AIA Lecture – Document Quality: An Audit Program to Improve Construction Documents

Document Quality: An Audit Program to Improve Construction Documents
This lecture was sponsored by the AIA Chicago chapter and reviewed the essential methods on how to improve the quality of construction documents. This lecture also explained the benefits of how better construction documents results in less exposure to litigation, reduced fees, reduced need for change orders and improved customer relations.

A list of the AIA Chicago Chapter of events can be found at:

http://www.aiachicago.org/events.asp

Robie House

The Robie House was one of the last houses Wright designed in his Oak Park, Illinois home and studio and also one of the last of his Prairie School houses. According to the Historical American Buildings Survey, the city of Chicago’s Commission on Chicago Architectural Landmarks stated: “The bold interplay of horizontal planes about the chimney mass, and the structurally expressive piers and windows, established a new form of domestic design.” Because the house’s components are so well designed and coordinated, it is considered to be a quintessential example of Wright’s Prairie School architecture and the “measuring stick” against which all other Prairie School buildings are compared.

The Robie House is one of the best known examples of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie style of architecture. The term was coined by architectural critics and historians (not by Wright) who noticed how the buildings and their various components owed their design influence to the landscape and plant life of the midwest prairie of the United States. Typical of Wright’s Prairie houses, he designed not only the house, but all of the interiors, the windows, lighting, rugs, furniture and textiles. As Wright wrote in 1910, “it is quite impossible to consider the building one thing and its furnishings another. … They are all mere structural details of its character and completeness.” Every element Wright designed is meant to be thought of as part of the larger artistic idea of the house.

The house and the Robie name were immortalized in Ernst Wasmuth’s famous 1910 publication “Ausgefuhrte Bauten und Entwurfe von Frank Lloyd Wright” (a.k.a. “The Wasmuth Portfolio”). This publication featured most of Wright’s designs, including those unbuilt, during his Oak Park years and brought them to the attention of European architects of 1920s, especially students of the Bauhaus school in Germany and the De Stijl school in Holland. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe among other great 20th Century architects, claimed Wright was a major influence on their careers.

The architectural significance of the Robie House was probably best stated in a 1957 article in House and Home magazine:

During the decades of eclecticism’s triumph there were also many innovators–less heralded than the fashionable practitioners, but exerting more lasting influence. Of these innovators, none could rival Frank Lloyd Wright. By any standard his Robie house was the House of the 1900s–indeed the House of the Century.

Above all else, the Robie house is a magnificent work of art. But, in addition, the house introduced so many concepts in planning and construction that its full influence cannot be measured accurately for many years to come. Without this house, much of modern architecture as we know it today, might not exist.

In 1956, The Archectural Record selected the Robie House as “one of the seven most notable residences ever built in America.” In 2008, the U.S. National Park Service submitted the Robie house, along with nine other Frank Lloyd Wright properties, to a tentative list for World Heritage Status. The 10 sites have been submitted as one entire site. The January 22, 2008, press release from the National Park Service website announcing the nominations states that “[t]he preparation of a Tentative List is a necessary first step in the process of nominating a site to the World Heritage List.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robie_House

Barcelona Pavilion

The Barcelona Pavilion, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, was the German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, Spain. This building was used for the official opening of the German section of the exhibition. It was an important building in the history of modern architecture, known for its simple form and extravagant materials, such as marble and travertine.

Concept
Mies was offered the commission of this building in 1928 after his successful administration of the 1927 Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart. The German Republic entrusted Mies with the artistic management and erection of not only the Barcelona Pavilion, but for the buildings for all the German sections at the 1929 Universal Exhibition. However, Mies had severe time constraints — he had to design the Barcelona Pavilion in less than a year — and he also was dealing with uncertain economic conditions.

In the years following World War I, Germany started to turn around. The economy started to recover after the 1924 Dawes Plan. The pavilion for the Universal Exhibition was supposed to represent the new Weimar Germany: democratic, culturally progressive, prospering, and thoroughly pacifist; a self-portrait through architecture. The Commissioner, Georg von Schnitzler said it should give “voice to the spirit of a new era”. This concept was carried out with the realization of the “free plan” and the “floating room”.

