Urban Figure Ground Debate

The urban plan is composed of the plot, the street, the constructed space, and the open space , and in the figure ground plan the constructed space is represented in black poche and all void spaces, including streets, are left white. The past century has hosted much debate over how to create a successful urban morphology through manipulation of the figure ground. The figure ground map can be almost all white to represent figural objects in field space or almost all black to represent figural spaces bounded by building .
The modern city has undergone radical changes not only in general territorial expansion but also through internal changes of the urban figure ground, revealing entirely new fabric types. Dense cities have become diffuse, as the figure ground has shifted from compressed poche with looser surrounding suburbs to void conditions with fragmented poche .
Transportation infrastructure is closely associated with the growing demands for mobility in post-industrial patterns of employment. Roads and parking spaces occupy large portions of land within cities ; thus, increasing the void spaces in the figure ground. Further, adjacent zoning projects, each with different plans, are strung along transportation routes, which creates a fabric that is disrupted .
History
Beginning in 1920s, urbanists such as Tony Garnier, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius wished to build new and rid culture of “dead forms” . Le Corbusier’s ‘Ville Contemporaine pour trois million habitants’ in 1922 featured high-density living concentrated in towers to maximize open space and fresh air. The proposed city created a field of figural objects based on Le Corbusier’s ‘tower in the park’ theory, which pervaded architectural theory through the mid-century Urban Renewal .
During the 1950s and early 1960s, architects did not follow a unified style, but they did share a genuine optimism surrounding the production, criticism, and public reception of modern architecture. Such blind confidence allowed planning bureaucracies to employ a tabula rasa in modern cities that called for clearing areas of high urban density, often deemed slums, to make room for large-scale urban gestures . The bulldoze method of urban renewal traded a finely grained urban fabric, a primarily black figure ground, for large figural objects in a open field condition, a primarily white figure ground.
By the late 1960s and 1970s, architects began to criticize the void condition of the figure ground created by urban renewal for “disregarding human needs, for not blending in, for lacking signs of identity and association, and for being an instrument of class oppression” . Many architects theorized about how to remedy the urban environments based on modern architecture’s fixation on the object.
In 1961, Gordon Cullen’s Townscape suggested architecture emphasize the relationship between urban elements- buildings, trees, nature, water, traffic, advertisements, etc. By designing cities at a whole, architects can create a “plastic experience, a journey through pressures and vacuums, a sequence of exposures and enclosures, of constraint and relief” . Cullen explained his theory of “serial vision” - a sequence of jerks and revelations” for the pedestrian - through serial perspective illustrations . These illustrations depict a figure ground plan with manipulated and controlled void spaces defined by the surrounding building fabric, a solution that would require infill of the large, unmanageable void spaces created by the previous decade’s bulldoze method.
In 1978, Colin Rowe’s Collage City recognized the shift in city matrixes from “continuous solid to continuous void” , but claimed the urban renewal’s city of jumbled disparate objects was as problematic as the dense traditional city - filled with slums - that modern architecture was to remedy .
Rowe explains that architects have a tendency to “space worship,” which explains the 1950s and 1960s desperate need to rid the figure ground of its dense blackness and open spaces, allowing more white to infiltrate. However, if architects suppose “space is sublime, then limitless naturalistic space must be far more so than any abstracted and structured space” , thus discrediting the theory driving land clearing during the renewal.
Instead, Rowe says for a figure to be appreciated as an object it must be understood with a “recognizable frame of reference” (Rowe 64). Architect’s and planners previous notions that a figure required field space to be perceived as an object actually enfeebles architecture (Rowe 64), primarily because the value of urban real estate in the modern city does not allow for all the green space Le Corbusier required to support his “towers in the park.” Rather, this residual space is paved for parking lots, which act to detach the building figures from the rest of the city fabric. Such detached architecture, Rowe argues, shrinks the public realm “to an apologetic ghost” because such a city of parking lots does not create an engaging streetscape for the pedestrian .
So, Rowe calls for neither space fixation nor object fixation as the sole solutions to the urban condition . Space fixation suggests a building simply as black infill within an urban figure ground plan, which is passive . Whereas, object fixation implies the creation of a “perfect building,” but this would then require its compromise for use in a less than perfect site . The former may characterize the old city and the later the new, but Rowe says these “situations must be transcended rather than emulated” . The result would be an urban environment where building and space achieved balance . Such a figure ground would allow for a shared dialogue between solid and void.
In 1993, Rem Koolhaas in S, M, L, XL expands on Rowe’s argument against the purely form-making urban architecture of the 1950s and 1960s. Koolhaas explains that architects’ fixation on the objectivity of a building, disregarding its coherence with the urban context has led to the “death of urbanism” . Koolhaas sums his argument with a powerful metaphor: “We were making sand castles. Now we swim in the sea that swept them away” . If architects are so seduced by the conceptual clarity of one building that they forget urbanism, cities become conglomerates of objects with no relation to one another. Thus, Koolhaas calls for interconnection amongst the black infill of the figure ground, so the plan does not become a white void surface freckled with black spots.
In 2005, Sandy Isenstadt in Site Matters argues that new buildings should add to their surroundings rather than just stand out in competition with context . The tabula rasa condition often created during the mid-century urban renewal disregarded context by removing it entirely . Thus, modern architecture was motivated by an idea of zeitgeist, when Isenstadt calls for an architecture of its place . Still, architecture must do more than just draw from surroundings; it must create spaces that give back to the public realm by responding to the current issues in the urban environment without abandoning the history of the place . Thus, Isenstadt figure ground suggests adding to or manipulating the existing black poche to better serve the inhabitants in order to develop continuity amongst the urban blocks.
Current Initiatives
The current decade’s New Urbanism movement encourages densifying metropolises rather than building on their peripheries, thus, promoting infill and reclamation of abandoned areas , which will increase the amount of poche in the figure ground to achieve a more continuous urban fabric. Such density will foster more livable communities with increased diversity of use and population, better pedestrian accommodations, more public spaces, and improved public transportation systems .

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