possibilities. The utopian spirit of the ideal city was often replaced by its opposite: the dystopian city, which was characterized by chaos and disorder. T.S. ELIOT’s poem Wasteland (1922; 1936/1963) pointed to such a metropolis, positioned in the ruins of Western civilization:

———————- Who are those hooded hordes swarming

———————- Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

———————- Ringed by the flat horizon only

———————- What is the city over the mountains

———————- Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

———————- Falling towers

———————- Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

———————- Vienna London

———————- Unreal

the hexagonal structure is made of quadrants

The intentions of the ‘ideal city’ were fully blurred by the time that the French artist Jean Jacques Moll put his design of ‘Napoleonville’ on the drawing board in 1809. Emperor Napoleon, at the height of his power, asked Moll to draw a town for hundred thousand citizens in the heart of Brittany (fig. 655). He produced not one, but six blueprints of what is now the city of Pontivy. An elliptical square with a large community building was surrounded by a park and sixteen symmetrical blocks were divided in two or four groups of houses connected with small gardens. ‘The city combines all the comforts and progress that anyone could wish for’ was Moll’s motto, but no specific details were given how such a state could be reached. The project remained unfinished in 1815 at the fall of the Empire, but continued at a slow speed in the nineteenth century. The Napoleon Square was used as a parade ground for ten thousand soldiers until 1927. A comparison of this lay-out with the garrison town of Sante Fe near Granada (Spain) (see fig. 600) indicates the closure of a circle. The creative concept of an ideal city came to an end. The time had come to look outside the constraints of the city – and it was found in nature. The cultural change became known as Romanticism.

655

Fig. 655 – A design for Napoleonville (Pontivy) by Jean-Jacques Moll in 1809 is probably the very last of the ‘ideal cities’, which was conceived in a dream of power.

Many nineteenth century efforts were often labeled as ‘ideal cities’, but they were, in fact, ‘future cities’, positioned in a glorified Nature or Cosmos. The visionary cities by the French, German and Russian architects of the 1920-1930, like those given by Le Corbusier (City Radiant), Taut and El Lizzisky, might qualify for a ‘second wave’ of ideal cities, but these metropolises were closer to science-fiction. The boundary between these two types (ideal – future) will always remain vague, mainly for reasons of a proper definition of the individual members and an understanding of the ‘city’ in one of its four (quadralectic) meanings.

QMRThe composition of a grid is the ‘last’ member of the linear (orthogonal) approach to urban development. It should be seen – in a quadralectic context – in conjunction with a circular approach, which ‘ends’ with the octagonal design. Both features in their concrete state are positioned in the psychological environment of the Fourth Quadrant (IV), characterized by a visible invisibility – a conceptual state of a multitude reaching into the realms where visibility is lost in uncountable quantity.

The grid type has certain features in common with the urban design based on a cross, square and/or rectilinear, like its central cross and squareness. It was mentioned before (fig. 184) that a square can be conceived as getting its shape from an initial cross (inside) or from two crossing parallel lines (outside). These differences are no longer visible in a grid, because the ‘evolution’ has taken a further step. The grid-type town or gridiron does, in itself, not reveal its genetic history, but it should be remembered that there are different approaches to its conception.

Several types of ‘grid’-town are given here in their geographical setting and connected within their position in a cultural context. The ambitious aim will be to mark the position of a gridiron (town) in the communication between a cultural unity (‘culture’) and a twenty-first century observer (who defined the boundaries of that culture).

1. The town planning in ancient Egypt did not particular favor the grid design, and most examples are worker’s dwellings related to other activities (like building the pyramids). Some examples of planned cities are Hotepsenusret (Kahun) in the Fayoum and the capital of Achnaton, the city of Akhetaten (Ch. 4.1.3.4.1).

2. The Greek ideas about regular town planning were mainly materialized in the colonies along the eastern Mediterranean and were often inspired by architects from that area (Miletus, Ionia) (Ch. 4.1.3.4.2).

3. The grid towns of the Roman agrimensores are probably the best known. These cities have been mentioned in the earlier section of the cross-design (Ch. 4.1.3.2.) and can be seen as the first step in the subsequent development towards a grid design (Ch. 4.1.3.4.3).

4. The grid cities of Europe had a long history, starting in the Celtic past. The design was appreciated in the extensive building period in the twelfth and thirteenth century all over Europe. It reached a celebrated status in the Renaissance, joining ‘classical’ ideas of (Roman) urban development with a sympathy for geometric schemes. Alberti’s book ‘De re aedificatoria’ stood on the threshold of this period and the ideas and practical application reached a stage of maturity in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but continued in different forms into the twentieth century (Le Corbusier) (Ch. 4.1.3.4.4).

5. The ‘modern’ American grid town, also called the Jeffersonian grid cities, is a class of their own and a genuine product of the Industrial Revolution and the Westward Movement in the United States (Ch. 4.1.3.4.5).

6. Other grid cities were built by different cultures, situated in China, South America and Asia (Ch. 4.1.3.4.6).

The various geographical ‘types’ of orthogonal town building will be discussed briefly now and their historical position within a possible cultural context determined along quadralectic lines.

Grids are quadrants

QMRThe Egyptian hieroglyph for city was a cross (see fig. 508), which gives an indication of city quarters in general. It can be assumed that the ‘open’ four-division (of the cross) was the basic point of reference with regards to a city (associated with a Second Quadrant setting). However, the Egyptians did not seem to be concerned with the actual space within the individual areas. The need for security sometimes urged a town to be ‘closed’ by a wall – and enter the sphere of the square/rectangular cities (in a Third Quadrant setting). The grid-type was only used under special circumstances when social and/or political motives promoted a consciously planned urbanization (in a Fourth Quadrant setting).

The workers’ quarters near the pyramids of Gizeh (pyramid of Menkaure) can be regarded as one of the first ‘rectangular urbanization’ in Egypt, dating from the Old Kingdom (2686 – 2160 BC). Much younger – from the New Kingdom (16th to the 11th century BC) – are the quarters (town) of Deir El-Medina near Thebes, where skilled craftsmen (and their families) lived. They cut out the tombs in the Valley of the Kings (and Queens) and constructed the temples in nearby Luxor and Karnak.

The city of Hotepsenusret (or Kahun) was founded by Senusret II (Khakheperre; or in Greek: Sesostris II). The rectangular, grid-type city measured 350 by 400 meters (fig. 582). Sesostris II was the fourth pharaoh of the Twelfth Dynasty (of the Middle Kingdom). He ruled from 1897 – 1878 BC. There were no wars or military campaigns during his reign, and he directed his efforts to economic projects like the cultivation of the Fayoum (oasis). The irrigation scheme included the building of dykes and the digging of canals to connect the Fayoum with the waterway of Bahr Yusef.

grids are quadrants

QMRFig. 582 – The city of Hotepsenusret (Kahun) was founded by pharaoh Senusret II (Twelfth Dynasty; Middle Kingdom) in the Fayoum and laid out in approximately straight lines. The main street was nine meters wide, while the streets in the residential district measured about one and a half meter.

The workers’ quarters were situated in the western part of the city, with the cul-de-sac streets. Traces of a temple are found in the southwestern corner. A wall, running north-south divided the workers’ area from more spacious living quarters of the higher classes, while the main palace was situated in the southeastern corner.

The (Egyptian) Labyrinth, although not a city, had a strict orthogonal layout (see fig. 47). The complex was also situated in the Fayoum and built by Amenemhet III (1817 – 1772 BC; Middle Kingdom) as part of the pyramid of Hawara. There were, according to Herodotus (in the fifth century BC), three thousand rooms. He described that ‘the roof of every chamber, courtyard and gallery is, like the walls, of stone. The walls are covered with carved figures, and each court is exquisitely built of white marble and surrounded by a colonnade’.

Another example of an Egyptian grid-type of ‘city’ was the workers’ village in the capital of Akhetaten (The Horizon of the Aten; also known as Amarna), created in the New Kingdom by the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten (fig. 583). The pattern resembles that of the Labyrinth and is more grid-like than the plans of Kahun and Deir El-Medina.

The city is made of quadrants

QMR Fig. 583 – The workers’ settlement in the city of Akhetaten (Amarna) had a grid pattern, which differed widely from the spacious and ‘empty’ design of the central city of Amarna itself. The city was created by pharaoh Achnaten in the New Kingdom, who tried to introduce a monotheistic worship of Aten. The period of his reign is called the Amarna period (Late Eighteenth Dynasty, c. 1353 BC) and marks a particular psychological crisis within the Egyptian cultural history.

It is an interesting (quadralectic) exercise to position the various traces of orthogonal and grid quarters (cities) on the CF-graph of the Egyptian cultural history (as earlier given in fig. 58) (fig. 584). This universal graph gives the relation between an observer (the writer) and – in this case – the historic existence of Egypt’s civilization. The (CF) values are an expression of the distance between these two entities in terms of visibility (and associated understanding). Higher values indicate an alienation (contrast), while lower values are a measure of the approach (congruence).

The city is made of quadrants

QMR4.1.3.4.2. The Greek grid towns

The idea of city foundation was part of the Greek mythology and preserved in the story of Cadmus (Kadmos). In the quest for his sister Europa, he was ordered (by the oracle in Delphi) to follow a cow with a half moon on her flank and to build a town on the spot where the cow laid down. The animal led him to Boeotia, where he founded the city of Thebes (Cadmea).

Cadmus wanted to sacrifice the cow to the goddess Athena (Minerva) and send some of his companions to the nearby Spring of Ismenos to fetch water. However, they were slain by the gold-crested dragon of Ares, who guarded the spring. Cadmus, in turn, confronted and destroyed the hydra and followed the instructions by Athena to sow the dragon’s teeth in the ground. Fierce armed men sprang up called Sparti (‘sown’), but they started fighting among themselves until only five remained. They assisted Cadmus to build the Cadmeia or acropolis of Thebes.

The new city had streets at right angles and Cadmus planned the future seven gates. A kylix (a shallow, two-handled drinking vessel) in the Musée du Louvre in Paris (Ca1860), dated from ca 550 –540 BC, shows Cadmus and the dragon fighting at the sacred spring of Ismene. Cadmus has a Gorgon-emblazoned shield and strikes towards the serpent, which is curled around a pillar of the well house. However, the interesting part for the present (quadralectic) survey is the left side of the scene with a great checkerboard pattern (fig. 585). Is the 10 x 19 grid a representation of the city of Thebes?

QMRFig. 585 – Cadmus fighting the dragon is seen here on Laconic Black Figure ware known as a kylix and attributed to the Horsemen Painter. The vessel dated from ca 550 – 540 BC and is now in the Museum Collection of the Louvre Museum in Paris. The grid on the left side of the representation could be a rendering of the city of Thebes.

The peregrinations of Cadmus (and his later association with Harmonia) remains an enigmatic mythical story with many aspects – of which the foundation of a (grid) city is just a part. The multiplicity of the narrative gives it a ‘Fourth Quadrant’ atmosphere, and a sequence of major events could support this setting. Searching Europa (I), visiting the oracle (II), fighting the dragon (III) and building a city (IV) are ‘quadralectic’ actions, which ‘fit’ into the characteristics of the various quadrants. The events, on the other hand, might be too arbitrary chosen in the light of the many other aspects of the myth to be convincing.

The evolution of Greek settlements and planning styles can be divided into two, rather unequal, time units. The Archaioteros tropos (or ‘older style’) of city planning runs from ca. 1200 – 500 BC and the Neoteros tropos (‘newer style’) was applied from 494 – 330 BC (VON GERKAN, 1922/1924; GUTJAHR, 1999). Cities of the ‘older style’ were, among others, places like Sparta, Epidaurus, Megara, Magnesia, Halikarnossos, Syracuse and Athens. The ancient city had a number of necessary elements, like the acropolis, walls, agora, stoas, bouleuterion, gymnasium, etc. The cities were often built over a long period of time and buildings changed in time. The architecture aimed at unification with cohesive design elements (like colonnades) resulting in an asymmetrical balance.

The cities of the Neoteros Tropos cover the classical period of the Greek cultural history with its pinnacle in the age of Pericles (443 – 429 BC). The civil grid became a major element in city design, without specific military implications. The abstract configuration of the Greek population, living in the fourth part of their Third Quadrant (450 – 375 BC) and entering the first part of the Fourth Quadrant (375 – 300 BC), must have liked the efficiency of a grid town. Inspirational ideas of such cities could have been supplied by the Greek historian Herodotus (484 – 425 BC), who traveled widely in his life and collected a wealth of urban planning knowledge from the orient.

The Greek-Ionian settlers on the shores of (south) western Turkey, and in particular the Milesian architect Hippodamos, were credited to be the ‘inventors’ of the checkerboard type of city in the fifth and fourth century BC. However, historical researches made it clear that (Greek) colonies used grid-type layouts as early as the seventh century BC, like Smyrna (Turkey) and Selinunt near the southwestern coast of Sicily (Italy). It is now assumed that Aristotle and his followers were wrong (or just chauvinistic) to credit the before-mentioned architect.

The city of Smyrna (now: Izmir) was an Aeolian colony, which came to wealth and prosperity in the eight century BC. The city was destroyed by the Lydian king Alyattes III around 600 BC and was later conquered by the Persians in 546 BC. This period of foreign domination ended in 333 BC when Alexander of Macedon took control and ordered Lysimachus (see fig. 388) to rebuild the city.

Pausanias recorded in his ‘Description of Greece’ (7.5.3) that Alexander the Great went on a hunting trip to Mt. Pagos one day and fell asleep under a tree, in front of the Sanctuary of the Two Nemeseis. The goddesses appeared to him in a dream and bade him to be the founder of a new city there. The oracle of Apollo at Claros was consulted in due course and the medium declared that: ‘Three and four times happy will those men be, who are going to inhabit Pagos beyond the sacred Meles’.