Mies’s response to the proposal by von Schnitzler was radical. After rejecting the original site because of aesthetic reasons, Mies agreed to a quiet site at the narrow side of a wide, diagonal axis, where the pavilion would still offer viewpoints and a route leading to one of the exhibition’s main attractions, the “Spanish Village”. The pavilion was going to be bare—no trade exhibits—just the structure, a single sculpture and purpose-designed furniture (the Barcelona Chair). This lack of accommodation enabled Mies to treat the Pavilion as a continuous space; blurring inside and outside. “The design was predicated on an absolute distinction between structure and enclosure—a regular grid of cruciform steel columns interspersed by freely spaced planes”. However, the structure was more of a hybrid style, some of these planes also acted as supports. The floor plan is very simple. The entire building rests on a plinth of tavertine. A southern U-shaped enclosure, also of travertine, helps form a service annex and a large water basin. The floor slabs of the pavilion project out and over the pool—once again connecting inside and out. Another U-shaped wall on the opposite side of the site also forms a smaller water basin. This is where the statue by Georg Kolbe sits. The roof plates, relatively small, are supported by the chrome-clad, cruciform columns. This gives the impression of a hovering roof. Robin Evans said that the reflective columns appear to be struggling to hold the “floating” roof plane down, not to be bearing its weight. Mies wanted this building to become “an ideal zone of tranquility” for the weary visitor, who should be invited into the pavilion on the way to the next attraction. Since the pavilion lacked a real exhibition space, the building itself was to become the exhibit. The pavilion was designed to “block” any passage through the site, rather, one would have to go through the building. Visitors would enter by going up a few stairs, and due to the slightly sloped site, would leave at ground level in the direction of the “Spanish Village”. The visitors were not meant to be led in a straight line through the building, but to take continuous turnabouts. The walls not only created space, but also directed visitor’s movements. This was achieved by wall surfaces being displaced against each other, running past each other, and creating a space that became narrower or wider.

Another unique feature of this building is the exotic materials Mies chooses to use. Plates of high-grade stone materials like veneers of Tinos verde antico marble and golden onyx as well as tinted glass of grey, green, white, as well as translucent glass, perform exclusively as spatial dividers.

Because this was planned as an exhibition pavilion, it was intended to exist only temporarily. The building was torn down in early 1930, not even a year after it was completed. However, thanks to black and white photos and original plans, a group of Spanish architects reconstructed the pavilion permanently between 1983 and 1986

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona_Pavilion

Robert Moses

Robert Moses (December 18, 1888 – July 29, 1981) was the “master builder” of mid-20th century New York City, Long Island, and Westchester County, New York. As the shaper of a modern city, he is sometimes compared to Baron Haussmann of Second Empire Paris, and is one of the most polarizing figures in the history of urban planning in the United States. He changed shorelines, built bridges, tunnels and roadways, and transformed neighborhoods forever. His decisions favoring highways over public transit helped create the modern suburbs of Long Island and influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners who spread his philosophies across the nation.

Moses’ projects were considered by many to be necessary for the region’s development after being hit hard by the Great Depression. During the height of his powers, New York City participated in the construction of two huge World’s Fairs: one in 1939 and the other in 1964. Moses was also in large part responsible for the United Nations’ decision to headquarter in Manhattan as opposed to Philadelphia. His supporters believe he made the city viable for the 21st century by building an infrastructure that most people wanted and that has endured.

However, his works remain extremely controversial. His critics claim that he preferred automobiles to people, that he displaced hundreds of thousands of residents in New York City, uprooted traditional neighborhoods by building expressways through them, contributed to the ruin of the South Bronx and the amusement parks of Coney Island, caused the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants Major League baseball teams, and precipitated the decline of public transport through disinvestment and neglect.

His career is summed up by his sayings “Cities are for traffic” and “If the ends don’t justify the means, what does?” His vast influence and patronage meant that projects were completed in a timely fashion, and many have been reliable public works ever since.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses

César Pelli

César Pelli (born October 12, 1926 in San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina) is an Argentine architect known for designing some of the world’s tallest buildings and other major urban landmarks. His designs are known for their curved facades and metallic elements.

