Early Modern Urbanism and the Grid: Town Planning in the Low Countries in International Context. Exchanges in Theory and Practice 1550-1800

274 Pages·2011·8.9 MB·English

by  Piet Lombaerde, Charles van den Heuvel

Early ModErn UrbanisM and thE Grid
ARCHITECTURA MODERNA
Architectural Exchanges in Europe, 16th-17th Centuries
Vol. 10
Series Editors:
Krista De Jonge (Leuven)
Piet Lombaerde (Antwerp)
Advisory Board:
Howard Burns (Vicenza/Pisa)
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (Princeton)
Jean Guillaume (Paris)
John Newman (London)
Konrad Ottenheym (Utrecht)
Ulrich Schütte (Marburg)
E M U G
arly odErn rbanisM and thE rid
t P l C
own lanninG in thE ow oUntriEs in
i C
ntErnational ontExt
E t P
xChanGEs in hEory and raCtiCE
1550–1800
Edited By

Piet Lombaerde & Charles van den Heuvel
H
F
Cover illustrations:
Simon Stevin, City plan, in: Ms. Hendrick Stevin, Eenighe stucken der Crychconst beschreven door Simon
Stevin, (The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 128 A-g-II).
(background) Nicodemus Tessin the Elder, design for redevelopment and extension of Gävle
(Stockholm, The Military Archives, KrA: SFP Gävle 28).
© 2011, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2011/0095/23
ISBN 978-2-503-54073-3
Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper
C
ontEnts
Introduction IX
Piet Lombaerde and Charles van den Heuvel
“Tractable Materials”.
Der Architekt zwischen ‘Grid’ und ‘Ragion di Stato’ 1
Werner Oechslin
Multilayered Grids and Dutch Town Planning.
Flexibility and Temporality in the Design of Settlements
in the Low Countries and Overseas 27
Charles van den Heuvel
Stevin’s Grid City and the Maurice Conspiracy 45
Wim Nijenhuis
Fortification and Town Structure.
Wilhelm Dilich’s Peribologia (1640) and its Connection to
Fortification Theory in the Low Countries 63
Tobias Büchi
The Grid and the Existing City.
Or how New Civic Buildings and Interventions on Confiscated Grounds
Transformed the Medieval City in Early Modern Times:
a Focus on Antwerp (1531–84) 77
Jochen De Vylder
Netherlandish Expertise in Swedish Sixteenth- and
Seventeenth-Century Urban Planning 95
Nils Ahlberg
Castrametatio and the Grid in the Spanish Habsburg World.
Contributions from the Low Countries 1550-1750 129
Piet Lombaerde
Toward an urbanismo austríaco.
An Examination of Sources for Urban Planning in the Spanish
Habsburg World 161
Jesús Escobar
Delirious New Amsterdam 177
Christopher P. Heuer
The Late Eighteenth-Century U.S. Rectangular Land Survey and
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Recuperation of its Enlightenment Ideal 187
Neil Levine
Chicago Architecture and the American Grid 207
David Van Zanten
V
ContEnts
List of Illustrations 215
Selective Bibliography 225
Index of Names and Places 237
Contributors 249
VI
s E ’ P
EriEs ditor s rEfaCE
This publication is the first integral volume on urban design in the Architectura
Moderna series. The Low Countries occupied an extraordinary position in this area of archi-
tecture – in the broadest sense – during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe.
Throughout these centuries, the conviction grew that architecture was not only relevant
to the design and realisation of construction projects, but that it was also essential to the
conception and layout of the city. This applied both to the transformation of existing cit-
ies and to the creation of new cities. Because the Southern Netherlands remained under
the control of the Spanish-Habsburg Empire until the early eighteenth century, there were
numerous contacts between architects and engineers from the Southern Netherlands and the
vast Spanish-Habsburg Empire, to which the New World belonged. It is interesting to note
the inclusion of the new urban design in models of fortifications for cities according to the
new system of bastions. Military architecture and urban design were inseparably linked. On
the other hand, contributions to theory development had been made in the Republic of the
Northern Netherlands since the late sixteenth century. Simon Stevin was a true groundbreaker
in this regard, having exercised enormous theoretical and practical influence on city planning
throughout the entire seventeenth century.