An example of a possible inspiration for the checkerboard pattern of the later Ionian cities is the Urartian city of Zernaki Tepe (CHAHIN, 2001). The city is situated in the eastern Van Region of Turkey (Armenia) and has a regular quadratic grid (fig. 586). The ancient site was dated from the eighth to seventh century BC (FLETCHER, 1975). The streets were about five meters wide and separated the housing blocks, which measured eighteenth by eighteenth meters. Zernaki Tepe had no gateways and its stonewalls were low, which could point to an unfinished state.

The Greek cities are made of quadrants

QMRFig. 586 – The grid-plan of the Urartian town of Zernaki Tepe, east of the Van Lake in Turkey (Armenia) might be an eight century BC predecessor of similar (Greek-Ionian) towns built in Asia Minor in the fourth century BC. Other researchers identified the town as a Roman settlement from the first or second century AD.

Anne Elizabeth REDGATE (1998) noted the dual character of the Urartian fortress town, on the one hand, and the nearby unfinished planned grid town of Zernaki Tepe on the other. The hill site town is ‘typical Roman of the first or second century AD’. Zimansky (1985; in: REDGATE, 1998) reckoned that the idea of an eight century BC grid town is unwarranted and should be considered a ‘twentieth-century invention’. This true scientific bickering is interesting, because it reveals the force of the grid idea in the context of a modern European setting.

The city of Miletus (in Greek, Hippodamia) is probably the most typical example of a grid town in the fifth century BC. (fig. 587). Miletus was, according to Herodotus, one of the twelve cities founded by Ionians fleeing the northern Peloponnese. The geographer Strabo and the historian Epheros stated that the city of Miletus was founded by Cretans and was related to the city of Milatos on that island. The settlement area reached prominence in the seventh/sixth century BC as a naval base.

The Greek cities are made of quadrants

QMRFig. 587 – The checkerboard plan of the city of Miletus (Hippodamia) was designed by Hippodamos in the fifth century BC. This design was credited (by Aristotle and others) as a Greek invention, but earlier grid-types of cities are known from the Middle East.

Miletus was the birthplace of the philosopher Thales (ca 624 – 547 BC), who was associated with an elementary form of division thinking (see p. 121; fig. 85). The protective city walls of Miletus dated back to circa 650 BC. They were restored around 550 BC. A renewed prosperity of the city started when the revolt against the Persians (500 – 494 BC) succeeded. The walls were again improved in the Hellenistic period (around 200 BC) and during the Roman occupation (125 – 88 BC).

The reconstruction of Miletus after the Persian Wars was organized by the architect and town planner Hippodamos in 479 BC. The city included three public realms (agora) linked to each other by a Stoa, in a checkerboard pattern. The architect Hippodamos also used the geometrical ground plan to create the city of Piraeus (the harbor city of Athens, c. 450) (CHOAY, 1980). His ‘Urban Planning Study for Peiraeus’ (451 BC) became the planning standard of that era and many later cities were laid out according to this plan, like the city of Rhodos (408) and Thurii (Italy, c. 440). The writer Theano of Thurii, living in the sixth century BC, dedicated her work ‘On Virtue’ to Hippodamus. Theano was the wife and pupil of Pythagoras, and taught mathematics in his school in Samos and Croton. She also wrote a ‘Theory of Numbers’ and a book about the construction of the universe.

The Greek polis of Olynthus (Chalcidice) was mentioned earlier as an example of modular orthogonal development according to the ‘Hippodamian plan’. The city in Macedonia was situated at the head of the Gulf of Torone, east of Thessalonica (Greece). It had a rich history, but the actual city life on the northern hill (in the new settlement with the grid layout) only lasted from 432 to 348 BC.

Olynthus became the capital of the so-called Chalcidic League, probably in the period of the peace of Nicias (421 BC). The settlement was thoroughly destructed by Philip of Macedon in 348 BC and the greater part of the site was abandoned. This situation led – wryly – to its good preservation, and subsequent excavation from 1928 onwards (CAHILL, 2001). The historian Callisthenes of Olynthus (c. 370 – 327) wrote the book ‘Alexandrou praxeis’ (Deeds of Alexander), which is now lost. His report on the campaigns of Alexander the Great provided the bulk of the historic material for later writers.

The ancient city of Priene was situated in western Turkey at the foot of Mt. Mykale, overlooking the Meander River. It can be seen as the pinnacle of Greek urbanization using a rectangular grid (fig. 588). The silting of the Meander River probably urged an earlier occupation (yet undiscovered) to change its location in the mid-fourth century BC. The Temple of Athena Polias was one of the first structures to be built in the newly moved city (334 BC). Towards the southeast was the open area of the agora surrounded by stoas (a portico with a colonnade, in Doric style).

The Greek cities are made of quadrants

QMRFig. 588 – The plan of the lower city of Priene shows the rectangular grid with blocks measuring about 35 x 47 meters (3 : 4).

The city was designed by Pytheos, who also contributed to the construction of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, apparently without any constraint of a directive government. It might therefore be assumed that the grid design was a ‘natural’ result of a particular frame of mind of the people living in that area (Ionia).

The modular rules of design were later expanded by the Ionian architect Hermogenes of Priene (late third century BC). The grid pattern became a political instrument in the foundation of many Greek colonies in the Hellenistic period (336 – 31 BC). In particular Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia, and his successors, the Diadochi, founded a great number of grid cities. The former started during his short reign (eleven years) at least thirteen towns bearing his name, while the latter are credited with some seventy more during the following twenty-two years.

The victorious Greek believed that their culture was superior to that of the occupied countries, and they wanted to bring their ideas about ‘democracy’ with peace and justice into practice. The gridiron plan produced lots of equal size, which had administrative advantages and allowed a systematic and controlled growth of the city. The city planner Deinocrates of Rhodos worked as an architect and adviser for Alexander the Great and used the grid pattern for the layout of the city of Alexandria (Egypt) in 332 BC. A painting by André Castaigne (1898/99) gives a romantic representation of this event (fig. 589).

The Greek cities are made of quadrants

Fig. 589 – This painting by André Castaigne (1898/99) shows Alexander the Great (and maybe Deinocrates of Rhodos) in the process of measuring the city of Alexandria around 332 BC.

The following period of the Ptolemies, Seleucids and Antigonids saw a struggle for supremacy, mainly led by generals. Military objectives started to dominate the planning of cities and the grid design proved useful in the hands of the rulers. Its orderliness made it easy to control and a wall around the city provided protection. The concept of a wall was not dominant in the formative period of the Greek city (1100 – 800 BC), when living conditions were founded upon agriculture. The idea of the polis (or city-state) changed all that. Trade between the people of Greece accelerated strongly around 800 BC. Market places became the major features of a city and defensive units and fortifications were built to defend the products of increased wealth. The (later) cities in the colonized areas put the idea of a polis directly into practice.

The city of Dura-Europos is situated on the river Euphrates in eastern Syria. It was founded about 303 BC by the Seleucids to accommodate Macedonian veterans. Hence the name – ‘Fort Europos’ – referring to the birthplace of Seleucus I Nicator. The city was a strategic point on the route between Antioch on the Orontes and Seleucia on the Tigris.

The Greek cities are made of quadrants

QMRThe distribution of grid towns in the Greek cultural sphere of influence is concentrated in the second half of its visibility period (X), i.e. after the Pivotal Point in the year 525 BC. Their genesis, in particular in the Classical Period (475 – 300 BC), does not seem to be related to a directive government, which pressed their ideas about law and order onto architectural creativity. The cities in the Hellenistic period (300 – 30 BC), on the other hand, like Alexandria (in Egypt) and Dura Europos (in Syria), derived their grid design from Greek imperialistic ideas, which started by Alexander the Great. He was born in 356 BC as the son of king Philip II (360 – 336 BC) and queen Olympias and his roots were firmly embedded in the ancient Macedonian homeland of ‘Europos’ (in northern Greece).

The building of grid cities seemed to be a genuine psychological aspect of the dynamic, multi-ethnic population living in the area around the Aegean Sea. However, the concept (of the gridiron) can also be used, as Alexander and his successors did, as a political tool to influence a clash of various types of division thinking, which was encountered in the occupied areas. The dualism of the east (Persia) and tetradic spirit from the west (Ionian Greece) understood each other in the order of the grid design. The unity of the multitude, as embodied in the grid, surpasses oppositional thinking: the fourfold way is a perfect compromise, even if the lower form does not understand the higher type.

QMR4.1.3.4.3. The Roman grid towns

The Roman grid towns – together with the Jeffersonian cities in America – might qualify as the most prominent examples among this particular type of city layout. The origin of the Roman grid town is rather vague. The Roman writer Varro (116 – 27 BC) noted in his book ‘De lingua Latina’ (5.143) that the Romans founded their towns with ‘Etruscan ritual’, which could point to an influence of this ancient tribe on the northern slopes of the Apennines.

The Etruscan town of Marzabotto, some 27 kilometers SSW of Bologna (Italy) might be a point in favor of this conjecture. The colony probably dated from the late sixth century BC and has a rudimentary orthogonal pattern (GATES, 2003). The rectangular town-plan has streets crossing at right angles with blocks of houses (fig. 592). The place had a relatively short life because it was sacked in the fourth century BC by the Gaul and further occupation has been scanty.

592

Fig. 592 – Marzabotto is an Etruscan town with a grid pattern, which might have influenced later Roman city development.

The towns are made of quadrants

QMRThe grid pattern of Marzabotto (Italy) – Photo: Marten Kuilman (1983).

HAVERFIELD (1913; p. 62) did not believe that the Etruscan town plan was instrumental in the Roman art of town-planning. The latter – with its customs of the templum and the division in four quarters (see Ch. 4.1.3.2.; fig. 550) – is only properly documented about 200 BC. However, the layout of a Roman camp was, according to Haverfield, long known before the Greek historian Polybius (c. 203 – 120 BC) described it in words in the middle of the second century BC in his book ‘The Histories’.

The Roman army had developed a straightforward way of setting up camp when they were involved in their expansion wars. The four-fold principle was the guideline of the Roman approach to reality and its dealing with the practicalities of life. Four is a practical number: not too few and not too many. An encampment in a relative flat terrain was based on a distinct fourfold plan. The main streets were called cardo and decumanus and the four quadrants (or centuria, consisting of 4 x 25 blocks) were divided in a grid.

The foundation of colonial cities started in the second half of the Roman Republic (300 – 30 BC) under the same social and political circumstances as seen before in the Greek cultural domination during their period of colonization (from 750 – 500 BC). The growing urban densities at home resulted in a shortage of available land and food. Colonies had to absorb the excess population of the parent cities (GALANTAY, 1979). This process commenced nearby in Ostia, founded in the middle of the fourth century BC at the mouth of the Tiber. The colonia started as a military camp to control maritime and river traffic and had the standard features of two bisecting main streets.

The settlement of Cosa, situated at a hill near a good harbor some hundred and forty kilometers north of Rome, was founded as a colonia in 273 BC in territory conquered from the Etruscan city of Vulci. The city walls were about two kilometers in length and had eighteen towers and four gates (fig. 593). Inside the walls was a regular grid, proving that the Romans adopted to this design in an early age. The citadel, or Arx, was the highest point in the southern part of the city. A Temple of Jupiter (Capitolium) and a temple dedicated to Mater Matuta were included in its walls. The Temple of Jupiter was originally built after 241 BC and rebuilt around 150 BC.

593

Fig. 593 – The city plan of Cosa, a harbor town north of Rome, displays an early application of the grid layout in Roman colonial cities. The plan proves that the orthogonal design was deliberately applied in difficult terrain as a genuine ‘Italian’ endeavor.

The conquest of Spain (Hispania) in the second century BC was another typical expression of such needs of expansion. The town of Numantia (near Soria) resisted the Romans for a long time and reached the cult status of the Masada fortress in Israel (conquered by the Romans in 74 AD). Scipio Aemilianus Africanus (185 – 129 BC) – after having defeated Carthage in 146 BC – attacked the former Iron Age hill fort and fortress town of Numantia in the year 134 BC. The siege lasted eight months and ended with the suicide of most of the inhabitants in 133 BC. The town was destroyed and rebuilt as a Roman grid town (fig. 594).

The towns are made of quadrants

QMRFig. 594 – The town of Numantia (near Soria, Spain) was conquered in 133 BC in the Roman expansion war and rebuilt as a grid town.

The wars of expansion led to garrison towns in occupied countries. Germany had Xanten – known as Colonia Ulpia Traiana – and Cologne, Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (CCAA). Austria featured the town of Carnuntum. Ljubljana (Laibach, Emona) was situated in Slovenia. Orange, in France, was called Colonia Iulia Secunda-norum Arausio. It was founded in 45 BC by discharged soldiers of Caesar’s Second Legion. Silchester in England and Lambaesis in Algeria proved the wide geographical distribution of this type of settlements. The veteran colonies in Italy itself – like Naples, Bologna, Parma and Piacenza, followed by Como, Pavia, Verona, Turin (fig. 595) and Aosta – have the grid pattern still preserved.

A complete summary of the Roman grid towns – in and outside Italy – is not sought after here. In stead, one typical example of ‘centuriatio’ is given as a representative of similar cities, which were built by the Romans. It will also be noted, that the term ‘grid town’ is a generalization, which does not pay credit to the individual differences between the towns, both in their foundation history, planning intentions and subsequent execution.

595

Fig. 595 – The old Roman city layout in Turin (Italy) is still visible in this map of 1844. Turin, known as Augusta Taurinorum, began around 28 BC as a ‘colonia’ founded by Augustus. The walls enclose an area of approximately 745 x 695 meters and had four main gates. The north and south gates are not in straight opposition, but it is not clear if this was the original plan.

The Algerian town of Timgad is probably the best-known example of a Roman colonial town. It exhibits a perfect archetype of a once thriving community (fig. 596). Emperor Trajan founded the colonia as Colonia Marciana Trajana Thamugas (Marciana in honor of Trajan’s sister) in 100 AD for his soldiers of the Third Legion, which were garrisoned in the neighboring fortress of Lambaesis (Lambessa). The number of veterans can hardly be more than four hundred and the first population must have been around two thousand (apart from slaves) (HAVERFIELD, 1913; p. 112).

