From townscape to skyscape: in an edited extract from a lecture due to be given to mark the 75th anniversary of the University of Sao Paulo later this month, Robert Tavernor from the University of Bath analyzes the future of London's distinctive skyline

Architectural Review, The, March, 2004

Urban design as art

The Viennese architect and planner, Camillo Sitte, was the first modern to describe urban planning as essentially an art. In City Planning according to Artistic Principles (1889) he articulated his admiration for the civic and artistic character of pre-industrial European towns and cities rather than the relentless straight-edged, mid-nineteenth century Boulevards that Baron Haussmann sliced through medieval Paris. Sitte argued that the intuitive creative drives that underlay medieval examples of more varied urban spaces could be presented as principles: his contemporaries considered them to be no more than happy accidents. Sitte reasoned that city planning could and should be regarded as an art, and one based on the spatial and formal compositions that preceded the considerable population explosion of his century. He referred to the wisdom of the ancients as proof for his assertions, especially the architectural and urban accounts of Vitruvius and Alberti: the basic idea of his book he wrote 'is to go to school with Nature and the old masters [...] in matters of town planning'.

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In London, the principles of Classical design promulgated by the 'old masters' were filtered mainly through Palladianism and two dynastic monarchies, the Stuarts and Hanoverians, who oversaw the urban transformation and expansion of medieval London. Georgian London, built during an unbroken monarchical span of 116 years between 1714 and 1830, is characterized by regular geometry, symmetry and grand Classical squares lined with palatial terraces. The Victorians built on this example, and to a grander scale, retaining or extending the underlying spatial structure and urban character of London. Their larger buildings affected the grain of the existing built form, by amalgamating several plots to create larger edifices that were usually bulkier than those they replaced. London's skyline acquired a new silhouette, but the changes brought by the nineteenth century were not as radical as those of the twentieth century, when commercial and residential towers were built increasingly tall.

There are no direct answers to the challenge that height presents to the image of a historic city like London in the writings of Vitruvius, Alberti and Sitte: they were concerned with a human-scaled environment. Judging by recent planning proposals in London, the challenge of height is set to increase. Towers--residential and commercial--are being designed for London that will be the tallest in Europe. Renzo Piano has recently been granted planning permission for London's tallest building yet, for a mixed residential and commercial tower that will be 303m tall when completed in 2009. Consequently, there is renewed interest in defining appropriate guiding principles that will enable tall buildings to sit well along the finest architectural and urban successes that characterize London. Intriguingly, many of the traditional principles advocated by Sitte have been absorbed into official planning policy guidance in the last decade in England and Wales, establishing a context within which tall buildings are being designed. This re-engagement with Sitte's urban ideals represents a curious volte-face. During most of the twentieth century, tall buildings were a powerful symbol of a new political and social ideology, which attempted to sweep away a traditional attachment to the forms and spaces of the pre-industrial city, of traditional streets and squares lined with buildings.

In London, St Paul's Cathedral and its surroundings have become a battleground for modernists and traditionalists. In longer views, its physical and visual relation to the dynamically changing commercial centre of London continues to provide the focus for an extraordinary debate: one that is likely to have a dramatic effect on London's appearance during the early twenty-first century.

London's skyline and the impact of the dome of St Paul's

St Paul's is at the western end of the City of London, the 'square mile' originally settled by the Romans. By the seventeenth century, the city was overcrowded, and the Great Fire of 1666 thrived on its density, devastating a large section of its medieval urban fabric. Christopher Wren proposed a radical replacement masterplan for the City, but this was rejected by the authorities in favour of a quick rebuild on the foundations of the former medieval street pattern. In fact, the most radical physical changes were affected by legislation introduced in the 1667 London Building Act, which succeeded in restricting the use of flammable building materials and building heights to a maximum of four storeys. Well into the nineteenth century, non-public buildings were kept low, and buildings proposed higher than 30m required special Metropolitan Sanction. Wren did of course succeed in replacing the burnt out old St Paul's with a great Baroque-inspired edifice, and his cathedral grew to dominate, both physically and spiritually, the relatively chaotic physical scene that surrounded it.