Friday, March 22, 2013

Iconic urban shapes: Wiener Ringstraße



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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