The walled, but unfortified city was laid out in the usual rigid Roman grid pattern. The decumanus maximus and the cardo are still visible and a – partially restored – Corinthian colonnade lines the latter. The cardo terminated at the forum. An open-air theater, four major baths, a library, and the Capitoline Temple are the other key buildings. At the west end of the decumanus rises the twelve meters high Arch of Trajan, which was partially restored in 1900. The orientation of the city did not follow the four directions of the wind rose, but it was said (by dr. Barthel) that the street which joins the east and west gates was laid out to point to the sunrise on the eighteenth of September, the birthday of Trajan.

The city of Timgad enjoyed a peaceful existence for several centuries and became a center of Christian learning before the Vandals sacked it in the fifth century. The Byzantine general Solomon occupied the city in 535 AD and a brief re-population took place, until the Berbers demolished the place in the seventh century. Timgad (Thamugas) passed from history after the defeat of Gregorius, governor of Africa, by the Arabs in 647. The Scottish explorer James Bruce (1730 – 1794) visited Timgad in 1765 and made drawings of the monuments. He was followed in 1875 by Sir R. Lambert Playfair, the British consul general at Algiers and Professor Masqueray, who published a report on the state of the ruins.

Fig. 596 – The city of Timgad in Algeria is a classical example of a Roman colonial gridiron town, generated in the context and needs of an orderly military organization. All the fourfold elements of Roman castrametion and urban development are brought together here. Not shown are the later additions to the town, which did not follow any geometry. The city was founded around 100 AD, which coincides with the greatest geographical extension of the Roman Empire under Trajan (reigned from 98 – 117 AD).

The approximate position of the Roman grid cities will now be plotted in the context of the Roman cultural history-as-a-whole (fig. 597). The Etruscan town of Marzabotta is indicated on the CF-graph, but does not qualify in the Roman cultural period proper. The colonia of Ostia, on the other hand, is a genuine Roman settlement established in order to assure control of the port of Rome. It started ca 350 BC as a regular military fort (castrum) covering a rectangular area of just over two hectares. The two dissecting main streets led to four city gates and the settlement followed the grid plan. The town expanded later – in the second and first century BC – beyond its original confines to cover around sixty-four hectares around 80 BC (when new walls were built). Emperor Trajan added around 112 AD a hexagonal harbor next to Claudius’ port (GATES, 2003).

The Roman cities were made of quadrants

QMRThe harbor city of Cosa can be qualified as a true Republican town, with walls, a citadel, a forum and a grid plan. Its foundation (in 273 BC) was inspired by military and economic intentions (to block Etruscan access to the sea). It marked the beginning of a period of enormous geographical extension with prosperous new towns (colonies), connected with an ever improving infrastructure of roads and bridges.

The Via Appia (Appian Way) from Rome to Campania (Naples) was paved as early as the late fourth century BC. Many of the new towns, in particular in the frontier zones, started their existence as army camps and continued their rectangular design. Julius Caesar’s march into France (in 58 – 51 BC) marked the end of the Republican period, but also a new start of urban development. The Roman Empire started when Octavian adopted the title of Augustus in 27 BC. and the greatest extension of the Roman Empire was reached at the end of the first century AD.

The bulk of Roman grid cities, either inside Italy or outside in the newly acquired territories, is concentrated in the Third Quadrant of the Roman cultural history, i.e. in the period between 375 BC and 125 AD. Extensive city building continued – for instance, in the Hauran area of Syria (see fig. 513) in the second to fourth century AD. The city designs are more diverse in the Fourth Quadrant of the Roman cultural presence and some (like Serjilla, in the center of fig. 513, wrongly spelled as Serjibla) have no plan at all. Regional influences, like the Nabataean architecture in Jordan and Syria, might have prevented Roman dominance. A town like Shahba (Philippopolis), which was the birthplace of the Syrian Emperor Philip (ruled from 244 – 249 AD), was created to be a replica of Rome – with all the outward signs of a Roman city (temples, arches, baths, etc) – but the design was less concerned with an initial ‘military’ layout leading to a grid pattern.

The Roman cities were made of quadrants

QMRTo try to understand a particular phenomenon, one must not only describe the actions of its participants but "interpret" them as well. But interpretation poses a problem for the investigator who has to attempt to classify behavior as belonging to some prior "ideal type". Weber described four categories of "Ideal Types" of behavior: zweckrational (goal-rationality), wertrational (value-rationality), affektual (emotional-rationality) and traditional (custom, unconscious habit).

Therefore Weber, who is keenly aware of “Ideal Type's” fictional nature, states that the “Ideal Type” never seeks to claim its validity in terms of a reproduction of or a correspondence with social reality. Its validity can be ascertained only in terms of adequacy, which is too conveniently ignored by the proponents of positivism. This does not mean, however, that objectivity, limited as it is, can be gained by “weighing the various evaluations against one another and making a ‘statesman-like’ compromise among them”, which is often proposed as a solution by those sharing Weber's kind of methodological perspectivism. Such a practice, which Weber calls “syncretism”, is not only impossible but also unethical, for it avoids “the practical duty to stand up for our own ideals” [Weber 1904/1949, p. 58 in [2]]

QMR4.1.3.4.4. The European grid towns

The European cultural history has its own record of urban development, including the grid-type. The earliest evidence of barrack-type (‘kasernen-artige’) of settlements with a circular wall was found in Senftenberg near Cottbus (Germany). The complex dated from the end of the Bronze Age, around 800 BC (KUCKENBURG, 2000). The late Bronze Age includes the Lusatian culture in eastern Germany and Poland (1300 – 500 BC), which continues into the Iron Age.

The archaeological site of Biskupin is another important place in north-central Poland, some ninety kilometers northeast of Poznan. The fortified community was originally located on an island of the Warta River. It is now part of a peninsula, which houses the reconstructed village and a historical museum. Radiocarbon dates from timber material ranged from 720 BC (first settlement) to 560 BC (later settlement). Biskupin belongs, in technical terms, to the Hallstatt C and D periods (early Iron Age). The rampart is made around 620 BC. The settlement was abandoned around 450 BC.

The defense system might be created to counteract the aggressive German tribes pushing eastwards. The discovery of the settlement in 1933 by a local schoolmaster became, for that very reason, a symbol for Polish national consciousness. Researchers from the Poznan University started investigations in 1934. The site was nicknamed the ’Polish Pompeii’ as a reference to a glorious past. The Germans renamed the place ‘Urstädt’ after the occupation of Poland in the autumn of 1939. The excavations were resumed in 1940 under the patronage of Heinrich Himmler and continued until 1942. The place was then flooded, which contributed to a good preservation of the woodwork.

European towns were made of quadrants

QMRFig. 598 – A reconstructed plan of the fortified settlement of Biskupin, Poland. Thirteen rows of houses were protected by a wooden dyke. The embankments had a gate with a watchtower and a footbridge. A circuit street ran alongside the rampart.

The works of Roman castrametation survived in the layout of monasteries (like S. Gallen, see fig. 335), and must have circulated in the collec-tive memory of the builders of the new towns in Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth century. The Anglo-French ‘bastides’ – with the square layout as their hallmark – have already been mentioned.

The town of Aigues-Mortes in the Camargue (Southern France) can be seen as the crucial onset of royal interference with rectangular city building, which lasted some hundred years (1270 – 1373). King Louis IX (Saint Louis, 1214 – 1270) founded the town in 1246 as a square with a number of crossing streets. Defensive walls were added from 1272 onwards and ten city gates were placed at roads entering the town. The total length of the walls is now over one-and-a-half kilometers. A rough six by six grid of blocks was loosely administered, with subdivisions and amalgamations. Inspiration of the design might have come from the city of Damiette (in Egypt) or Acre (Saint Jean d’Acre) in Israel, both fortified cities at the sea, which played a role in the Crusades.

The number of German towns grew tenfold during the thirteenth century – although Germany-as-a-country did not exist at the time. Cities with a central market square and a checkerboard layout in Germany and Poland included Neu-Brandenburg (1248), Retz (1275), Wohlau, Oschatz, Gleiwitz (Gliwice) in Upper Silesia – known as the site of the provocation that Hitler staged as a pretext to invade Poland – Hamm (Nordrhein-Westfalen, 1226), Leoben, Budweis, Wroclav and many more. Rectangular grids are known from Austria (Bruck-an-der-Mur, 1263) and from Italy, with places like Manfredonia (Province of Foggia, Apulia; founded by King Manfred in 1256) and Cittaducale (Province of Rieti, Lazio; 1309).

European towns were made of quadrans

QMRFig. 599 – The plan of Villarreal (Castellon, Spain) is a rectangular plan surrounded by walls with four towers in the four corners.

Briviesca, near Burgos (Spain) is a typical regular Castilian town of the fourteenth century. Similar cities in the northern Basque area are Durango, Salvatierra, Bilbao and Guernica. GUTKIND (1967) mentioned in his book on the ‘Urban Development in Southern Europe: Spain and Portugal’ a number of systematically planned (grid) towns, like Puente la Reina (in Navarra, established in 1090) and Castellon de la Plana, Villarreal (fig. 599), Nules and Almenara in the Castellon region.

Gutkind noted (p. 147) that the ‘Spaniards are always torn between two extremes’ and that the todo o nada attitude had dominated the Spanish political and social history. He pointed to an inflexible national character, which was prone to irrevocable and rigid alternatives and links this mental situation of no compromise with the Spanish landscape. However, this dualistic aspect ‘has created great architecture and great cities’.

The enclosed town concept flourished in those maturing years of Europe as a cultural entity, but practical considerations came into conflict with the preconceived ideas. Extensions of the town were difficult, because the (square) markets were wedged into the houses. Furthermore, the reality of stagnation was a real threat. The Black Death of 1349, which wiped out a quarter of the population in some areas of Europe, contributed to the economic depression on the continent. The attention was focused inwards (miniatures) for some hundred years. It was the Renaissance in Italy and its renewed quest for identity – around the year 1450 – that set Europe in motion again.

The city of Santa Fe, west of Granada (Andalusia), is still one of the finer examples of a grid town, founded in 1492 (the year Columbus discovered America). This agro-military town started as a military camp for the troops, which besieged the city of Granada. The first camp was destroyed by fire, but a new layout was built in the immediate neighborhood. The Plaza de Armes was in the center and the walled city had two principal streets and four gates (fig. 600). An earthquake destroyed the town in 1809, but it was completely rebuilt.

600A

QMRHenry Moore (English, 1898–1986)

Four Forms, 1936

QMRThis proposed scheme gives the main psychological themes in the Fourth Quadrant. The subdivision (of the Fourth Quadrant) follows the same characteristics, which were earlier established in the Second Quadrant and will end with a new cycle.

The terms in the lower section of fig. 510 are inspired by the approach of the Dutch architect Raoul Bunschoten and the institute he co-founded, called CHORA. This latter organization is a cross between an academic research institute, a design office and a think-tank for urban policy. The processes within urban development are studied and the transformation by intervening is their main field of interest. Raoul Bunschoten proposed a methodology to deal with these developments consisting of four major parts:

1. How to see manifestations of global influences on local environ-ment?

2. How to model them?

3. How to develop and communicate scenarios based on this knowledge? And

4. How to implement these scenarios?

The first question could be tackled by an ‘annunciation’ (proclamation), which is framed by cultural preconceptions and existing forms. The models should map out incisions or lines of connection, because ‘by making an object, you question everything else’. Architecture should appear as an artificial continuation of the project of fragmentation and connection.

Raoul Bunschoten and his associates gave their project for the Center of Berlin (Germany, 1988) the name ‘Apeiron or Chaos embodied’. The term apeiron (the boundless) pointed to Anaximander (c. 611 – 546 BC), the Ionian philosopher, who believed that infinity holds the key to understanding. Steven M. ROSEN (2004) wrote a brilliant book on this subject and underlines the need to incorporate the notion of apeiron in our thinking (again). He points to a science of experiential reflection that questions the limits of the conceptual. ‘Chaos embodied’ is the teeming of the multitude, as it exists in fragmentation and shaping it into a new proposal.

CHORA – in their publication ‘Urban Flotsam’ (BINET et al., 2001) – advocates dynamic models to monitor the urban flux. They recognize four processes in urban development, which closely reflect the mood in the various quadrants of the quadralectic world view:

510A

QMRArchitect and planner Christopher ALEXANDER et al (1987) studied the ‘wholeness’, which can be experienced in certain cities of the past (such as Venice and Amsterdam). Their findings (and feelings) led to a new theory of urban design, based on the notion of organic growth. The authors came to the conclusion (p. 5) that a ‘good’, traditional city was the result of “a process of urban growth, or urban design, that would create wholeness in the city, almost spontaneously, from the actions of the members of the community… provided that every decision, at every instant, was guided by the centering process”.

They noticed the following four fundamental features in a ‘natural’ city, which is interpreted as a growing whole. These observations have affinities, by and large, with the characteristics of the four quadrants in a quadralectic outlook:

———————— 1. The whole grows piecemeal, bit by bit

———————— 2. The whole is unpredictable

———————— 3. The whole is coherent

———————— 4. The whole is full of feeling

QMRThe form of the new unity (of multiplicity) has its own story to tell, which can be quite different from the narrative of the members in the group. The step from individuality to massality (and back to individuality) is a test case of division thinking, because it is here – in the process of change – that the deep-seated differences in view point come to light.

The expression ‘the Four Corners of the Earth’ can be traced back to the Egyptian mythology and pointed to the world-as-a-house. The Egyptian sign for a city (‘niwt’) was a circle divided in four parts and one of the oldest known hieroglyphs, dating from the pre-dynastic period (fig. 508). The hieroglyph is derived from the graphic renderings of walled enclosure, which were depicted on flattened stones (palettes) found near Abydos in Upper Egypt and dating from the end of the fourth millennium BC.

