Journal - Abstracts vol.5 nr.2 (2001)

S.Malfroy - Urban morphology and projectconsulting: a Berlin experience

The city of Berlin has been engaged for over 20 years in a long-term project of repairs to the urban tissue that was dismembered during the war and by a half-century of political division. These projects have been undertaken with the greatest of care, on the basis of morphogenetic studies that have informed master plans and extremely detailed regulations. Without questioning the utility of these planning and building standards, there is a fear that they will hypertrophy and end up limiting the work of architectural and urban design to that of pure execution. Producing an inventory of the collective values that should bring lasting benefits to all the city's users is one thing, while making provision in the arrangement of the actual space for the compatibility of these ideals with the individual demands of the different contractors from case to case is another. This paper emphasizes the idea that the task of reconciliation requires a specific inventiveness. After a presentation of the conceptual relation between urban morphology and building typology which underlies the neo-rationalist approach to the urban project, the paper examines how this methodology applies to the resolution of problems by dissecting a proposal formulated for the international competition of 1996 for the completion of Pariser Platz facing the famous Brandenburg Gate.

H.-J. Nitz Medieval towns with grid plan andcentral market place in east-central Europe: origins and diffusion in the early-thirteenth century

In east-central Europe the earliest new towns of the grid model with a central square originated before 1200 in the Austrian border zone with Hungary. Their precursors seem to have been military border towns of the borgo-novo type in northern Italy, from where the model (without a central square) was borrowed by Duke Heinrich von Mödling on his tour through Italy as a companion of Emperor Heinrich VI. Wiener Neustadt, the earliest Austrian example, has been studied in detail using a metrological analysis of its layout. Parallels to the measures of the layout of the borghi novi are part of the proof of the transfer. During the early-thirteenth century, the Neustadt model was applied in new towns all along the Austrian border. When Prince Ottokar II of Bohemia became Duke of Austria, he continued to found towns using this model and, when he took over the kingdom of Bohemia, he introduced the grid town in the perfect chequerboard version to his royal towns.

J.W.R. Whitehand British urban morphology: the Conzenian tradition

This paper describes the origins, development and characteristics of the school of urban morphological thought that is grounded in the work of M.R.G. Conzen. After considering the early influences of Schlüter and Geisler, attention is given to the concepts Conzen developed, such as the burgage cycle, the fringe belt, the morphological frame and the morphological region. In the second half of the paper three examples of current research that builds on foundations laid by Conzen are illustrated: namely, micromorphology, the relationship between morphological periods and the typological process, and the link between decision-taking and urban form.