The concepts of castrametatio and the use of grid patterns form a recurrent theme.
This publication pays considerable attention to the discussion concerning the meanings of
these essential terms in the urban design of the Early Modern Era. These terms represent
the key modern concepts for the new urban design that was prominent in Western culture
throughout a long period, defined as the late sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century.
The scholars participating in this publication explored the relations and possible exchanges
between urbanism and fortification in the Low Countries during the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, in terms of both theory and practice. In this book, they also address the
development of architectural and urban projects, both built and unrealised, in Europe and
America.
On 8 May 2009, the Faculty of Design Sciences (University of Antwerp) and the
Rockox House Museum hosted an international symposium entitled New Urbanism and the
Grid: The Low Countries in international context. Exchanges in Theory and Practice 1550-
1800. This publication is the outcome of the discussions during this symposium, which was
organised by Piet Lombaerde and Charles van den Heuvel.
The study of New Urbanism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was made
possible by the Research Fund of the University College of Antwerp. We are grateful to Dr.
Nils Ahlberg for allowing us to call upon his expertise in the course of our research. This
book was compiled largely according to the various lectures of the fourth international
symposium, which was organised by the Henry van de Velde Institute in connection with a
broader study of innovation in the area of architecture, urban design and fortification design
in the Southern Netherlands, particularly in Antwerp. This symposium was made possible
through the financial support of the Antwerp University College and the hospitality of the
Management of KBC, particularly Leo van de Gender (Communications Manager of the KBC
Bank) and Hildegard van de Velde (curator at the Rockox House Museum in Antwerp).
We are grateful to all of the authors, with particular thanks to Charles van den Heuvel
for his complete dedication to the success of this project. Without his scholarship and years of
research in the area of the history of fortification design and urban design, this project would
have never reached a favourable conclusion.
VII
PiEt loMbaErdE
Special thanks are also due to Jesús Escobar, Professor at Northwestern University
(Evanston, Illinois, USA) for his willingness to conduct a critical reading of the introduction
to this book. His comments and questions contributed to the preparation of this introduction.
With this publication, we would like to stimulate a new perspective on the history of
urban design, in terms of both theory and practice. In the opinion of the authors, innovation
in urban design, together with fortification design, infrastructure and water management, are
typical of the Low Countries during the Early Modern Era. Moreover, such developments
generated many exchanges, and they have even had considerable influence in the area of
urban design in general.
Piet Lombaerde
Series Editor
Association of the University and University Colleges of Antwerp
VIII
i
ntrodUCtion
Piet Lombaerde and Charles van den Heuvel
Getting a Grip on the Grid
The grid is probably the most defused form of planned cities and at the same time
remains a most intriguing instrument in the history of urban planning in the Old and New
Worlds. Although the term is commonly used in its singular form, there is a great variety of
this urban form built and theorized, from army camps to utopian settlements, leading to inter-
pretive associations with domination and democracy. As a result of continuous changes in
the content and context of the use of “grid” as a term, anachronisms can hardly be avoided.
On the one hand the term is used in the historiography of town planning in the specific con-
text of urban planning in the United States since the end of the eighteenth century; on the
other hand the term is often alternated with the orthogonal layout of cities and buildings all
over the world from Antiquity to the twenty first century. In a recent publication, The Grid
Book, Hannah Higgins equates the term with a range of loose associations having to do with
brick construction, linear projection systems on maps, musical notation, double-entry ledger
systems, applications of checkerboard floor in perspective paintings, ship containers and
computer networks.1 While such comparisons are based on similarities in formal aspects of
the grid, in particular in rectangular grid-like structures, we need to keep in mind that at the
same time different grid forms are often associated with similar functions. For instance, Frank
Lloyd Wright’s view on democratic land-use translated into the rectangular grid of Broad-Acre
City had its radial counterpart in the utopian Democracity presented during the New York’s
World Fair of 1939. Indeed, the relationship between the grid and politics was one of the
most pressing issues that emerged during the colloquium. Although the urban grid in its most
common interpretation (as a system of lines meeting at right angles within regular spaces
which are either square or rectangular) might in principal be considered as value free – that
is, neither oppressive nor democratic – in practice these sorts of political associations related
to urban form prevail.2 The political issue is fundamental since it reveals the risks of reducing
and comparing complex spatial organization of society to abstract forms as apparent in many
morphological studies of the twentieth century. For instance in the case of thirteenth-century
Florentine New Towns, several authors, such as Marconi and Friedman, explained the hier-
archical structures of these cities via the lens of a common design method employed by their
builders.3 Yet, one could argue instead that their layouts can only be explained by looking to
contextual forces beyond the shape of the grid itself. In fact the administrative organization
of the mother town Florence into quarters explains the reason of their designs, as well as the
irregular development of the quarters in new towns.