According to KuilmanThis chapter deals with several types of (city) forms. It is realized that this particular focus is just a small part of the enormous field of architectural form, from the universal scale on a philosophical level to the hardly visible, minute details of an individual building. The choice is inspired by the nature of a city as a distinct human product with its own story to tell. Cities represent the collective outcome of numerous decisions in the field of the building, resulting in a new unity. The city can be treated as limited entity and four major types of habitat organization can be recognized (in a quadralectic setting):

—————– 1. Chaotic, placing edifices in a haphazard way

—————– 2. Natural, following the existing topography or logic natural boundaries,

—————— 3. Human design

—————————————- Round/Circular and/or radial

—————————————- Cross

—————————————- Square and Rectangular

—————————————- Grid

—————— 4. Composite, a combination of the previous.

QMRThe quadralectic viewpoint on urban spatial design would follow its own division, in the following, non-hierarchical sequence:

—————————— 1. The ad hoc or random theory

—————————— 2. The linkage theory

—————————— 3. The figure-ground theory

—————————— 4. The place theory

The particular types of visibility are reflected in the four types. The random plan (1) is shrouded in the mystery of the invisible invisibility. There are no immediate limitations, only the occasion. An opportunity can spring up any time and disappear just as fast. It embodied the unlimited possibilities of the First Quadrant.

The linkage theory (2) thinks in terms of an invisible visibility as given in the Second Quadrant. Certain ideas – in itself symbols of movement – can be caught on the drawing board. A spatial datum can be created and used in subsequent planning.

The figure-ground theory (3), with its emphasis on solids and voids, is characterized by the visible visibility of the Third Quadrant. Roger Trancik (p. 101; Fig. 4-5) distinguished six types of typological patterns of Solids and Voids: the grid, angular, curvilinear, radial/concentric, axial and organic configuration.

The quadralectic inquiry prefers the following graphical-orientated division of urban solids and voids in the figure-ground theory:

————————— 1. The circular/radial model (4.1.3.1)

————————— 2. The cross-shaped model (4.1.3.2)

————————— 3. The square/rectangular model (4.1.3.3)

————————— 4. The grid model (4.1.3.4)

A city planner, thinking in terms of solids and voids, has to follow these four positions in order to make a choice. Clearly, the outcome reflects the mood of the creative designer (or the team of designers) at that particular time.

1. A circular or radial-concentric approach to (city) building is related to the universal world of the First Quadrant, with its center (point) as a source of unity, distributing itself in a specter of innumerable rays. Concentric building aspires a universal coverage of space.

2. The cross-shape is the result of the (Second Quadrant) idea that the division of space in four compartments can be achieved by the drawing of two crossing lines. The cross (not necessarily perpendicular) is the shortest way from the two-division (on a local scale) to a four-division (on a universal scale). Many cities find their origin in just two crossing roads, cutting the landscape in four quarters (areas).

3. The rectangular-shaped of a city plan is the more confined expression of the four-fold in action (in the Third Quadrant). Four points mark the limitations in the field. There is no direct spatial relation to the four-fold (like it was in the cross-shape) other than the number four. The rectangular is – even if its generation is based on four points – a rather oppositional feature: a point (observer) is either in or out of the delimited area.

4. The combination of the previous approaches – consisting of a point, two crossing lines and four crossing lines – find its new form of expression in the grid. The (organized) multitude is the hallmark of this (Fourth Quadrant) type of city planning. The grid might have many forms and may even be subdivided along tetradic lines. The most familiar grid of squares – like the old Roman town designs and many American cities – would then be a ‘Third Quadrant’ feature. The logical developed ‘fractal’ grids (MANDELBROT, 1982), with its element of self-similarity, would qualify as a ‘Fourth Quadrant’ type of grid-building.

Finally, the place theory (4) – as the last of the above-mentioned three-division in urban spatial designs by Roger Trancik – is characterized by the visible invisibility of the Fourth Quadrant. There is so much to see – in the minds of people and their sociological and historical background – that visibility gets lost or becomes simply inaccessible because of its quantity.

QMRA reconstruction of a Viking settlement Trelleborg near Slagelse on the Isle of Seeland (Denmark) as it existed between 1000 and 1050 AD. The circular form has been used to provide the ultimate protection against attacks from all sides.

The settlement is a quadrant

QMRFig. 726 – The Fountain of the Evangelists, situated in the main cloister in the southeastern part of the Escorial complex.

The work on the actual royal dwelling (King’s House) in the northeast quadrant had begun in 1570 – 1572. It took nearly fifteen years until the court moved from their provisional quarters to the new accommodation in August 1585, but most of the palace and the college had still to be finished.

The library portico, which was part of Toledo’s ‘’universal plan’, only started when the construction of the palace, basilica and college had ceased and was finished in 1583. The hospital buildings (infirmary) were situated outside the main cuadro (of 1562) at the southwestern corner. Farm buildings, later known as La Compana, were also outside the monastery. The northern service buildings (casas de oficios) were mentioned in 1581. Fig. 727 shows the Escorial in a reconstruction of the situation in 1568.

The plan is a four squared quadrant

Fig. 730 – The plan of the Escorial near Madrid follows tetradic lines with a four-division in function (palace, college, monastery and place of contemplation) organized around a church with a square ground plan. It is made up of four part quadrants.

Some observers pointed to a Post-Reformation geomancy as initiating the design. Nigel PENNICK (1979) stated that ‘the Escorial at Madrid was built according to a Jesuit interpretation of the Vision of Ezekiel’. Others go further back and tried to find Renaissance ideas of magic underlying the design of the Escorial (TAYLOR, 1967). René Taylor wondered whether the courtier and ‘architect’ Herrera could not be ‘a Magus, a man deeply versed in Hermetism and occult lore, who by virtue of this was attached in a special way to the King?’

George Kubler (pp. 128 – 130) denied the view that the King and Herrera had occult views. He could prove that the King did not sympathize with astrology and horoscopes. The court’s association with the mystic Ramon Lull (1232 – 1316) – the ‘Doctor illuminatus’ with his combinatorial method for categorizing all possible knowledge (see p. 780), but also with his intention to convert Muslims to Christianity – was purely academically, according to Kubler. It is regrettable that none of these authors make any reference to a particular type of division thinking, which might elucidate such labels like Mannerism, Puritanism, astrology, magic, etc.

Another building in Spain with a proud history is the Fortress Palace of the Alhambra in Granada. The complex begun by the founder of the Nasrid dynasty around 1250 AD and can be seen as the final bastion of Spanish Islam (fig. 731). The further construction was spread over a period of two hundred and fifty years. The palace of Charles V, started in 1526, is situated at the southwest of the Court of the Lions. It is an octagonal-circular building, designed by Pedro Machuca, a pupil of Michelangelo.

QMRFig. 731 – A plan of the Fortress Palace of the Alhambra, situated on a hill above Granada (Spain). The palace of Charles V (1500 – 1558) can be seen as the star-like feature at the lower center, south of the Court of the Myrtles.

The Alhambra is a storehouse of Islamic motifs in which the tetradic signs feature prominent. The Court of the Lions is a masterpiece of garden layout with the octagonal fountain with twelve marble lions in the middle. The court takes the form of a quadrant.. There seem to be a direct influence of the Patio de las Doncellas in Sevilla, but its roots are in the Persian ‘Charbagh’, the division of the court in four parts, representing the four parts of the world. The irrigation channels symbolize the four rivers of Paradise.

The palace of King Louis XIV (1638 – 1715) of France at Versailles is probable the prototype of what a palace should look like (in Europe). Louis XIV commissioned his architect Le Vau (1612 – 1670) and his landscape architect André Le Nôtre (1630 – 1700) to extend the hunting castle of his father Louis XIII and improve the adjacent grounds (fig. 732).

QMRFig. 732 – The map of Le Petit Parc de Versailles by F. de La Pointe was dated 1664, when the work of the Petit Château (1662) and the first Orangerie (1663) was finished. The dating of ca. 1668, as suggested by Robert Berger (1985), is difficult to explain since many buildings had reached different forms than given on this map. it is made up of quadrants.

The Sun King (le Roi Soleil) moved his court to Versailles in May 1682 while the architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart continued the improvements of the palace. The painter Charles Le Brun (1619 – 1690) did the interior decorations of the new additions and collaborated in the landscaping of the palace gardens (THOMPSON, 2006). The royal tapestry suites of the Four Elements and the Four Seasons (1664 – 1668) were after designs by Charles Le Brun.

The iconography of the Versailles palace was a particular concern for the Petite Académie, a consulting group of literary men like Charles Perrault and Jean Chapelain. They first met in February 1663. The building program got soon thereafter a dynamic leader in the person of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619 – 1683), who replaced Ratabon as Superintendent of the King’s Buildings in January 1664 (BERGER, 1985). The last (fourth) building campaign (1699 – 1710) concentrated on the construction of the royal chapel and the apartments of the King (STUMBERG EDMUNDS, 2002).

Fig. 733 – The buildings and gardens of the palace of the Sun King Louis XIV of France at Versailles, west of Paris, indicate a symmetry along a central axis.

The formal axial layout (E-W) of the palace gardens (fig. 733) is associated with linear thinking. The palace, with an exuberance of art objects, is dedicated to empirical visibility into the extreme. This objective is achieved either by unity (Latona Fountain), dualistic themes, like the ‘Fountain de la Victoire d’Apollon sur le Serpent Python’ or by the (numerological) fourfold, like Apollo’s chariot in the Apollo Fountain (by Jean Baptiste Tuby).

The story of Bernini’s equestrian statue of Louis XIV is memorable as an illustration of the volatile mixture of power and art. The statue was made by the celebrated Italian sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598 – 1680) for a public square in Paris, but was regarded so repulsive that it ended up as the Roman hero Marcus Curtius in Versailles. The marble of Louis XIV Equestrian was carved by students from the French Academy in Rome under Bernini’s guidance between 1671 and 1677. Bernini died in 1680 and Colbert in 1683, and the statue was still in Rome. Eventually, it reached Paris in March 1685, when the artistic judgment turned sour, and the marble was placed in the Orangerie of Versailles Palace.

The King ordered it destruction, but in stead the French sculptor François Girardon got the task to change the statue to that of a Roman hero, Marcus Curtius. The story went that a seer declared in 362 BC that the Romans had to throw their most valuable possessions into a chasm, which had opened up in front of the Forum. Then Curtius, a youth of noble family, jumped in fully armed and the chasm immediately closed again. The spot was afterwards covered by a marsh called the Lacus Curtius.

The Versailles Palace can be seen in the wider setting of its historical significance as the apex of materialism in Europe. Its position in the fourth part of the Third Quadrant (III, 4) of the European cultural period (see fig. 267) fits into a characterization of this period as a ‘Golden Age’ – but also as a period of struggle and turmoil. The cultural entity of Europe had passed its Second Visibility Crisis (SVC, 1650), with its realization of the shortcomings of material wealth, and reached soon thereafter in the Sun King of France the physical proof of its emotional poverty.

The Royal Palace of Caserta was, some fifty years later, Italy’s answer to the glamour of Versailles (fig. 734/735). It surpassed the former in size and was probably the largest building erected in the eighteenth century in Europe. The Reggia di Caserta, thirty kilometers north of Naples, had twelve hundred rooms. The Bourbon King Charles VII of Naples laid the foundation stone on 20 January 1752 after he had seen a scale model by the architect Luigi Vanvitelli (1700 – 1773). This architect and engineer had drawn and supervised the pentagonal Lazzaretto (hospital) project in Ascona between 1733 – 1738 (see p. 430, fig. 346). Luigi Vanvitelli was the son of the Dutch view painter Gaspar van Wittel (1653 – 1736), who made a name in Italy with his topographical views known in Italy as vedute.

It is made up of quadrants

QMRFig. 734 – The Palace of Caserta and projected extensions as part of an etching by Luigi Vanvitelli (1756). The tetradic outlay of the palace is a conspicuous feature, echoed in the different garden designs around the central building. It is made up of quadrants.

The history of the palace and its gardens cover a long period from the sixteenth century, when it started as the property of the noble Caetani family of Sermonti, to its culmination in the nineteenth century when the palace’s throne room was finished in 1847.

The palace consisted of an entrance hall divided into three aisles and opened on its sides on four courtyards. The spacious, octagonal vestibule seemed to be inspired by the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute in Venice. The latter, in turn, paid tribute to Byzantine designs such as the Basilica of San Vitale. The ‘Rooms of the Seasons’ were painted by Antonio de Dominici and Fedele Fischetti with colorful allegories of the tetradic theme of the Four Seasons. The palatine chapel is often compared to the similar royal chapel at Versailles, which was designed by Robert de Cotte (1656 – 1735). The gardens were completed after Charles VII left the Kingdom of Naples for Spain and became Charles III, King of Spain. His son, Ferdinand IV of Naples, together with the son of Luigi, Carlo Vanvitelli, continued the further extensions of the building.

Lord Hamilton, an envoy to the Neapolitan court, persuaded Queen Maria Carolina (of Austria and Regina di Napoli e di Sicilia, 1752 – 1814) to compete with her sister Marie Antoinette of France, who enjoyed the gardens of the Petit Trianon at Versailles. Maria Carolina employed the English botanist Andrew Graefer, who was famous for his gardens. The ‘Botanical Garden of the Royal House’ started in 1782 and featured, besides the avenues and the Bath of Venus, two statues of a Sphinx and a Shepherd playing the flute. These statues were previously owned by the Caetani family, the founders of Caserta.

QMRFig. 735 – The Royal Palace of Caserta (near Naples) was the megalomanic answer of the Bourbon Kings to the palace in Versailles. The Royal Palace of Madrid by Filippo Juvarra and the Charlottenburg near Berlin might have acted as models, but this city-palace – as planned by Vanvitelli – exceeded the other palaces in cheer size. However, the outlay as given on this etching (of 1756) never substantiated in this way.

The Palace Farnese at Caprarola, some sixteen kilometers from Viterbo, is another famous palace in Italy. It is more than two hundred years older than the Palace of Caserta and was built by the architect Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola (1507 – 1573), known as Vignola. The pentagonal building should not be confused with the Palace Farnese in Rome, one of the great Renaissance ‘Pythagorean Palaces’ designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (1484 – 1546). The ‘palace’ in Rome started in 1515 and was again some fifty years older than Vignola’s efforts in Caprarola (1559 – 1564). The Italian architects of the later sixteenth century gathered by that time the courage to go beyond the constraints of opposition.

