Urban Navigation

II. Terminated Vistas Considering what the pedestrian and driver see ahead is one of the basic tasks of good urban design; management of vistas is not an empty formal gesture. It helps people get around more easily and interestingly, and it displays that which the civitas considers to be significant. Physical structure and social structure in urbanism are often mutually revealing. The terminated vista is, literally and metaphorically, the most straightforward of the three types of what Raymond Unwin called “street pictures.” A terminus is what is directly ahead of the axis of movement, occupying the vanishing point framed in perspective by the buildings defining the walls of the street. Whatever structure lies ahead concludes the line of sight, thereby taking on the importance of a goal. In this, the lines of movement and vision exactly coincide; in the two other vista types, the deflected and the layered (to be explained in subsequent Technical Pages), they do not. appropriateness and technique The function of a terminating structure and its visual importance should conform. A terminating building may be large or small, but the activity it accommodates should be significant enough in its community to justify its occupying the prominent location. An avenue culminating in a garage or a mundane private business will risk meaninglessness. There is fitting purpose in a terminating structure. In designing such a building, it must be remembered that different kinds of features capture attention at different distances. A strong silhouette will be legible at a greater distance than will light and shadow patterns or architectural features within the outline of the structure. In New England, for example, many old churches have roads converging on the silhouette of their distinctive steeples. Closer in, steeples may get lost in the leaf canopy, while the church’s entry portico becomes prominent, taking over the job of navigational beacon. Details of ornament, color and materials are also useful, but mainly closer in. These kinds of considerations constitute the technique of managing a vista. Where Modernist plans feature terminated vistas, they are usually promising in plan but rather ineffective visually. For example, Le Corbusier’s Plan for a City of 1922 had a complex structure at its center, an aerodrome above a train station above intersecting highways, symbolizing the importance of movement at the heart of his conception of the city. But the structure itself would have been unnoticeable at any distance, as his own perspective drawings reveal. Its descendents are all the “civic center arenas” since the 1960s, which usually block off streets without bothering to visually terminate them. These large buildings contribute to the notorious sense of there being no “there there” in modernist-modified American downtowns. The terminated vista is socially and physically contextual, with inherent power to affect how a place is perceived and understood. It operates in the realm of both perceptual experience and (more so than either deflected or layered vistas) social symbolism. Such power must be handled with knowledge and respect.