1 H. B. Higgins, The Grid Book, (Cambridge (Mass.) - Urban Design in the Late Middle Ages, (Cambridge
London 2009). (Mass.) 1989). For a recent critical comparative
2 E. W. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, (Minneapolis analysis: W. Boerefijn, The Foundation, Planning
2010). and Building of New Towns in the 13th and 14th
3 P. Marconi, La città come forma simbolica. Studi Centuries in Europe. An Architectural-historical
sulla teria dell’architettura nel rinascimento, Research into Urban Form and its Creation, (PhD
(Rome 1973); D. Friedman, Florentine New Towns. dissertation, University of Amsterdam 2010).
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PiEt loMbaErdE and CharlEs van dEn hEUvEl
This example is characteristic of discussions during the colloquium, which are reflected
in the contributions of this book. Rather than presenting the grid as an explicatory model,
several contributors, such as Werner Oechslin, Charles van den Heuvel, Wim Nijenhuis and
Neil Levine question the grid and try to find modes of thinking and underlying historical
practices that might explain the variety in grid-like structures. In his philological exploration
of historical antecedents of the grid in architectural theory, Werner Oechslin not only demon-
strates how such structures were used in a critical way to formulate opinions on democracy
and the good functioning of the state in Antiquity, the Renaissance and early modern period,
but also the arbitrariness of the historiographical line that reduces the theory of town plan-
ning and the ideal city to design methods and formal schemata. Charles van den Heuvel and
Wim Nijenhuis explain how various planning traditions that resulted in grid-like structures
in the Low Countries were combined in the seventeenth century and theorized by Simon
Stevin in a culture of ‘mathesis’ that served the education and formation of Prince Maurice in
support of the young Dutch Republic. The translation of old planning traditions into theory
in support of a new political framework, seems diametrically opposed to the development
of the grid in United States since its authorization by the Federal government in 1785 and its
establishment of the Land Act of 1796. Neil Levine describes how the grid that had grown
out of Enlightenment ideals of rational organization, systematic classification, and egalitarian
opportunity during the nineteenth century in the U.S. would lose its sense of idealism, until
Frank Lloyd Wright reinstated the grid to instantiate the idea of a democratic community
building.
These examples make clear that it is impossible to come up with an all encompassing
definition and that we are in need of critical alternative readings of the grid. This need has
become even more apparent with the introduction of technologically centered approaches
to the study of cities and the application of Geographical Information Systems, which often
carry with them the risk of reducing complex urban phenomena and losing historical context
in the pursuit of formal schemata. First of all, we need a better understanding of the histori-
cal background of the term. Oechslin explains that the term was not used before the nine-
teenth century and discusses it historical antecedents: figure, line and “geometria”.4 Second,
we need to know how the term grid has been used in various historical contexts. For that
reason we proposed for the colloquium a diachronic approach that does not follow a simple
historiographical line with the grid as a common explicatory model, but in which the grid is
problematized by comparing complex relations between grids and town planning in theory
and practice in various historical contexts overtime. Such an allows us to get a better grip on
the complexity of the deceptively simple form of the grid.
The following themes emerged from the symposium, its follow-up discussions, and
the resulting papers that make up this volume:
Grid: communication by design and instructions
We begin by touching upon the great diffusion of grid-like plans across a wide
expanse of geography. If there are external influences or exchanges with local practices at
work in this process, how did communication take place? How, for instance, can we explain
4 This explanation was given by Werner Oechslin Theory of Architecture’, Nexus Network Journal,
during the closing discussing of the International vol .3, n° 3, 2001, http://www.emis.de/journals/NNJ/
Symposium in May 2009 in the Museum Rockoxhuis Sbacchi.html.
in Antwerp. See also: M. Sbacchi, ‘Euclidism and
x