It is made up of quadrants

QMRFig. 736 – The Palace Farnese at Caprarola has a pentagon shape and a circular internal courtyard, pushing Renaissance geometric ideas to its limits at the final stages of its presence. A pentagon fort was transformed by the architect Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola (1507 – 1573), known as Vignola, into a summer residence for the Farnese family in the years 1559 – 1564.

Many other palaces can be mentioned throughout Europe, in particular those built in the exuberant Barock (1600 – 1720) and Rococo (1720 – 1770) periods, but the space of this book is limited. The history and setting of palaces, like the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg (Russia, created in the 1750s as the winter residence of the Russian tsars and their families), Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin and Sans-Souci Palace in Potsdam (Germany), the summer retreat of the Habsburg dynasty known as Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna (Austria) and Buckingham Palace in London (England) are glorious buildings in their own right. They are the eye-catching signs of visibility in the Third Quadrant of the European cultural history.

Palaces – as a common political and social focal point – are widespread over the world and found their practical application in most cultures. Just to mention a few, like the Japan’s Imperial Palace in Tokyo on the grounds of the ancient Edo Castle, the Potala Palace in Lhasa (Tibet), which was built in 1645 on Marpo Ri Hill, or the royal residence of the Maharaja of Jaipur known as the Rambagh Palace in Jaipur (India), gives no justice to many other great palaces elsewhere. Exuberance is often the word to characterize the dwellings of kings and queens – which puts the phenomenon (of palace building) in the realm of the Fourth Quadrant of a quadralectic communication. The emphasis on the material-many can be the reason that most palaces are lost in the multiplicity of possibilities without a deepening of impressions other than those of power.

The palace complex in the Amaliegade district in Copenhagen (Denmark) might be an exception. The Danish gardener and architect Nicolai (Niels) Eigtved (1701 – 1754) drew up a plan of four Amalienborg Palaces, which form an integrated composition and carry the spirit of a tetradic setting to its ultimate form (fig. 737). Two of the four Amalienborg palaces were com-pleted before Eigtved died in 1754. The work was continued by another leading Danish architect and historian, Lauritz de Thurah (1706 – 1759), and completed in 1760.

It is made up of quadrants

QMRFig. 737 – The four palaces at Amalienborg, Copenhagen (Denmark) are designed by the architect Nicolai Eigtved (1701 – 1754) in the last years of his life. They are a hallmark of a tetradic approach to architectural design. The palaces take the form of a quadrant

The palaces of the Yoruba people, living in present day Nigeria and Benin, underline the psychological setting of royal buildings within a society. The Yoruba people are known for their violent history, which is well-studied, because their history is closely intertwined with the slave trade of the nineteenth century (ADE AJAYI & SMITH, 1964; SMITH, 1969).

The royal residence of a Yoruba Oba (ruler) is known as the Afin, which means palace. They were the most impressive parts of any town. Most of them are now in ruins since the culture came in contact with Western civilization (OJO, 1966). There are four types of Afin (palaces):

1. Oyo type, found in the Oyo major kingdom.

2. Ife type, are the most numerous after the

3. Ijebu type with a number of palaces in each town;

4. Egba kingdom type, originating only in recent times (after 1830). Ake, the palace of Alake, who was the foremost Oba (king) of the Egbas, is an example.

The Yoruba palaces were relatively large edifices. ‘The traditional and spi-ritual eminence of the Oni of Ife evoked a spirit of willingness on the part of the people to serve him without hesitation ensured the largeness of his Afin’ (OJO, 1966; p. 26). Relatively stable kingdoms had large palaces.

QMRFig. 600 – An aerial photo (of 1958) of the city of Santa Fe de Granada (Spain) shows the regular quadrant grid pattern of its design. The city was founded in 1492 as a purpose-built garrison town, west of the city of Granada.

The city of La Valletta on the isle of Malta was a ‘bastion of Christianity’ (KRUFT, 1989; p. 52) and became an example of a new type of city planning, which implied the growing importance of artillery. The Johanniter order (the Knights of St. John) had to leave the island of Rhodos in 1522, which had been their base since 1310. They were more or less forced – by the German Emperor Carl V – to go to Malta and to start again. Their dominant position on the island lasted from 1530 to 1798 and La Valetta became their stronghold.

601

Fig. 601 – The second plan of La Valetta (Malta) by Francesco Laparelli (1566) indicated a grid-like layout within the confines of the city walls and a star-shaped bastion. KRUFT (1989) gave the illustration upside down. The north is here to the top.

Military engineers arrived on Malta in 1532 and improved the weak existing forts. After some initial hesitation about a permanent stay, the insight grew, in 1557 that a new city was necessary and plans were drawn. Further improvement of defense buildings took place after Turkish beleaguering in 1565. The military engineer Francesco Laparelli (1521 – 1570) stated: ‘It is a great thing to lay the foundations of a new city, built her defenses and let the people live in it and admire: these things are the daughters of immortality.’ The decision to enlarge La Valetta was formally taken on the 14th of March 1566. The city plan followed a chessboard pattern within irregular defensive walls (fig. 601).

Laparelli and his supervisor Gabrio Serbelloni must have known Pietro Cataneo’s influential book ‘Quattro primi libri di architettura’ (1554). This set of four books on architectural theory was particularly concerned with the design of fortified cities, materials, ecclesiastical and domestic architecture. His plan for an ‘ideal city’ might have influenced Richard Newcourt’s proposal for the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire in 1666. The book inspired the orthogonal schemes of early American cities like Philadelphia and Savannah (see fig. 609 and fig. 611).

The Flemish mathematician and engineer Simon Stevin (1548 – 1620) was born in Bruges and lived in Leiden from 1581 onwards. His first publication was on interest tables (‘Tafelen van interest’) in 1582. The manuscript had been circulating in the banking community throughout Europe and was considered as secret information. Another important work was ‘De Thiende’ (The tenth; 1586), a booklet introducing decimal fractions in Europe.

The Renaissance knowledge on defense cities was formalized in his book ‘De Stercktenbouwing’ (1594), using geometrical techniques to reach the best practical form (fig. 602). The book on ‘Castrametatio’ (1617) was an elaboration of the theme. Further interests were focused on mechanics (De Beghinselen der Weegconst, 1586), astronomy (De Hemelloop, 1608), civil life (Het Burgherlick leven, 1590) and music (The Spiegheling der Singconst, 1884). He published a total of eleven books covering diverse subjects like trigonometry, architecture, geography, fortification, navigation and musical theory.

The European cities were made of quadrant grids

QMRAn ideal port plan by Simon Stevin (1590) was constructed along geometric lines with the gridiron as a leading principle.

The grid-design found its followers in the Low Countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The newly developed polders (drained lakes in peat areas) were often divided in rectangular plots, like the Beemster (1612), Schermer (1635) and the Watergraafsmeer (1629). The map of the Watergraafsmeer (fig. 603) was drawn by Daniel Stopendael, with the northern direction to the bottom. The polder is divided in four nearly equal parts by two cross roads (the Kruislaan (Cross Lane) and the Middenweg (Middle Road).

603

Fig. 603 – A plan of the Watergraafsmeer or Diemermeer as given by the polymath Mattheus Brouërius van Niedek in his book ‘Het Verheerlykt Watergraefs of Diemermeer’, Amsterdam (1721).

The last of the great lakes to be drained and resulted in the Haarlemmermeerpolder, between Amsterdam and Leiden, in 1852. New projects of droogmakerijen (land reclamation) were initiated in the twentieth century in the former Zuiderzee (now IJsselmeer), resulting in the Wieringermeerpolder (1930), the Noordoostpolder (1942) and the Zuidoostpolder (Flevoland; 1957). The pattern of the roads, waterways and subdivisions was almost without exception of a rectangular nature.

The Dutch also transposed the grid pattern to their colonies, notably to the port town of Batavia (Jakarta, Indonesia) (fig. 604). This colonial settlement developed along the contemporary notions of the ‘ideal’ city (NAS, 1997).

European towns were composed of quadrant grids

QMRFig. 604 – The plan of Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) is seen here on a seventeenth century map. The layout consists of a four-starred fort and rectangular streets.

More recent, but still in the aftermath of the Renaissance influences, was the redesigning of Baixa, the old city center of Lisbon (Portugal). An earthquake hit the capital of Portugal on November 1, 1755 with an estimated punt nine on the Richter scale and ninety thousand people were killed, due to the fires and a tsunami. About 85% of the city was destroyed. Marquis De Pombal (1699 – 1782) took control of the situation and initiated the rescue operations and a rebuilding of downtown Lisbon in a perfect rectilinear grid.

Another Pombaline town is Vila Real de Santo Antonio in the southeast of the country at the Portugese-Spanish border (not to be confused with Vila Real, east of Porto, with its famous Mateus Palace). The fishing village of Vila Real de Santo Antonio was also damaged in the earthquake of 1755 and rebuilt in only five months in 1774 by Marquis De Pombal. The town had a rigid grid, like Lisbon, but on a smaller scale.

The grid was also ostentatious applied in the German city of Mannheim (Germany), on the confluence of the rivers Rhine and Neckar. Frederick IV (1574 –1610), Elector Palatine of the Rhine, initiated the building of the fortress Friedrichsburg and the grid-like city core in 1606 (fig. 605). Subsequently, history bestowed Mannheim with four destructions, but the original grid remained intact in the rebuilding efforts. Now the city bears its name as ‘Quadratstadt’ proudly, with a reference to the numbering of its housing blocks rather than given street names.

European towns were composed of quadrant grids

According to KuilmanFig. 605 – A copper engraving of the city of Mannheim (Germany) as it looked in 1758. The fortified city and grid pattern was founded some hundred and fifty years earlier (1606) by the Elector Palatine of the Rhine Frederick IV and head of the Protestant military alliance known as the Protestant Union.

The nineteenth century saw a monumental rebirth of the grid as initiated by the Spanish architect Ildefons Cerdà (1815 – 1876) in the city extension, or Eixample, of Barcelona (Spain) (fig. 606). The population pressure of the city had reached a boiling point in the mid-nineteenth century. Some seven hundred residents lived on a hectare, in comparison to London (128 inhabitants/hect), Berlin (189 inhabitants/hect) and Paris (291 inhabitants/ hect) at that same period. The rule to leave an unbuilt area outside the city boundary to provide a field of fire could no longer be maintained. Cerdà’s new outlay was eight times larger than the existing city of three hundred thousand inhabitants.

606

Fig. 606 – The Eixample of Barcelona as designed by Ildefonso Cerdà in 1858 was a bold design to release the pressure of the inner harbor city.

It will come to no surprise that Spain took a leading role in Europe, since its rich tradition of colonial grid cities in Middle and Southern America provided a storehouse of experience. The concept was earlier tried on the barren plains of Spain itself in places such as Briviesca, Villarreal and Sante Fe de Granada. However, it seems that the widening of thinking in the Fourth Quadrant of the European cultural history (from the year 1800 onwards) was sympathetic to the orderly outlay. It could counteract the first signs of chaos when people drifted from the countryside into the city in order to enjoy the advantages of ‘urbanization’.

European cities and towns reflected quadrant grids

QMRFig. 607 – The European cultural history with the position of some of the grid towns mentioned in the text.

The history of grid towns in Europe started with the legacy of the Roman Empire. The first visibility of Europe-as-cultural entity under the leadership of Charlemagne was positioned in the middle of the eight century (750 AD) and coincided with a consciousness of the division (John Scotus Eriugena’s The Division of Nature; SHELDON-WILLIAMS, 1987). The first European large-scale city development took shape in the thirteenth century, marking the emerging visible visibility of the Third Quadrant (III) of Europe.

The Renaissance put a renewed emphasis on geometry and the esthetic-visual possibilities of division. However, despite the richness of concepts, the grid town never became the dominant type of city plan in Europe during this period. Most urban developments in the European realm took place under ‘natural’ conditions, with an emphasis on defense structures, because it was a time of (regional) power struggle. Occasionally, some fancy ideas about city planning could develop in the wake of the Renaissance.

The grid concept gained new impulses in the Fourth Quadrant (1800 – 2400) of Europe’s cultural history. Cerdà’s Barcelona (1859) marked the beginning and many European cities followed suit. The Machine Age, with an accent on new technology and mass production left its marks in architecture. The ‘mass approach’ was practiced under the guidance of architects like Le Corbusier and set the scene for the massive post-war city development in Europe, with the ‘American’ way of urbanization and its grid design as a leading principle. The planned city of Milton Keynes (England) might be the zenith of this trend. The grid is since the 1960’s more and more replaced by a ‘street hierarchy’ with separation as a leading principle.

QMR4.1.3.4.5. The American grid towns

The rapid expansion in the seventeenth century of the colonial settlers into the heartland of America provides a unique insight into human behavior on a grand scale. The mass movement of human beings – which occur at a number of occasions in world history – is an interesting phenomenon, which can be associated with a way of thinking. Most of the colonialists had left their homelands pursuant to intolerance (towards particular political or religious opinions) or poor living conditions. The former can be translated in terms of an oppressive oppositional way of thinking and the latter had to do with a spirit of survival, which could be described in a Shakespearian way as ‘to be or not to be’ – the ultimate two-division.

The European colonization of America was – in a quadralectic perspective – permeated with dualistic thinking. Better ways of transportation made it possible to escape the personal situation of discrimination and/or misery. However, many settlers were still born and bred in the same oppositional spirit, which they wanted to evade. So they fell back on their instinctive dualistic apparatus in their newfound freedom – and became successful in a materialistic existence in due course.

Initially, the settlers used their freedom to choose a particular layout of their habitations. The city of Annapolis (Providence), for instance, favored a plan with circles and radiating streets. Puritans from Virginia founded the capital of Maryland in 1649 and the city got its charter in 1708 from Queen Anne. The St. Anne Church (with the Church Circle) and the State House (with the State Circle) are still the remainders of those bygone days of city planning, followed by new developments in a rectangular order (fig. 608).

