The great buildings attract people

Another truism but very often we do not realise its importance. The great buildings - I mean great public buildings - in the history usually the churches and cathedrals, now the buildings of culture: theatres, operas, museums. But lets look at this phenomena a little bit closer. What are the possible locations of great buildings within the city structure? Here we find very different solutions.
Usually the great buildings are connected with great public spaces. This was the case of Egyptian pyramids and the ceremonial procession road, as well as the procession road from the Ishtar Gate to the ziggurat in Babylon.  In the second case theirs direct neighborhood consisted of private housing.

Similar situation took place through ages. Citing Camillo Sitte the cathedrals used to be a part of a city not a separated construction. The temple was present in the city structure through the multiple vistas, usually well thought and composed.

Cathedral, Piaza dell Duomo, Florence, Italy, source: Google Street View

The same situation took place in the Renaissance when the role of public spaces became more important and along with the discovery of the perspective the vistas became longer and created with the awareness  of the peculiarities of human sight.

All the time the public edifices were surrounded by the common buildings, which formed a background, the obvious environment. The great building attracted people and the close environment profited of this phenomena as well as of the beauty . The beauty, which discovered part by part used to be much more attractive than visible in whole in the middle of a great square. A bit like a dressed body I suppose.. The commerce, the services, the living public spaces appeared. The profits for the inhabitants were obvious. (Of cause the concept discussed here is not new, e.g. J. Jacobs talked of the same things).

The invention of geometry and the role which it took in the history of urban planning since the Enlightenment  seems to had been similar to the unbounded believe in the potentialities of human mind. Which as we learned after the II world war occurred to be fault. Just let’s look at the current philosophical thought like the oeuvre of Habermas and his successors. The same situation takes place in the field of urban planning. Camillo Site, cited above, started to criticise erecting the public buildings according to geometric rules already in the end of XIXth century (City Planning According to Artistic Principles ,1889) . The real come back to urban planning which respects the basic rules of situating the important building within the city structure allowing them to play their proper role had to wait yet a bit. In the meantime we had the modernism with its believe in the role of open green spaces and the inhuman scale of urban spaces, like e.g. in Brasilia, notabene with the beautiful structures by Oscar Niemeyer. But the crowd is absent..



Just let’s look at few examples of contemporary public buildings which add new values to the surrounding structure.

The Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright, photo source: http://www.architecturesdesign.com/

The Guggenheim Museum II by Frank Ghery, photo source: http://www.mrrena.com/2002/postmodern.shtml

The Opera a Lyon by Jean Nouvell, photo source: http://houseoftalin.blogspot.com/

The Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park in Chicago by Frank Ghery again, photo source: http://www.e-architect.co.uk/chicago/

The Akron Art Museum by Coop Himmelb(l)au, photo source: http://news.architecture.sk/


As a matter of fact in the smaller scale the similar role may be also played by more common buildings like some bigger stadiums or exposition halls. The context seems the most important, as well as the ability to inscribe the building into the surrounding structure.

Boca Juniors stadium, Buenos Aires, Argentina, photo source: http://jerzyciszewski.bblog.pl/