In 1991, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) listed Pelli among the ten most influential living American architects. His many awards include the 1995 AIA Gold Medal which recognizes a body of work of lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture.

Perhaps his most famous work are the Petronas Twin Towers, which were for a time the world’s tallest buildings. He also designed the World Financial Center complex in downtown Manhattan, which surround the now-fallen World Trade Center.

After studying architecture at the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, Pelli completed his studies at the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He started his career in the New Haven offices of architect Eero Saarinen.

He emigrated to the United States in 1952 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1964. He married Diana Balmori, a renowned landscape and urban designer. They had two children: Denis, a neurobiologist and Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University and Rafael, also a renowned architect.

Pelli served as dean of the School of Architecture at Yale University from 1977 to 1984. His firm employs about 100 architects, designers, and support staff in New Haven, Connecticut.

Pelli wrote a book, “Observations for Young Architects.”

In 2007, Duke University commissioned him to plan a 20- to 50-year revitalization of its Central Campus.

On May 26, 2008, Yale University bestowed an honorary Doctor of Arts degree to Pelli for his work in Architecture.

Other famous buildings he has designed include:

1966: Worldway Postal Center, Los Angeles International Airport, California
1967: Kukui Gardens housing, Honolulu, Hawaii
1969: San Bernardino City Hall, San Bernardino, California
1972: US Embassy in Tokyo, Japan
1973: Commons Centre and Mall, Columbus, Indiana
1975: Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, California
1981-1987: World Financial Center, New York City, New York, USA
1982-1984: Herring Hall at Rice University, Houston, Texas
1984: Residential Tower atop the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, New York
1984-1986: Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
1984: Mattatuck Museum Arts and History Center renovation, Waterbury, Connecticut
1987: Blumenthal Performing Arts Center, Charlotte, North Carolina
1987-1990: Carnegie Hall Tower, New York City, New York, USA
1987-89: Maryland Residence, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
1987-1991: One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London, England
1988: Wells Fargo Center (formerly Norwest Center), Minneapolis, Minnesota
1989: Gaviidae Common, Minneapolis, Minnesota
1990: Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan
1990: 181 West Madison Street, Chicago, Illinois
A 50-story skyscraper thought to be inspired by Saarinen’s second place entry in Chicago’s Tribune Tower competition
1991: Key Tower, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
1991: 777 Tower, Los Angeles, California
1991: Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York
1992: Bank of America Corporate Center, Charlotte, North Carolina
1992: Plaza Tower, Costa Mesa, California
1994: Physics and Astronomy Building, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
1995: Aronoff Center for Performing Arts, Cincinnati, Ohio
1995: 100 North Main Street (formerly Wachovia Center), Winston-Salem, North Carolina
1996: Edificio República, Buenos Aires, Argentina
1996: Owens Corning World Headquarters, Toledo, Ohio, USA
1997: Expansion of Washington National Airport, Washington, D.C.
1998: Overture Center, Madison, Wisconsin
1998: Petronas Twin Towers, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
1998: Schuster Center, Dayton, Ohio, USA
1999: Cheung Kong Center (長江集團中心), Hong Kong
1999: Zurich tower office building in The Hague, Netherlands
2000: Kurayoshi Park Square, Kurayoshi, Japan
2000: Boston Bank Building, Buenos Aires, Argentina
2000: KABC-TV, Los Angeles, California
2001: Citigroup Centre, 25 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London
2001: Bucksbaum Center for the Arts at Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa
2001: Athletic and Fitness Center at Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa
2001: Investment Building, Washington, DC.
2002: Weber Music Hall at University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, Minnesota
2002: Former Enron Headquarters at 1500 Louisiana Street, Houston, Texas
2003: Gerald Ratner Athletics Center at University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
2003: Two International Finance Centre, Hong Kong
2003: Center for Drama and Film & the Martel Theater at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York
2003: 25 Bank Street, Canary Wharf, Docklands, London
2003: 40 Bank Street, Canary Wharf, Docklands, London
2003: Benjamin & Mariam Schuster Performing Arts Center, Dayton, Ohio
2004: Goldman Sachs Tower, Jersey City, New Jersey
2005: Cira Centre, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2005: Malone Engineering Center, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
2006: Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building Eastern District Courthouse, Brooklyn, New York
2006: Science and Engineering Research and Classroom Complex at University of Houston, Houston, Texas
2006: Minneapolis Public Library’s Central branch, Minneapolis, Minnesota
2006: Joe Rosenfield ’25 Center, Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa
2006: Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Segerstrom Center For The Arts, Orange County Performing Arts Center, Costa Mesa, California
2006: Thomas E. Golden Jr. Center, St. Thomas More Catholic Chapel and Center, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
2006: Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, Miami, Florida
2008: BOK Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma
2008: One Park West, Liverpool, England
2008: Torre de Cristal, Madrid, Spain