Quadrant grid towns are popular in america

QMRFig. 608 – The grid city was just a choice of designs available to the early settlers in America. Other options were sometimes chosen, like the city center of Annapolis (Maryland), which shows the circles as Sir Francis Nicholson drew them at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

The spirit of freedom in a terra incognita had to come up with solutions for habitation, and it is remarkable that – apart from ‘naturally’ grown cities – the grid design turned out to be popular in the new colonies. The grid was earlier identified as a Fourth Quadrant member in an ‘evolutionary’ family of basic graphical elements of city plans. The grid (city) does not have – at least in theory – a clear boundary, edge, or entry, since the grid is expandable in all directions. The argument was often brought forward that the rectilinear grid greatly simplified the task of surveying and fitted into the mental pattern of surveyors and civil engineers.

Spiro KOSTOF (1991, p. 100) questioned the statement that the urban grid represented an egalitarian system of land distribution. He admitted that the ordinary citizen gained easy access to land in a preliminary phase, and that a grid speeds up the process of absentee purchases. Straight lines meant that it could be easily broken up in lots. However, once the lots had been sold the social mechanisms of individual wealth destroyed any type of egalitarism and ‘what matters in the long run is not the mystique of grid geometry, but the luck of first ownership’.

William Penn initiated one of the first grid cities when he created the plans for the city of Philadelphia (1682) (fig. 609). He wanted to make Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, into a rural town rather than a city. He chooses the grid plan, as a tribute of freedom in multiplicity, but many inhabitants stayed near the Delaware River and resold their lots.

609

Fig. 609 – The city of Philadelphia, as seen here on a plan by William Penn in 1682, is generally considered to be the first settlement on American soil to promote the grid outlay.

The eventful life of William Penn (1644 – 1718) epitomized the English settler, who brought all the complexities of seventeenth century Europe to the new territories. William’s father was admiral Sir William Penn and his mother Margaret Jasper was the daughter of a Rotterdam merchant. Penn, converted to a Quaker in 1667, aimed at freedom of conscience and equal rights. He defended religious tolerance, both in England and America and was six times imprisoned in his home country for speaking out his opinions. Penn’s intentions contrasted with those of the Puritans of New England, whose goal was a theocracy and despised liberty. The latter used strong-arm tactics, like whipping and hanging to reach their incentives. Their religious vehemence often let to a humiliation of the Indians when their properties were stolen, while William Penn negotiated peaceful purchases.

The policy of tolerance and peace attracted many European immigrants, including Protestant sects like Dunkers (New Baptists, an offshoot of earlier Pietism in which a deeper emotional experience was more important than the form), Huguenots (French Protestants, followers of John Calvin (1509 – 1564), Lutherans (followers of Maarten Luther (1483 – 1546), Mennonites (followers of the pacifistic ideas of Menno Simons (1496 – 1561), Moravians (Herrnhuter or Bohemian Brethren) and the Schwenkfelders (followers of the Silesian-born Caspar Schwenkfeld von Ossig (1489 – 1561), searching for a ‘Reformation by the Middle Way’). These groups were, if anything else, an expression of the spiritual turmoil in Europe caused by oppositional thinking. Pennsylvania became in the early eighteenth century, by inviting these people, a melting pot of immigrants seeking the true spirit of liberty.

The Scottish-born colonist Sir Robert Montgomery (c. 1680 – 1731) was, just like Penn, an exponent of idealistic colonialism in America. He initiated, as early as 1717, the start of a settlement in what sixteen years later became the colony of Georgia. He tried to solve the problems between the English, Spanish, French and local inhabitants by creating a community which he called the ‘Margrate of Azilia’. The proposed territory covered some four hundred square miles between the Altamaha and Savannah rivers (fig. 610). Modesty was not the strongest point of his character when he declared that ‘my design arises not from any sudden motive, but a strong bent of genius I inherited from my ancestors’.

Quadrant grid towns are popular in America

QMRFig. 610 – The plan for the Margrate of Azilia (The Form of Setling) as given by Sir Robert Montgomery in his prospectus for the project ‘A Discourse Concerning the Design’d Establishment of a New Colony to the South of Carolina in the Most Delightful Country of the Universe’ (London, 1717).

A markgraf, or ‘margrave’, originally functioned as the military governor of a Carolingian mark, a medieval province. A margravate was a European term for a border area governed by a ‘margrave’ and Azilia was a fanciful of unknown origin (although there is an early Mesolithic European culture known under this name, referring to a village of southern France, le Mas d’Azil, where the first traces were found). The layout aimed at a corporation of the settlers and the existing Spanish mission. The enterprise failed, but the intentions and the tetradic spirit remained.

The city of Savannah (Georgia) did not remain a grid proposal. When James Oglethorpe (1696 – 1785) and his group landed on February 1, 1733 at the site of present-day Savannah, they started to build palisades for protection. Some eleven hundred residents lived in Savannah in 1738, whose major occupation was ‘to secure land, rum and Negroes’. The grid pattern was probably the brainchild of Oglethorpe, or his friend the architect Robert Castell. Many texts refer to Oglethorpe as a ‘strict disciplinarian’. Slavery and strong liquor were forbidden. However, the lack of a labor force was felt as a constraint and many settlers began to oppose their ‘perpetual dictator’. Oglethorpe left the colony in 1750 and all bans were lifted.

Quadrant grid towns are common in america

QMRFig. 611 – A map of Savannah (Georgia) and its vicinity with the division of land as drawn around 1800 by McKinnon. It might be that Robert Castell, a friend of Oglethorpe’s, provided Georgia’s founder with the inspiration for his plan. Castell cited in his book ‘Villas of the Ancients Illustrated’ (1728) the architectural ideas of Vitruvius, which are reflected in Savannah’s design.

The town is composed of four by four quadrant grids, which are quadrant models

QMRThe city of Savannah, Georgia was established in 1733 and laid out around the four original squares: Ellis Square, Johnson Square, Telfair Square, and Wright Square; all originated by the coordination of James Oglethorpe, the founder of the Georgia colony and the city of Savannah. Originally, these four squares were named for each ward, Johnson, Percival, Ellis, and St. James. Later, Percival was renamed to Wright Square and St. James was renamed to Telfair Square. By the late 1851, there were 24 established squares in the City (text: Brianne Baggett). Photo: Marten Kuilman (May 2013).

Three planned settlements in Kentucky – Franklinville (fig. 612), Lystra (fig. 613) and Ohiopiomingo (on the Ohio River near Rock Haven Landing) – were designed at the end of the eighteenth century by a group of London speculators to attract immigrants. John Russell marked the places on his ‘Map of the State of Kentucky; with the Adjoining Territories’ (London, 1794), but in reality they did not exist.

612

Fig. 612 – The plan of Franklinville in Mason County (Kentucky) depicts an imaginary town designed by property developers (1797). The ‘city’ between the North and Middle Branches of the Licking River had perpendicular streets and blocks of uniform size.

The plans (as reproduced in fig. 612/613) were first given in a four-volumed book by William Winterbotham ‘Historical, Geographical, Commercial and Philosophical view of the United States (London, c. 1796) or ‘View of the United States’ (New York, 1796). The British Baptist minister Winterbotham (1763 – 1829) wrote these books while in Newgate Prison for four years because of his liberal views. The book on the United States was a sequel of a similar setup for the Chinese Empire (1795).

American towns are commonly composed of quadrant girds

Fig. 613 – The layout of Lystra (Kentucky) was an imaginary and never-built town in Kentucky, put on paper in 1794 by a group of London speculators. Lystra was to be located in Nelson (later Grayson) County on a branch of the Rolling Fork of Salt River.

The increase of grid cities started in 1775 and continued in the nineteenth century. The city of Charlotte in Mecklenburg County (North Carolina) is just an example of many, which urban development runs throughout the various ages. Thomas Polk founded the city in 1768 at the crossroads of the Great Wagon Road and a Native American trading path. Settlers of Scottish, Irish and German descent came from Pennsylvania to live in the Carolina foothills. Charlotte Town was named after the wife of King George III, showing its British loyalty. The grid pattern was chosen in the 1770’s.

A ‘gold rush’ started in 1799, some fifty years before the California Gold Rush of 1848. The Carolina Mint functioned from 1837 to 1861, minting local gold. The city’s boom years were between the 1910s – 1920 when the government established Camp Greene. The settlement was named after a war-hero called Nathaniel Greene, and constructed in less than ninety days in 1917. The United States of America, under president Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924), had long stayed out of the World War I in a policy of isolationism, but declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. Camp Greene became a city unto itself with its own facilities.

Many soldiers remained in the area after the Great War and Charlotte was rapidly transformed into a modern city. The grid pattern was abandoned and the landscape architects and city planners took over. The Olmsted Brothers were America’s most well-known name in this branch of urban architecture. Father Frederick Law Olmsted Sr (1822 – 1903) helped (together with Calvert Vaux) to design Central Park in New York in the 1850s. He went on to create park systems in almost every major US city (Prospect Park in New York, Chicago’s Riverside subdivision and the terrain for the Chicago World Exposition in 1893 and Buffalo’s and Boston’s park systems). He died in 1903 and the brothers John Charles and Frederick Law Jr. took over the firm.

By 1912 the overall street plan of Charlotte was complete. Since then the city had become a banking and financial center in the US (HANCHETT, 1998). The icons of business erected the modern high-rise buildings like Wachovia building (One Wachovia Center, 179 m; 1988), the Bank of America building (Bank of America Corporate Center, 265 m; 1992) and the Hearst Tower (201 m; 2002). Charlotte (North Carolina) is today, measured by control of assets, the second largest banking headquarters in the United States after New York City. Much of the icon status of the banking community was seriously flawed in the crisis of 2008, when it turned out that their prosperity was based on thin air.

American towns are often made of quadrant grids

QMRFig. 614 – The city plan of Washington D.C by the surveyor Andrew Ellicott (1754 – 1820) and published by James Thackara and John Vallance in November 1792 became the official city map for government and property developers. An earlier version of this map was printed in Boston in 1792 and was an adaptation of L’Enfant’s first draft of the planning map in June 1791.

The French-born architect and civil engineer Pierre (Peter) L’Enfant (1754 – 1825) first drew a plan for Washington D.C. in 1791 (fig. 614). He used diagonal and radial avenues superimposed upon a gridiron street system in the classic European Baroque style with long sight lines. Comparisons with the layout of Versailles and Paris had been made. The commissioners of the renewal plan of 1901 (McMillan Commission) traveled to the French places, which presumably influenced L’Enfant. The cross feature (to the northwest of the palace) and the fork pattern (to the south east) on the map of Versailles – as produced by the renowned landscape architect André LeNotre (1613 – 1700) (see fig. 29) – does not play a structural role in the modern-day perception of the plan of the capital Washington DC.

615

The New York City grid can be regarded as the most characteristic and daring grid plan in American history. The Commissioners Plan of 1811 was the result of four years of deliberations on the land development of upper Manhattan between Fourteenth Street and Washington Heights. This area was at that time still covered by hills and swamps, which had to be leveled and filled. The visual and practical impact as provided by the horizontal and the vertical lines in the area between the Hudson River to the west and the East River is firm and impressive for any modern visitor to the city (fig. 615).

Fig. 615 – The grid of New York was laid out between 1807 – 1811.

The initial plan called for twelve numbered avenues running north and south. Each avenue was to be hundred feet (30 m) wide. The Middle Way (now Fifth Avenue) formed the main north-south axis. Hundred-and-fifty-five orthogonal cross streets were projected. The main streets were to be no less than sixty feet (18 m) in width. The diagonal of Broadway only interrupts this grid pattern. The surveying and flattening of the huge area north of the city often met with many difficulties. It was recorded that a woman selling vegetables started to throw artichokes and cabbages to drive the surveyors off the land. The young city also featured the first major urban park in the country. The City of New York acquired in 1853 a stretch of land, which was transformed by the distinguished landscape architects Olmstead and Calvert Vaux into the Central Park.

The archetypal grid pattern of New York at the beginning of the nineteenth century did not seem to have a particular religious background, but was guided by a Zeitgeist, which favored an organized multiplicity. On the other hand, the initial settlement by the Dutch some two hundred years earlier (in 1626) had an orthodox component as noted before (p. 740). The community, then known as ‘Nieuw Amsterdam’ and later governed by the notorious fourth Director-General Peter Stuyvesant (1646 – 1664), followed a grid outlay, which might have been conceived in and endorsed by a Christian-religious state of mind.

John REPS (1965/1969; p. 410) stated that ‘the year 1830 saw the birth of a new religion, one among the dozens spawned in the backwaters left by the advancing waves of the frontier. This Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – or the Mormons as they soon were called – became the most successful city builders of all the religious and utopian societies’.

The movement of Joseph Smith (1805 – 1844) started in Fayette in the state of New York and moved towards the west. Their first departure was to Kirtland (Ohio), where a Mormon temple was built. A dream in July 1831 revealed to Smith that the future kingdom of Mormon should be created in Jackson County (Missouri), roughly the center of the North American continent. So a group settled in Independence (Missouri) to survey the area. They received, in 1833, a detailed instruction of Smith how to build a new city (City of Zion), which could hold a population of fifteen to twenty thousand persons (fig. 616). Smith’s eventful life, including visions of God, organizing a new social order, wildcat banking (Kirtland Banking Society), a candidacy for President of the United States and some stings in jail, ended with his assassination in Carthage, Illinois in June 1844.

American cities are commonly composed of quadrant grids

QMRFig. 616 – This intended plan of Zion City was given by Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), to his followers in 1833. The three central buildings functioned as Temples for the Priesthoods (High and Lesser) and Bishop’s store houses. The center is surrounded by a 7 x 7 grid of blocks with alternating axes.

In the end, the city of Far West in Caldwell County (Missouri) was built along these specifications, but nothing has left of this settlement. The population of Independence and other towns in Jackson County started to resent the Mormon influx and after some time the new arrivals of Far West had to move again, this time to the east. Nauvoo (‘the beautiful’) on the banks of the Mississippi River in Illinois became their settlement. The idea of a religious utopia in the wilderness and the establishment of a model society took shape on a larger scale when the movement settled down in Utah and started to build Salt Lake City in 1847, again along a stringent uniform grid (fig. 617). It is made up of quadrant grids.

