Architectural theory and urbanistic discourse : Of «beautification » through to overall reform in the XVIII C. City

Abstract

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in the beginnings of urbanism and its original nature. This examination has much to do with that other as to the relation between discreet urban projects and overall planning in the present day. In the second half of the XIII Century, the notion of «Embellissement» (ornamentation or beautifying) went hand in hand with functional objectives and a reform of the city at large. A re-reading of Laugier's famous «Essai» in which the city is held to be like a copse (a wood and yet a prak) shows that this idea in point, thought it might appear to be formalist, has within it a hard centre of functionalism. The paper goes into the development and importance of such ideas and attempts to trace a relation between them and contemporary changes in thought in established disciplines from Geography and Medicine right on through to changes in thought as to the best «policing» of cities. In the light of the foregoing, we can now-or so the paper holds- understand the Plan of the Artists for Paris (1793-97 ) as something more than a mere formal exercise. The paper does not set out to be historialogically original but rather to exalt the importance that this plan in question and many others such had in their «geometricality» as signs of an altering urbanistic universe of discourse.