The Concise Townscape

by Gordon Cullen

Book Overview

This book pioneered the concept of townscape. 'Townscape' is the art of giving visual coherence and organization to the jumble of buildings, streets and space that make up the urban environment. It... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0442217706
• ISBN13: 9780442217709
• Release Date: January 1976
• Publisher: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co.
• Length: 199 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Answer to Every Question

If Gordon Cullen's book 'The Concise Townscape' were required reading for anyone entering an architectural education, the level of discourse on design would skyrocket. Cullen puts to words and images some of the more intangible qualities of space that nevertheless affect how we view our surroundings. It is, in my opinion, a categorization of experiences... discussing things like 'serial vision' (the progression of visual experience as one moves along a path) 'outdoor room and indoor landscape', 'looking into enclosure', 'viscosity', etc. etc. This book is more than a dictionary or thesaurus of spatial terms, however. It is primarily a book on experience- getting to the heart of how a space actually feels; how it is occupied, how it CAN be occupied, and what are the qualities that make it that way. If read for what it truly is, it renders the current fashion of architectural pornography rather silly. And this, my friend, is where its true strength in Academia comes into play. Sexy renderings only take one so far, but your design professor has most likely read this book. Understanding Cullen's work will bring the discourse up, and move your work beyond a visual one-liner. But that's just my opinion, and I could be wrong.