QMRFig. 617 – A view of Salt Lake City (Utah) in 1870, just after the continental railway reached the city, which brought an end to some twenty-five years of isolation and a founder’s spirit based on a religious belief.

The centralized planning was efficient for some time, but things were beginning to change when the transcontinental railway reached the city in 1869. Its presence ended the geographic isolation of the city (which had about twelve thousand inhabitants at that time of which 90% was Mormon). Some twenty years later the population had risen to forty-five thousand inhabitants of which half was non-Mormon.

The population became more diverse in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and a conflict between Mormons and Gentiles (or non-Mormons) arose, leading to skirmishes on the political front. The struggle to retain the conservative, communal values based on religion and the progressive minds of a modern society was caused by the limitations of oppositional thinking. The disagreements began to moderate after 1890 due to a further influx of immigrants. Religious controversies were subdued by 1920.

The original, oppositional state of mind, however, was still visible in the early 1960s, when Utah had the most defense-orientated economy of the United States. ‘The largest single site employer in Utah is the U.S. Air Force’s Hill Air Force Base, located between Salt Lake City and Ogden with an employment of 22,000 military, defense civilians and contractors providing worldwide engineering and logistics management for the F-16 Fighting Falcon, A-10 Thunderbolt II, and Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile’ (Source: http://business.utah.gov/industries/aerospace-defense/)

The intertwining of a psychological setting geared towards strong beliefs in right and wrong, an architectural peculiarity (a grid city) and the sociological factor of people working in the arms industry is probably more than a coincidence. It might well be, that the choice for straight lines in a city design finds its roots in that same belief of moral straightness and in an occupation, which is concerned with physical force (resulting in different forms of murder). The uniting entity in this sociological setting is, no doubt, an oppositional (two-fold) frame of mind.

This observation puts the tetradic ‘grid’ town of the Jeffersonian type – and maybe the Roman type as well – in a different perspective. It might well be that the inspiration of a cross and a grid could be rooted in oppositional thinking rather than in the tetradic message, which is incorporated in its superficial appearance. A stern warning for future ‘quadralectic’ adepts is therefore repeated here:

Not every tetradic appearance (in architecture) refers to a four-fold way of thinking, but these features can also be the result of a stringent application the two-fold (oppositional) way of thinking.

The gridiron town fits – as a graphical expression – into the Second and/or Fourth Quadrant state of mind, which either occur in a young phase of a development or towards its end. These two options still have their influence in America, but the former is more prominent since the American culture is in an earlier stage (from a European point of view). Many grid cities were built in a youth-full spirit. The open space opened possibilities, while the pockmarked history of Europe after 1650 assumed a type of blending in. For many settlers, the route to America was not only an adventure in the physical sense, but also a search for a different type of division thinking – although it has never been described that way.

The European religious evacuees of the seventeenth century, like the Quakers and the Puritans saw their (total) devotion to God – which in itself was a sign of a Third Quadrant mind – threatened by other oppositional thinkers, who were not willing to compromise. Therefore, the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean was also the search for an environment in which their (rigid) ‘Third Quadrant’ state of mind was not threatened. Some of them might even have dreamed of a ‘Fourth Quadrant’ experience, a feeling of freedom, because of the lack of opposition.

The ‘first American lady poet’ Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612 – 1672) could be mentioned as a person searching for salvation and spiritual freedom in undiscovered lands. She had a rather sensitive character and was prone to depressions. As the wife of a Puritan settler (Simon Bradstreet) she arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 and had already five children when she was thirty. Another three children were born when living in the settlement of Andover (Essex County, Massachusetts).

It is made up of quadrant grids

QMRBradstreet toyed with the four-fold in a peculiar way in some of her poems. It was like someone longing for solutions in an incomprehensible world. In a modern (quadralectic) view her split character was unable to escape the bonds of oppositional thinking – which is a highly opportune theme by many people. Her longest poem was called the ‘Four Monarchies’, a classical tetradic theme in ancient history (and the Biblical story of Daniel). The fourfold was again instrumental in poems like the ‘Four Ages of Man’, the ‘Four Humours in Man’s Condition’ and the ‘Four Seasons’. Her main sources were found in Puritans libraries, in books such as Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘History of the World’, Archbishop Usher’s ‘Annals of the World’, and William Pemble’s ‘Period of the Persian Monarchy’.

Many more examples of American cities can be given in which the grid played a formative role in the urban development. The city center of the fourth largest city in the United States, Houston (Texas) is probably the ultimate form in which the grids themselves act as structural units (fig. 618).

American towns are commonly made of quadrant girds

QMRFig. 618 – The central part of the city of Houston (Texas) is constituted of a number of grids, running in different directions.

Houston was founded in 1836 and became the capital of Texas in 1842. The digging of the Houston Ship Canal marked the beginning of an unprecedented economic growth based on in- and export of oil and agricultural products. A fast chemical and pharmaceutical industry was added in due course and the NASA’s Johnson Space Center put the first man on the Moon. The Old Market Square is the historic town center and a number of old buildings were recreated in the Sam Houston Historical Park. A full grid was already developed in 1873 and given as a ‘Bird’s Eye View of the City of Houston’. The drawing was by Augustus Koch, a prolific itinerant city-view artist, and published by J.J. Stoner (Madison, Wisconsin). Popular series of bird’s eye views of American (grid) cities comprised Austin, Mount Vernon, Columbus, Circleville (1876, fig. 533-534), Salt Lake City (fig. 617) and many others in Ohio and Michigan.

There are exceptions, but it is fair to say that the grid town is a hallmark of urban America (and for Australia as well). The position of the boom periods at the end of the eighteenth century, the beginning of the nineteenth century and the religious inspired building from the first quarter to the third quarter of the nineteenth century are given in fig. 619. The CF-graph of the American cultural period was given earlier as fig. 551.

American towns often comprise quadrant grids

QMRThe quadrant grid city can be found on all continents and is embedded in many different cultures. The Chinese grid cities were already partly covered in the present book under the heading of the ‘square’ cities (Chapter 4.1.3.3). Many square cities – but not all – were also grid cities, as could be seen in the reconstruction of the old capital of Xi’an (or Chang’an, in the Shaanxi Province) in the T’ang Dynasty (618 – 907 AD, see also fig. 564).

The square and grid theme originated in the Zhou (Chou) dynasty (1123 – 256 BC), although some sources put the tradition as far back as the fifteenth century BC. The first written form was in the ‘Kaogong ji’ (Record of Trades) section of the Zhou li, an Eastern Zhou text originated in the Spring and Autumn Period (722 – 475 BC). It said that ‘a capital city should be square on plan. Three gates on each side of the perimeter lead into the nine main streets that crisscross the city and define its grid-pattern. And for its layout the city should have the Royal Court situated in the south, the Marketplace in the north, the Imperial Ancestral Temple in the east and the Altar to the Gods of Land and Grain in the west’.

Mexico City in Middle America is probably the biggest grid city in the world. Its pedigree is indigenous (before 1500 AD) with further development (of the grid pattern) in the Spanish colonial period and a continuation after the country (Mexico) became independent in 1810 (and its recognition by Spain in 1821 after Agustin de Iturbide rode into town as the ‘National Liberator’).

The history of the foundation by the Aztecs (in 1325 AD), its destruction in 1521 and rebuilding by the Spaniards and its subsequent development in the nineteenth century, marked a long line of urban planning with the grid as its guiding principle. Further explosive urban growth in the twentieth century – from some five hundred thousand inhabitants in 1900 to nearly nine million in 2008 – saw the appearance of the shantytowns, the chaotic conglomerates of makeshift houses (see Chapter 4.1.1).

The grid design was highly popular in South America, from ancient time onwards. The city of Chan Chan, once the capital of the pre-Inca Kingdom of Chimor, near Trujillo (Northern Peru), is an example of city planning along rectangular lines. The period of building was estimated between AD 950 and 1400, and some two hundred thousand people might have lived there at one time.

Chan Chan covers about 28 square kilometers and comprises at least nine self-contained, walled-in units (‘citadels’ or ‘palaces’), in a rectangular grid structure. The vast site was put on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986 and also on the additional ‘in danger’ list, because the adobe (mud) is vulnerable to excessive precipitation. The ancient city is now in ruins and restoration is a difficult process. The nearby ‘pyramids’ (temples) of Huaco De La Sol and Huaco De La Luna were made by people of the Moche culture between the first and eight century AD and deserve preservation as well. Recently, a mummy of a woman was found (c. 450 AD) in a tomb near the summit of Huaca Cao Viejo in El Brujo, south west of Chocope, in the Ascope province (one hour drive from Trujillo).

The Law of the Indies was codified by Philip II in 1573 to provide a formal framework for the colonial urbanization processes, and kept in force for some three hundred years. The Law specified a square or rectangular central plaza with eight principal streets running from the plaza’s corners. This design pattern, which was in line with the practices of earlier Indian civilizations, was followed by scores of communities throughout Middle and Southern America.

The city of Lima, the capital of Peru, followed a traditional development just like Mexico City from a pre-Inca background into a Spanish colonial town – founded by Pizarro in 1535 as ‘Ciudad de los Reyes’ – with a continuing urbanization after the independence of Peru was declared in 1821 and consolidated after the Battle of Ayacucho in 1824.

Figure 620 gives a plan of Lima in the year 1683. It displays a walled city with the majority of the houses in a grid pattern, but also some radiating structures. Lima became the major export town of the Spanish colonial trade (gold and silver). A map of 1750 by the famous French cartographer Jacques Nicolas Bellin (1703 – 1772) still indicates the same outlines. The main city and its harbor port Callao were connected by urban development in the 1970’s. The whole coastal area from Callao to Chorrillos in the east is now covered by housing developments in alternating grids.

QMRFig. 620 – The plan of the city of Lima in 1683 gives an example of post-Hispanic city development in South America, consisting of radial and grid elements. The north is towards the left-hand corner at the bottom of the page.

Cuzco, in the southeastern part of Peru, was the Inca capital of the Tahuantisuyu (‘The Land of the Four Corners’). Popular belief and local lore tell the story that the city was planned as a puma (jaguar), with two sectors: urin and hanan. These areas were in turn divided into four parts representing the four provinces: Chinchaysuyu (NW), Antisuyu (NE), Cuntisuyu (SW) and Qollasuyu (SE). The leaders of these provinces could only live in that particular quarter of the city, which corresponded to their part of the empire.

It is unlikely that the initial settlers had a jaguar in mind, but certain geometric directions might have crossed their mind when they started building their houses. Sometimes the imagination of (pseudo) archeologists led them into observations, which are debatable, but wins them the favor of the public. The bird’s eye view of Cuzco, as given by the German cartographers Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg in their atlas ‘Civitates orbis terrarum’ (Cologne, 1597), is fairly idealistic (fig. 621). The first Latin edition of Volume I of the ‘Civitates’ dated from 1572. The woodcut is admitted to Antoine Du Pinet (1564) after a plan in G.B. Ramusio, Navigatione (Vol. III, 1556). The map could be seen as a projection of ancient European myths and utopian dreams. The map of Tenochtitlan (Mexico) is given in the same work of Braun and Hogenberg and was discussed earlier. The topography around Cuzco only allows for a rather crude ‘traza’ (regular checkerboard pattern) with the plaza major (Plaza de Armas) in the center.

The city is composed of quadrant grids

QMRFig. 621 – A grid map of the city of Cuzco (Peru) – as given here in a later edition of Braun and Hogenberg’s book ‘Civitates orbis terrarum’ (1597) – is an idealistic representation of the situation as the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro (1476 – 1541) found the city during his 1533 expedition to Pachacamac.

Many other South American cities, like Caracas (Venezuela, founded in 1567), Buenos Aires (1580) and Mendoza (1561, with a rebuilding after the 1861 earthquake, which killed five thousand people) in Argentinia, started as a grid city and continued to use the rectangular pattern in their extensions in later years.

The last example will be Santiago, the capital of Chili, which was founded in 1541 by the Spanish conquistador Pedro de Valdivia (c. 1500 – 1553) at the foot of the Santa Lucia Hill, formerly known as the “Huelén“. Valdivia became the first royal governor of Chile. He was murdered at the end of an extraordinary eventful life. The city was planned according to the traditional Spanish checkerboard layout (fig. 622).

The city was composed of quadrant grids

QMRFig. 622 – This engraving of the city of Santiago in Chili was given by Chilean Jesuit and chronicler Alonso de Ovalle (1603 – 1651) in his book ‘Histórica relación de Chile’ (Rome, 1646). The publication in Rome was staged in order to avoid Spanish censorship. Santiago is made up of four by four quadrant grids

More modern developments, like Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais) in Brasil, still uses the grid as a structural element in urban development. The first planned city in Brasil (founded in 1897) had two oblique crossing orthogonal schemes designed by Aarão Reis in 1894 (fig. 623). The ideas were partly borrowed from Washington DC and comprise the eclecticism of the time. The symmetrical blocks had to be a physical expression of the slogan ‘order and progress’ – written on the Brazilian flag as ‘ORDEM e PROGRESSO’ – and any memory of the baroque colonial style was erased.

reis

Fig. 623 – A stamp to commemorate the hundred’s birthday of Aarão Reis, the engineer who conceived the city plan of Bello Horizonte (Minas Gerais) in Brasil in 1894. In addition, a portion of his grid plan of the city at a scale of 1: 10.000 is given.

Later, in the 1940’s, the young architect Oscar Niemeyer added the Pampulha Neighborhood to the capital of Minas Gerais (commissioned by the mayor and later president of Brasil Juscelino Kubitschek). Both men – Niemeyer and Kubitschek de Oliveira (1902 – 1976), together with Lucio Costa – wrote architectural and planological history in 1956 with the foundation of the new capital Brasilia.