CCTV Building – Beijing, China

Central Chinese Television CCTV
CCTV’s new 550,000 square meter headquarters, to be completed for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, will be among the first of 300 towers to be constructed in Beijing’s new Central Business District.
As part of an international architectural competition organized by the Beijing International Tendering Co., the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) was awarded the contract on December 20, 2002.

On the 10-hectare site in the new Central Business District in Beijing, the OMA proposal consolidates the program in an iconic configuration of two high-rise buildings.

The new CCTV headquarters, at a height of 230 meter and a floor area of about 400,000 square meters, combines administration with news, broadcasting, studios and program production – the entire process of TV making – in a sequence of interconnected activities. Although the building is 230 meter tall it is not a traditional tower, but a continuous loop of horizontal and vertical sections that establish an urban site rather than point to the sky. The irregular grid on the building’s facades is an expression of the forces traveling throughout its structure.

The second building, the 115,000 m2 Television Cultural Center (TVCC) includes a hotel, a visitor’s center, a large public theatre and exhibition spaces. It is visible from the main intersection of the Central Business District through the “window” of the CCTV headquarters.

A Media Park forms a landscape of public entertainment, outdoor filming areas and production studios as an extension of the central green axis of the CBD.

Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren will be partners-in-charge. The OMA design team will consist of Shohei Shigematsu, Adrianne Fisher, Hiromasa Shirai, Anu Leinonen, Charles Berman and many others. Qingyun Ma from Shanghai will be advisor to the project.

The CCTV Headquarters will be realized in collaboration with ECADI, the East China Architecture & Design Institute from Shanghai.

Cecil Balmond and his team of Ove Arup & Partners will be responsible for the structural and mechanical engineering.

OMA will collaborate with its media and research branch AMO.

from: http://www.arcspace.com/architects/koolhaas/chinese_television/

Walter Gropius

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (May 18, 1883 – July 5, 1969) was a German architect and founder of the Bauhaus School who, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture.

Walter Gropius, like his father and his great-uncle Martin Gropius before him, became an architect. Gropius could not draw, and was dependent on collaborators and partner-interpreters throughout his career. In school he hired an assistant to complete his homework for him. In 1908 Gropius found employment with the firm of Peter Behrens, one of the first members of the utilitarian school. His fellow employees at this time included Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Dietrich Marcks.

In 1910 Gropius left the firm of Behrens and together with fellow employee Adolf Meyer established a practice in Berlin. Together they share credit for one of the seminal modernist buildings created during this period: the Faguswerk in Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany, a shoe last factory. Although Gropius and Meyer only designed the facade, the glass curtain walls of this building demonstrated both the modernist principle that form reflects function and Gropius’s concern with providing healthful conditions for the working class. Other works of this early period include the office and factory building for the Werkbund Exhibition (1914) in Cologne.

In 1913, Gropius published an article about “The Development of Industrial Buildings,” which included about a dozen photographs of factories and grain elevators in North America. A very influential text, this article had a strong influence on other European modernists, including Le Corbusier and Erich Mendelsohn, both of whom reprinted Gropius’s grain elevator pictures between 1920 and 1930.

