The Concise Townscape

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All that remains is to join them together into a new pattern created bythe warmth and power and vitality of human imagination so that webuild the home of man.

Buildings, rich in texture and colour,stand on the floor. If the floor is asmooth and flat expanse of greyishtarmac then the buildings will re­main separate because the floor failsto intrigue the eye in the same waythat the buildings do. One of themost powerful agents for unifyingand joining the town is the floor, asthese two pictures so effectivelydemonstrate. With justification we may assume the precinctualorganization of cities and a more equal distributionof privileges. Put together in terms of town planning,the result will be the square as quadrangle protectedfrom all but local traffic.

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In this Swedish example trees havebeen used as a sort of living wall­paper to decorate the vast geometryof the grain silos. There are advantages to be gained from the gathering together of peopleto form a town. A single family living in the country can scarcely hopeto drop into a theatre, have a meal out or browse in a library, whereasthe same family living in a town can enjoy these amenities. The littlemoney that one family can afford is multiplied by thousands and so acollective amenity is made possible. A city is more than the sum of itsinhabitants. It has the power to generate a surplus of amenity, which isone reason why people like to live in communities rather than in isolation. symptoms of agoraphobia and claustrophobia). Place a man on the edgeof a 500-ft. cliff and he will have a very lively sense of position, put himat the end of a deep cave and he will react to the fact of enclosure.

For over thirty years before his death in 1994, Cullen was a busy consultant completing influential studies, masterplans and urban design projects, such as for the new town for Alcan Industries (1964–68) and, later, the Isle of Dogs in London. His formative years, however, were spent as part of an influential group led by Hubert de Cronin Hastings, the eccentric proprietor of the Architectural Review (AR) where in 1946, Cullen was appointed Art Editor. From there he joined forces with luminaries such as painter John Piper, Hugh Casson, architectural director for the 1951 Festival of Britain, writer Nikolaus Pevsner, and iconoclast Ian Nairn, author of Outrage and scourge of ‘subtopia’, those places Nairn derided for their loss of individuality and spirit of place. Despite being blind in one eye, he was a tremendous artist and draughtsman. During the Second World War he was declared medically unfit for military service and instead designed factories and Ministry of Information exhibitions, before going to Barbados with the colonial service in 1944 to plan self-help housing and schools in the British West Indies. suffice to demonstrate the charms ofthis immediacy. A somewhat similareffect is produced in those caseswhere a structure is separated fromthe viewer by a featureless plane,a great empty stretch which has nogrip on the eye, such as the view ofthe Horse Guards from St James'sPark or the view of the SupremeCourt in Chandigarh across thewide lake. Cullen was born in Calverley, Pudsey, near Leeds, Yorkshire, England. He studied architecture at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, the present day University of Westminster, and subsequently worked as a draughtsman in various architects' offices including that of Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton, but he never qualified or practised as an architect.Second, the time scaling of these streams. Change, of itself, is oftenresented even if it can be seen to be a change for the better. Continuityis a desirable characteristic of cities. Consequently while planning con­sent in a development stream might be automatic one may have to expecta built-in delay often or even twenty years in an important conservationarea. This is not necessarily to improve the design but simply to slowdown the process. This also is happening, if grudgingly, in the case ofPiccadilly Circus. buildings. Cover up each alternatelywith the hand and the impression isgiven that the dark building is muchfurther away from us than the lightmodern building. This is due to thedifference in scale between the two

Additionally, the link between urban space’s size, form, and configuration and a city’s quality may be observed aesthetically. Cullen lived in the small village of Wraysbury (Berkshire) from 1958 until his death, aged 80, on 11 August 1994, following a serious stroke. After his passing, David Gosling and Norman Foster collected various examples of his work and put them together in the book "Visions of Urban Design".

In this shortened version, the studies of specific towns have been left outand instead Cullen has contributed a new foreword and conclusion which well remain a private or communal garden, enclosedand screened from passers-by by the usual railings. Cullen is therefore closely associated with the three decades-long Townscape campaign, initiated and promoted by the prestigious London-based magazine The Architectural Review, which espoused a visual modern-picturesque approach to city design. Though Cullen is well known, he is little studied and--owing specifically to the malleability of and contradictions in his legacy--even less understood. In examining his urban ideas, most scholars have placed him in the history of urban design. An in-depth study of Cullen's printed image and modus operandi, however, is conspicuously missing. This study fills this gap. It provides a structural understanding of Cullen's massive popularity and influence through his image-making trade--its professional status, income sources, clients, norms of success, production modes--and through his drawings. These influences work palpably beyond urban design and Townscape: they signal a major shift in the role of image makers and the status of the image in the production and consumption of popular architecture in the postwar era.