The former casino in Belo Horizonte/Pampulha (1942; now an art museum, since gambling was no longer allowed) is situated above the artificial Pampulha Lagoon, and was the first example of Modernism in the country. Niemeyer followed the concept of Le Corbusier’s promenade architecturale, a journey through a building in order to reveal the soul of the building. The garden was designed by the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx (1909 – 1994).

Finally, the many grid cities of Australia can be mentioned, like Adeleide on a map by P.F. Sinnett (1881) (given in: GALANTAY (1979), which followed the North American type of urbanization. The country is still too young to opt for a separate ‘cultural period’, apart from their Aboriginal past. The same lack of cultural context holds for the modern grid patterns in the cities in South East Asia and elsewhere.

QMRFig. 722 – The Strozzi Palace in Florence is a Renaissance building with the appearance of a princely palace, completed in 1538.

The Strozzi Palace in Florence (fig. 722) is attributed to Giuliano da Maiano and designed by Giuliano da Sangallo the Younger. The building started in 1489. The plan is an exact 4 : 3 rectangle, while the courtyard plan has a ratio of 5 : 3. There is a bilateral symmetry in the layout and the façade has a four-division. All these features together might point to a ‘Pythagorean’ design and cubic architecture in general, but this line of thought ceased with the Strozzi Palace. Other ‘master plans’ took over, based on the quincunx and various types of symmetry (other than the bilateral) were used. Maybe the Renaissance palaces should be treated as a distinct class of buildings, which are different from the historical palaces, which were occupied by real kings and queens.

The sculptor, architect and theorist Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439 – 1502) produced a number of ground plans for these civic palaces, based on a grid. He was also a military engineer involved in the building of seventy fortifications for the Duke of Urbino. The latter is known from his Studiolo in the Ducal Palace in Gubbio (see p. 520). The ground plans of di Giorgio did not favor a particular number. There were grids consisting of 9 x 9, 11 x 11, 12 x 12 quadrant blocks, often with four squares, circular or octagonal cortiles (open internal courtyards). The design method offered a degree of artistic freedom within the constraints of the grid, which was generally followed in the decades to come (fig. 723).

QMRFig. 724 – The Palazzo Valmarana in Vicenza (Italy) was designed by Andrea Palladio and represents a culmination of civic building inspired by classical geometrical ideas. This type of buildings became popular in the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century, and remained a guideline for similar constructions up to the present day. The Palazzo Valmarana can be seen as an outstanding architectural marker point of building for the rich.

‘Real’ palaces were designed and constructed in Spain at about the same time as Palladio provided the Valmarana family with shelter in Italy. The Royal Palace of the Escorial is located some forty-five kilometers northwest of Madrid (Spain) at the rim of the Guadarrama Mountains. It appears as a great stone platform carved from the mountain and its harmonizing with the landscape makes it a stonescape. It has reminiscence, according to George KUBLER (1982, p. 98), to certain Quattrocento paintings of ideal cities drawn with single-point perspective in Renaissance Italy. He gives the panel painting ‘A City Square’, attributed to Luciano de Laurana, in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, as an example (see also fig. 648 top of this book).

The history of the Escorial has four distinct elements, which were planned by King Philip II (1527 – 1598) after he became King of Spain in 1556: 1. The initial purpose as a place to house the tombs of the dynasty, in particular his father Charles V, who was buried in Yuste; 2. The foundation of a monastery (with hospital buildings); 3. A basilica (with a dome); 4. A palace (with a library). These four intentions, which were brought forward more or less simultaneously, have aspects of higher division thinking, but the psychological setting of the King is hard to prove.

Spain was in the second half of the sixteenth century on the heights of its political power, covering the larger part of Europe when Philip II was King of Spain and Portugal, King of Naples, Duke of Milan, Ruler of the Spanish Netherlands and King consort of England (as husband of Mary I). It was furthermore, a global player in the colonial expansions across the Atlantic.

King Philip II began his search for a foundation of a new monastery in 1558 – 1559. He called it San Lorenzo de la Victoria – referring to the victory in the battle of San Quintin (in northern France) on 10 August 1557, on the day of San Lorenzo. The King employed the help of the Jeronymite Order, but their suggestions and plan, where about half the size than the cuadro (block), which was laid out in April 1562 in a location near El Escorial. The plan of the monastery, which was first to be started, had a classical tetradic design (fig. 725).

QMRFig. 725 – The plan of the monastery cloisters (before 1567) was the first onset to the master plan consisting of the fourfold monastery-basilica-palace-library complex of the Escorial. The plan is a four square quadrant.

George KUBLER (1982) mentioned three Jeronymite friars, who played a major role in the history of construction of the Scoria. Juan de San Jeronimo was present from 1562 to 1591 as the chief accountant and most authoritative as a chronicler. Antonio de Villacastin was the obrero mayor (chief workman) and Jose de Sigüenza wrote a history of the building by recording the progress of design and construction.

The official work started in 1563 with the intention of Philip II to bring the body of his father Charles V, the Emperor, who died in 1558, from Yuste to the new location. Philip had an interest in building matters, which only increased after his European tour at his father’s command (1548 – 1551). The King visited England for the marriage to Queen Mary (1516 – 1558, also known as Bloody Mary, because she had three hundred religious dissenters burned at the stake) in July 1554. He was accompanied at that (political-inspired) trip by the architect and engineer Gaspar de Vega, who had to study foreign buildings and constructions, which could be useful in Spain. Vega returned overland and visited places like the Louvre, St.Germain-en-Laye and Fontainebleau.

The three main architects of the Escorial were Francisco de Villalpando, Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera. The first named architect was originally a bronze worker, who translated Serlio. He was titled as a ‘geometer and architect’, which was the first official use of this term by a Spanish royal patron. His qualities as a humanist and theorist gained him (royal) recognition in the liberal art of architecture (KUBLER, 1982).

The second, Juan Bautista de Toledo, was appointed as an architect in 1559. He had been Michelangelo’s assistant at St. Peter from 1546 to 1548. His promotion turned into a personal tragedy when his wife and two daughters and all his books and papers were lost when the ship sank, which had to bring them from Naples to Spain. His appointment – after this event and as an outsider – was marred with conflicts and crisis, but the King backed him until he died on 21 May 1567.

The third, Juan de Herrera, was an assistant of Toledo, appointed by the King in 1563 to check on the unpredictable authority of Toledo. He was appointed in 1576 as royal architect – after years working in the back-ground, with close ties to the King as Master of the Horse (1569 – 1577) and later (1579) as court chamberlain.

The inactive year of Toledo’s death (1567) was followed two years later by an increase in activities. Flemish slaters expanded their trade after the work on the Kings temporary dwelling La Fresneda was finished. The main staircase, which was the showpiece of the monastery, the roofing of the kitchen wing and the paving made good progress. The cloister was finished in 1579 when the parapets were placed. The basilica started in 1574 and was finished in 1586.

The building of the fountain begun in 1586, following the symbolism of the Garden of Eden, with four rivers watering Asia, Africa, Europe and America (fig. 726). The design had similarities with the Fons Vitae, also with four basins, at the Manga cloister of Santa Cruz in Coimbra (Portugal), built in 1533 – 1534.

As well as this Christian iconography, the paintings could also contain mythological allusions to four deities of classical antiquity.[5] In Spring, Poussin reuses the device of a rising sun, previously employed in the Birth of Bacchus to denote Apollo, the father of Bacchus. In Summer Ruth with her sheaf of corn could denote Ceres, the goddess of grain and fertility. In Autumn the grapes could be a reference to Bacchus. The serpent is a symbol used in Poussin's previous oeuvre.[6] In Winter the snake slithering over the rocks could be an allegorical reference to the classical underworld and Pluto.

Gallery

In 1750 the Deluge was included in an exhibition of the paintings of Louis XV in the Luxembourg Palace. At the time its popularity with the public eclipsed the Marie de' Medici cycle of Rubens, on display for the first time; this included well-known visitors such as Charles-Antoine Coypel, James Barry[disambiguation needed] and Horace Walpole, who in particular singled out the Deluge as "worth going to see alone" and "the first picture of its kind in the world". It was, however, the commentary of the Abbé Louis Gougenot at the time that captured the four aspects of the painting that would be the main points of all future discussion:[21]

Funeral service of Nicolas Poussin by Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret. 1819. Engraving by C. Normand. The Deluge hangs on the back wall.[22]

Economy of means. One significant feature that distinguished the Deluge from the Deluges of Raphael and Michelangelo was the small number of figures in the painting – eleven including a horse. Several writers including Coypel and Diderot thought there were even fewer. Poussin was perceived to have deliberately chosen to depict "le moment solennel où la race humaine va disparaître". Early critics, including Chateaubriand, regarded this essay in horror and pathos as Poussin's swansong. Later the historical painter Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret included it symbolically in his depiction of Poussin's death. Critics also noted Poussin's understatement: according to Diderot and de Clarac, the calmness of the picture only intensified the horror. Constable, who picked out the Deluge as one of the four paintings marking "the memorable points in the history of landscape", considered that this calmness showed Poussin's faithfulness to the original biblical text, which only mentions rain; for him Poussin had eschewed all violent and dramatic effects, thereby deepening the interest in those few figures present.[23]

Richness of interest. Although lacking in principal figures, the Deluge was considered to evoke in the observer all the ideas connected with a disaster – destruction, desolation, fear, horror and melancholy. Critics singled out the old man clinging to a plank, the pathos of the family group desperately trying to rescue their child and, most sinister of all, the serpent gliding over the rocks on the right. Rousseau was among those whose imagination was haunted by the serpent, the precursor of evil. The nightmarish image of the serpent – l'esprit tentateur qui corrompit le premier homme, et qui s'applaudit encore du nouveau désastre dont il est l'auteur – became one of the most copied motifs of Poussin.[24]

Sublimity of conception. For many critics, Poussin's boldness in daring to break all the usual rules of painting showed that he was attempting to speak the unspeakable; that he was willing "to hurl himself into the depths to make tangible an inaccessible truth." With this recognition of visionary recklessness, considered by some to contradict his usual rational methods, came also an appreciation of the ineffable sublimity of the Deluge, both for its terror and its simplicity. Like others before him, Shelley was transfixed by the painting, which he found "terribly impressive". Many commentators have ascribed the visceral and overwhelming reaction created by the Deluge, so hard to translate into words, to Poussin's genius in evoking the sublime.[25]

Appropriateness of colour. Already in the seventeenth century, academicians had praised the Deluge for its "universal colour". In 1750 the Abbé Gougenot had similarly referred to the appropriateness of grey as a colour. It was Coypel, however, who understood that it was a colour designed to evoke a mood of melancholy. Later this was understood to be a supreme example of Poussin's theory of modes. This ran contrary to the usual academic theories demanding vivid contrasts in a work of art. On the contrary as the English critic John Opie pointed out in 1809, the colourlessness of the Deluge was one of the main factors for the "pathetic solemnity, grandeur and simplicity of its effect". Poussin's use of colour did not please all, notably the English critic John Ruskin, who found the treatment of the theme undramatic and unnaturalistic. Much later at the turn of the twentieth century the French art historian Paul Desjardins, one of the greatest scholars of Poussin, interpreted the Deluge not as an evocation of rain or flooding but of doom and despair. Rather than realism, he saw the whole painting as an expression of a human state, a prayer uttered into the void never to be answered. With this interpretation, the greyness of the picture became moving in itself, the symbol for a lost soul. Moreover, the cycle of four paintings could thrn be seen to have a unity as four moods or musical modes, reflected in the different colourings of the paintings: lush greens for Spring; golden yellows for Summer; fading browns for Autumn; and ashen grey for Winter.[26]

QMRCanaan as it was possessed both in Abraham and Israels dayes with the stations and bordering nations is an ancient wall map of the Land of Israel which was drawn by the English historian and cartographer John Speed in 1595. It is the first map to be drawn by Speed.

Today the only copy of the map is found within the Eran Laor maps collection in the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.

Contents [hide]

1 Description

2 Notes

3 References

4 External links

Description[edit]

The map is printed on four sheets as divided to quadrants, with the dimension of each being 957 by 745 millimeters.

The map is based on the map of Benito Arias Montano, which in turn is based on the map of Santo Vesconta, while the map of Speed is larger than those other two and includes areas that don't appear on those: Mesopotamia at the Fertile Crescent area, the Arabian Peninsula, the shores of Turkey and of Cyprus island, and the Nile Delta in Egypt. The map also includes historical-biblical details: The story of The Exodus - the Israelites' route out of Egypt with illustrations of miniature figures and events along the route, the formation of the land of Israel with the borders of the Israeli tribes in marking with striated lines, and the story of Jonah and the whale illustrated off shore from the city Ascalon with the whale opening his mouth in order to swallow the prophet Jonah. On the sides of the bottom right and left quadrants appear two tables of references, according to longitude and latitude lines of sites on the map.

The uniqueness of the map is within decorative enframes-cartouches on its sides, with two big cartouches at the top quadrants and two small ones at the bottom quadrants. The big cartouche at the top left shows the biblical Israeli leaders Moses and Aaron placing their hands on Israel's Tablets of the Law with the Ten Commandments inscribed in Hebrew. Above them at the top of the cartouche frame within another frame, appears a caption of the Hebrew word "יְהֹוָה" - YHWH, the tetragrammaton as the most sacred name of God. The big cartouche at the top right quadrant shows the biblical story of Adam and Eve in Paradise, which is based on Albrecht Dürer's engraving from 1504 under the title Adam and Eve - with small differences between the two[n 1]. Above them at the top of the cartouche frame within another frame, appears a caption of the Hebrew word "אֱלֹהִים" - Elohim as the second name of God. The small cartouche at the bottom left quadrant shows a heraldic eagle and an inscription to sir Robert Cotton who encouraged Speed to start drawing maps.

QMRFour cardinal virtues; Louvre, Paris. Brooklyn Museum Archives, Goodyear Archival Collection- art

QMRThe Tomb of Sir John Hotham, supported by figures of the cardinal virtues.

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Quadrant Model of Reality

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Quadrant Model of Reality Book 26 Art and Cities

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