Gropius’s career was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Called up immediately as a reservist, Gropius served as a sergeant major at the Western front during the war years, and was wounded and almost killed.

Important buildings

Gropius House (1938) in Lincoln, Massachusetts1910–1911 the Fagus Factory, Alfeld an der Leine, Germany
1914 Office and Factory Buildings at the Werkbund Exhibition, 1914, Cologne, Germany
1921 Sommerfeld House, Berlin, Germany designed for Adolf Sommerfeld
1922 competition entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition
1925–1932 Bauhaus School and Faculty, Housin, Dessau, Germany
1936 Village College, Impington, Cambridge, England
1937 The Gropius House, Lincoln, Massachusetts, USA
1942–1944 Aluminum City Terrace housing project, New Kensington, Pennsylvania, USA
1949–1950 Harvard Graduate Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (The Architects’ Collaborative)
1945–1959 Michael Reese Hospital, Chicago, Illinois, USA – Master planned 37-acre site and led the design for at least 8 of the approx. 28 buildings.
1957–1960 University of Baghdad, Baghdad, Iraq
1963–1966 John F. Kennedy Federal Office Building, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
1948 Peter Thacher Junior High School,
1958–1963 Pan Am Building (now the Metlife Building), New York, with Pietro Belluschi and project architects Emery Roth & Sons
1957 Interbau Apartment blocks, Hansaviertel, Berlin, Germany, with The Architects’ Collaborative and Wils Ebert
1960 Temple Oheb Shalom (Baltimore, Maryland)
1961 The award-winning Wayland High School, Wayland, Massachusetts, USA
1959–1961 Embassy of the United States, Athens, Greece (The Architects’ Collaborative and consulting architect Pericles A. Sakellarios)
1967– 69 Tower East Shaker Heights, Ohio, this was Gropius’ last major project.
The building in Niederkirchnerstraße, Berlin, known as the Gropius-Haus is named for Gropius’ great-uncle, Martin Gropius, and is not associated with Bauhaus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Gropius

World’s First LEED Net Zero Home: Eco Kitchen – buildaroo.com

Oscar Niemeyer

Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho (born December 15, 1907) is a Brazilian architect who is considered one of the most important names in international modern architecture. He was a pioneer in exploring the formal possibilities of reinforced concrete solely for their aesthetic impact.

His buildings are often characterized by being spacious and exposed, mixing volumes and empty space to create unconventional patterns and often propped up by pilotis. Both lauded and criticized for being a “sculptor of monuments” , he has been praised for being a great artist and one of the greatest architects of his generation by his supporters. Among his numerous famous works there are the many public buildings he designed for the city of Brasília, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, The United Nations Headquarters in New York City (with others), etc.

“ Not the straight angle that attracts me, nor straight, hard, inflexible, created by man. What attracts me is the free and sensual curve, the curves that find in the mountains of my country, in the course of its winding rivers, the sea waves, the body of the woman preferred. Curves is done throughout the universe, the universe of Einstein’s curved.

Oscar Niemeyer was born in the city of Rio de Janeiro in 1907 in Laranjeiras neighbourhood, on a street that later would receive the name of his grandfather Ribeiro de Almeida. He spent his youth as a typical young Carioca of the time: bohemian and relatively unconcerned with his future. He concluded his secondary education at age 21. The same year, he married Annita Baldo, daughter of Italian immigrants from Padua. Marriage gave him a sense of responsibility: he decided to work and enter university.

He started to work in his father’s typography house and entered the Escola de Belas Artes (Brazil), from which he graduated as engineer architect in 1934. At the time he had financial difficulties but decided to work without fee anyway, in the architecture studio of Lúcio Costa and Carlos Leão. He felt dissatisfied with the architecture that he saw in the streets and believed he could find a career there.

