Concise Townscape Theory, Gordon Cullen

Serial Vision

Serial Vision is to walk from one end of the plan to another, at a uniform pace, will provide a sequence of revelations which are suggested in the serial drawings opposite, reading from left to right.

Place

Place description is in a world of black and white the roads are for movement and the buildings for social and business purposes.

Content

Content concerned with the intrinsic quality of the various subdivisions of the environment, and start with the great landscape categories of metropolis, town, arcadia, park, industrial, arable and wild nature.

Focal Point

Focal point is the idea of the town as a place of assembly, of social intercourse, of meeting, was taken for granted throughout the whole of human civilization up to the twentieth century.

Closure

Closure, may be differentiated from Enclosure, by contrasting ‘travel’ with ‘arrival’. Closure is the cutting up of the linear town system (streets, passages, etc.) into visually digestible and coherent amounts whilst retaining the sense of progression. Enclosure on the other hand provides a complete private world which is inward looking, static and self-sufficient.

Street Lighting

Here we are concerned with the impact of a modern public lighting installation on towns and not, primarily, with the design of fittings. Naturally it is impossible to disassociate the two since, as in all townscape, we are concerned with two aspects: first, intrinsic design and second, the relationship or putting together of things designed.

Outdoor Publicity

One contribution to modern townscape, startlingly conspicuous everywhere you look, but almost entirely ignored by the town planner, is street outdoor publicity. This is the most characteristic, and, potentially, the most valuable, contribution of the twentieth century to urban scenery. At night it has created a new landscape of a kind never before seen in history.

Here and There

The practical result of so articulating the town into identifiable parts is that no sooner do we create a HERE than we have to admit a THERE, and it is precisely in the manipulation of these two spatial concepts that a large part of urban drama arises.

Man-made enclosure, if only of the simplest kind, divides the environment into HERE and THERE. On this side of the arch, in Ludlow, we are in the present, uncomplicated and direct world, our world. The other side is different, having in some small way a life of its own (a with-holding).

From the book “Concise Townscape”, (the architectural press, 1971)