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This book challenges the conventional idea of what constitutes the physical form of the contemporary city. Observing the absence of extended urban fabrics―the missing urbanism―in the new global cities developed today, it argues that these cities are merely statistical accumulations of density that lack the positive attributes of a genuine urban condition. Cities as urban places cannot be made by individual buildings alone but rather depend on the intertwined combination of an architecture that is bound to the creation of public spaces and streets, and engaged in the structure of urban blocks to form a complex field pattern of interactive solids and voids. Broad in scope, the book explores the nature of the fundamental relationship between architecture and urbanism as one of spatial formation. As an independently designed entity, the city forms the ordering framework in which architecture is partially subordinated to the mutual sustainability of the overall urban fabric. If a new urban architecture is to be an integral constituent of public place making, it must be composed using a radically different paradigm of positive, figurally constructed “space” rather than the indefinite background of “anti-space” as exemplified in the chapter on Mies van der Rohe’s architectural quest for the ineffable modern void. These two different spatial models are explored in depth in the eponymous article, “Space and Anti Space,” first published in the Harvard Architectural Review in 1980, which forms the core of the book and postulates that the underlying attitudes toward spatial formation, at both domestic and urban scales, determine our ability to shape place and human experience. In a series of essays, articles and urban projects extensively illustrated by plans, analytic diagrams, and dramatic images, this book makes a visual and verbal argument for the steps that need to be taken to re-urbanize the city in order to achieve an urbanity consisting of multiple discrete places that depend on the essential concept of contained geometrical space. These spatial ideas are illustrated in this book in three proposals: for Rome, in “Roma Interrotta,” 1979; Paris, the “Consultation Internationale pour L'Aménagement du Quartier des Halles,” 1980; and New York in the “World Trade Center Site Innovative Design Study,” 2002.
In their splendid, beautifully illustrated, and clearly written book, Steven Peterson and Barbara Littenberg lay out their urban design and architectural theories developed during their practice over the past forty years, which led to their proposals for the rebuilding of The World Trade Center after the attacks of September 11, 2001. They were one of the final six teams asked for proposals.They said: The idea of rebuilding the world's tallest building in the immediate aftermath of the attack seemed preposterous: why provoke another attack with an overt act of hubris? A secular building would be, by definition, subject to 'temporality', i.e., obsolescence, change of occupancy, owner renaming, and reinterpretation as an alternative symbol. The limitation of a commercial office building's capacity to be an eternal sacred symbol of the tragedy seemed obvious, or at least to us.Their proposal was a striking contrast to the Liebeskind proposal with its gee-whiz, glitzy 1776 foot tall "Freedom Tower," which was the winner, but of course never built a designed. The Peterson-Littenberg proposal starts with a "public garden around the footprints or the twin towers. The footprints were to become, in one case, a memorial reflecting pool, and in the other case, a memorial amphitheater. There were to be two towers to one side so the plaza could be identified and located from a distance. Commercial space was proposed around the perimeter to be filled in, eventually, by real estate market forces. A mile-long sequence of public spaces was to stretch from the public garden to Battery Park, New York Harbor, Ellis Island, and the Statue of Liberty.Following the urban design theories of their teacher, mentor, collaborator, and friend, Colin Rowe, and their actual, previous proposals for design interventions in Rome, Les Halles in Paris, and Lower Manhattan, they show how, by identifying the structure of the surrounding urban fabric, that fabric can be stretched, expanded, and transformed to form new urban spaces, or urban rooms. These rooms can become the settings for urban life. They believe that an empty plaza with an "objectified" building in its center is not space, but anti-space.There is a fine chapter on Mies, which explores philosophical underpinnings of his work. If Mies said that in his buildings he strove for "beinahe nichts," next to nothing, what is left but space, or as the authors say "space as idea (conceived by Mies as universal)?"The book is an impressive piece of work. It could be summed up in their quoted words of Colin Rowe, who might say at the end of a project he knew was not really complete, " 'boom, boom, boom, implying that all was known, but would be tedious to explain.' " Michael B. Rosen, Architect Chicago 2020