In 1945, already an architect of some repute, he joined the Brazilian Communist Party, and in 1992 he would become president of that party. Niemeyer was a boy at the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and by the Second World War he became a young idealist. He is still an enthusiastic communist, a position which cost him much during his life. During the military dictatorship of Brazil his office was raided and he was forced into exile in Europe. The Minister of Aeronautics of the time reportedly said that “the place for a communist architect is Moscow.” He visited the USSR, met with diverse socialist leaders and became a personal friend of some of them. Fidel Castro once said: “Niemeyer and I are the last Communists of this planet.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Niemeyer

Camillo Sitte

Camillo Sitte (17 April 1843 – 16 November 1903 in Vienna) was a noted Austrian architect, painter and city planning theoretician with great influence and authority of the development of urban construction planning and regulation in Europe.

Life
Camillo Sitte was an art historian and architect. He traveled around the towns of Europe and tried to identify aspects that made towns feel warm and welcoming. Architecture was a process of culturization for him. Sitte received a lot of attention in 1889 with the publication of his book “Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen” (English title: “City Planning According to Artistic Principles”). The richly illustrated book pointed out that the urban room around the experiencing man should be the leading motif of urban planning, thus turning away from the pragmatic, hygienic planning procedures of the time. Sitte emphasized the creation of an irregular urban structure, spacious plazas, enhanced by monuments and other aesthetic elements.

Sitte founded the Camillo Sitte Lehranstalt and the Camillo Sitte Gasse in Vienna, and also the magazine Städtebau in 1904. Camillo Sitte was the son of the architect Franz Sitte (1808-79) and the father of the architect Siegfried Sitte (1876-1945).

Sitte is also credited with having invented the cul-de-sac.

City Planning According to Artistic Principles (1889)

Fountain of Hygieia in Olomouc (in Czech: kašna Hygie), Camillo Sitte (plan) and Karel Lenhart (statue)The work of Sitte is not exactly a criticism of architectural form, it is more precisely an aesthetic criticism of the nineteenth century’s end urbanism. Mainly an urban planning theory book, it has a deep influence in architecture, as the two disciplines are deeply intertwined. It was also highly successful in its time. Between 1889 and 1922 it was edited five times. It was translated into French in 1902, but was not translated into English until 1945.

For Sitte, the most important is not the architectural shape or form of each building, but the inherent creative quality of urban space, the whole as much more than the sum of its parts. Sitte contended that many urban planners had neglected to consider the vertical dimension of planning, instead focusing too much on paper, and that this approach hindered the efficacy of planning in an aesthetically conscious manner. Athens and the ancient Greek spaces, like the agora and the forum are his preferred examples of good urban spaces. He makes a study of the spatial structures of the cities, squares, monuments, and confronts the living beauty and creativity of the most ancient ones with the sterility of the new cities. In general:

Sitte makes an analysis based on sensitivity aesthetics and is not concerned with the historical circumstances that generated such forms. Urbanism is to be lived today and thus must be judged according to today’s needs and aesthetics;
Criticizes the regular and obsessive order of the new squares, confronting it with the irregularity of the medieval city. “A square should be seen as a room: it should form an enclosed space”;
Criticizes the isolated placement of Churches and monuments, and confronts it with how monuments were formerly presented to the viewer;
With examples from Italy, Austria and Germany, he defines a square typology, an “enclosed squares’ system of the ancient times”. He studies from a psychological viewpoint the perception of the proportions between the monuments and its surroundings, opposing the fashion of very wide streets and squares, and the dogma of orthogonality and symmetry;
He fears that Urbanism would have become a mere technical task without any artistic involvement. He acknowledges an antagonism between the picturesque and the pragmatic, and states that these restrain the works of the artists. The building of another Acropole would become impossible, not only because of the financial means, but also the lack of the basic artistic generating thought;
He stated that an urban planner should not be too concerned with the small design. The city should only take care of the general streets and structure, while the rest would be left to private initiative, just as in ancient cities;
He Provides an example of his theories at the end of one of his books in the form of the redesign of Vienna’s Ring, a circular avenue.
His theories were widely influential for many practiticians, like Karl Henrici and Theodor Fischer. Modernist movements rejected these thoughts and Le Corbusier is known for his energetic dismissals of the work. Nevertheless, his work is often used and cited as a criticism of the Modernist movement, its importance reemerging in the post-modernist movement of the late sixties.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camillo_Sitte