The Architecture of Public Open Urban Spaces

The architecture of public open urban space has taken many forms through history, and the points of views of its proper syntax is one that has created conflict and discrepancies among architectural and urban design theorists and practitioners, following the beginning of the modern movement. The present book, a demonstration of the problem of defining civic art in relation to public open urban spaces from modernism and until today, along with the presentation of syntactic demonstrations of contemporary solutions, offers tools and actions for the architectural qualitative habitation of the contemporary public open urban environment. It involves theoretical contemplation based on fundamental bibliography on civic art definitions; analytic and illustrative syntactic representations on paradigmatic shifts of the modern movement; the involvement of heritage considerations and 'interventional' theory; and the experimental application of design solutions for selected contemporary public space problems. The overall result is a syntactic representation of case study analyses and methodological suggestions for new designs and interventions, based on fundamental theory of civic art.