Inner Worlds

Revising Urban Planning and Local Context

architect Markus Pernthaler
project Rondo home & business building, Graz, Austria
written by Otto Kapfinger

 

Urban planning is an unreflected outmoded concept, describing contexts and bonds which, in their classical historical sense, have ceased to exist, living on in the shallowest formality to serve the status quo of visual habit and nostalgia of popular culture. Until the end of the 18th century with the breakthrough of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the cityscape in Europe as a whole, as a hierarchical structure of architectural components, as the syntax of spatial topics and elements, was – right down to the smallest detail – a direct manifestation and materialisation of spiritually-based and feudally-structured societies.