Post #607

For our purposes, however, this relationship, which determined to a great extent the nature of the Renaissance ideal city, becomes important only at the moment when architects became aware of the possibility of transferring to the realm of reality that which they had imagined in their memory; that is, of cutting out of the fabric of the real city the sequences and places that constituted their memory maps of the city, of turning the city into a memory theater and making that theater accessible both to the inhabitants and, equally importantly, to visitors. The planning of the Rome of Sixtus V as a vast tourist city with all its monuments and memorials joined by significant paths or streets marks the true beginning of urbanism. Urbanism, in this sense, might be defined as the instrumental theory and practice of constructing the city as memorial of itself. The history of urbanism from the late Renaissance to the Second World War illustrates this definition clearly : the replanning of London by Wren and his fellow scientists and historians of the Royal Society; the replanning of Paris by Pierre Patte and the philosophic architects of the Enlightenment; the reconstruction of Paris by Baron Haussmann under the Second Empire; the various model cities and their partial implementations envisaged by the modernists from Tony Gamier to Le Corbusier; all perpetuate the myth of memory as installed for keeps, so to speak, in the heart of a metropolis that is (finally) rendered significant and speaking to its people. Anthony Vidler - The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (1992), p. 179