Most urban centers or urbanized areas have some sort
of icon that is supposed to signify that specific city and add to a sense of
identity. Most often these icons are buildings; one only needs to think of the
Eifel tower in Paris, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the Golden Gate Bridge of
San Francisco, The Colosseum in Rome, the
Guggenheim-museum in Bilbao, the Kremlin complex in Moscow, the Forbidden City
in Beijing, the Atomium in Brussels and so on.
Only rarely will the shape of the city be iconic.
Few
people will recognize any major city from its layout. Depending on the excision
some cities will produce a recognizable image. A good example is the old city
of Amsterdam with the iconic semicircle of 3 broad canals (the Grachtengordel).
Other examples include the urban grid of Manhattan with the Central Park in the
middle, The Ring road around the old centre of Vienna (Wiener Ringstraße), the
star like layout of Karlruhe, the fanning avenues of Washington, the bird
figure of Brasilia, Canberra with its axis shooting off a circle and an octagon,
the rather similar New Delhi and the diagonally cut grid of Barcelona.
Most cities, especially those on a grid plan are not
easily distinguishable from one another. Not many people will be able to draw a
map of the grid plans of for instance Helsinki, Leopoldsburg, Mannheim or
Düsseldorf. Water cities -another example- have certain characteristics in
common; they are located at the confluence of a smaller river with a larger
one, will have a more or less rounded outline, one or more large open spaces
within the urban fabric of streets and angular connections to radial roads. Yet
few people will be able to distinguish the cities of Leiden, Gouda, Utrecht,
Groningen, Leuven, Ghent, Bruges, Duisburg, Bremen, Wesel, Lübeck, Jülich or
Heilbronn on the basis of their morphology alone.
The Ringstraße
(literally: Ring Street), together with the Franz-Josef-Kai, encompasses the
historic center of Vienna and is one of the tourist attractions of the city. Although
divided in 9 seperatly named roads the colloquial term is der Wiener Ring. This ring road is the most important
nineteenth century intervention in the Viennese urban landscape and forms the
backbone of a number of formal ensembles of mostly public buildings.
The Ringstraße was constructed
between 1857-65 after dismantling the fortifications. It was laid
out on the Glacis and the former bulwarks (Basteien
in German). The terrain was filled in and the urban landscape was wiped out for
a second time (the first time of coarse was when the glacis was constructed at the expense of
the then present suburbs outside the city walls). The ringroad with its squares
and buildings has been designated as a world heritage site together with the
old city that it encircles.
There are no less than five
ensembles that make up the Ringstraße. The streetscape connects the old inner
city area with the baroque city around the glacis within the Gürtel.
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