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THE CITY The Sky and Its Limits

Christian Norberg-Schulz talks about Dallas’ search for a sense of place.
By David Dillon |

Christian Norberg-Schulz is currently Professor of Architecture at the University of Oslo, but as of January 1980 he’ll be Professor of Art and Architecture at the University of Dallas. One of the foremost architectural historians and critics, he is the author of half a dozen books, including Existence, Space, and Architecture, Meaning in Western Architecture, and several works on the Baroque. Most current thinking, he argues, has either ignored man entirely or else made architectural space merely a reflection of private impressions and sensations; it has done little to help us understand the many different relationships between people and their environment. This is Norberg-Schulz’s fundamental subject. While in town for the recent McDermott Colloquium at the University of Dallas, he discussed it and other matters with contributing editor David Dillon.



Dillon: A point that comes up frequently in your books is that a truly great city has a strong sense of place. What makes for a sense of place? Can it be developed, or is it a given?

Norberg-Schulz: The great cities of history show a certain continuity: They have preserved their identity, not just in a passive sense, but as a kind of creative interpretation of the quality of the place. By “place,” therefore, I mean something which isn’t just relative and continuously changing – there is a constant there, something which lasts.

It has to do with physical setting first of all. In my new book Genius Loci, which means the spirit of place, I have analyzed three important cities: Rome, where I have lived for many years; Prague; and Khartoum in Africa, where I have acted as consultant to the city planning department. These three cities are situated in landscapes that represent the basic types: desert landscapes, classical landscapes as you find them in Greece and parts of Italy, and Nordic landscapes, which you might call romantic landscapes. My intention was to show how a city is not just a man-made fact, but is related to a natural situation.

Dillon: I’m sure you’ve heard the cliche that there is no reason for Dallas to be where it is, that it represents an act of will instead of a response to a favorable setting.

Norberg-Schulz: But Dallas does have a particular quality as a place. The thing that strikes me immediately is the infinite extension of the landscape. The sky here is bigger than any other place I have ever been. Even in the desert the sky doesn’t look that big. Here, the landscape is not completely flat – it has little ups and downs, so that when you’re only up a little, you can get a fantastic view. That is one element. Another is the vegetation – trees are very small here.

Dillon: What difference does the vegetation make?

Norberg-Schulz: It changes the scale. Big trees make the whole landscape look smaller, whereas a lot of small trees gives a feeling of vastness and extension. You also have extremely intense light here, and dramatic clouds and weather patterns.

Dillon: Another key difference between the Texas landscape and, say, New England is that out here there’s no middle distance. There’s only near and far.

Norberg-Schulz: That’s interesting. In the middle distance you must have something that stands out, of course, whereas here you have the sense of a somewhat monotonous repetition. Nothing stands out.

But I feel the importance here in this vast landscape of certain natural features, especially the little creeks in what you call draws. I’ve visited some here in Dallas and others down near Glen Rose. It’s important that there be | these intimate spaces. I suspect ” that in the past the Trinity River and Turtle Creek gave this sense of intimacy. There was a configuration to this land that gave the early settlers the feeling that this was somehow a little different from other places.

Dillon: What kinds of relationships have you observed here between architecture and landscape? Is there anything like a Southwestern style or are we hopelessly eclectic?

Norberg-Schulz: I’ve seen some older houses here, houses that were related to this place. They had to secure shadow and ventilation in the hot summers, so you have houses where the breeze can blow through completely, with porches and so on. The older houses had that relationship to the land.

One of the basic questions in architecture is how to dwell in a certain place. How do you build so that human beings can live there and feel that it is a good place to be? How do you make friends with a place? Today, these questions are being forgotten because we all use mechanical aids to feel comfortable. We use air conditioning instead of learning to live with a place. I’m unhappy about this, because it cuts us away from a natural, elemental feeling of belonging to a place. We just close ourselves within walls, put on a machine, and have the right temperature.



In Dallas and Texas, if people want to live with these vast landscapes, they need the intimate spaces. Nature offers these in the draws. When we build in this landscape, we should attempt to create man-made draws. The Quadrangle is a good example, because it offers this sense of being inside.

Dillon: If you were a city planner in Dallas, would creating these intimate spaces be one of your priorities?

Norberg-Schulz: Yes. That does not mean that we shouldn’t also make normal roads or even freeways. But within such a system of streets, we should create small intimate places. Today, when the road systems have become so expansive, it is even more important to define such places.

Attempts have been made, of course – there are shopping centers all over the city which aim at the same thing. But they are not as successful as the Quadrangle. There is something about the scale there and the inside-outside feeling that works.

Dillon: I’m getting fed up with the practice of turning interior spaces into exterior spaces. Architects have become so obsessed with creating gardens and miniature streets that they seem to have lost interest in interior spaces as such.

Norberg-Schulz: Well, one of the basic aims of the modern movement in architecture, starting in the late 19th century, was to unify interior and exterior space. There are a number of reasons for this. There was a general feeling in the 19th century of the breaking up of an ancient static world. Man entered a new kind of global situation because of advances in communication. The feeling of opening up became very strong, especially in pioneering countries like the United States, where you always move farther on. There was also a return to a more natural way of life, to less formality in daily living and more contact with nature. You brought natural materials such as rough stone and wood inside.

But opening up the interior meant, in a sense, losing it. Now, there is a reaction against all that. We are beginning to feel lost in all this floating space. We need a Fixed point. And maybe because our environment has disintegrated and dispersed we need these interior spaces more now. In the time of Frank Lloyd Wright the old cities were still intact. Now only fragments are left here and there. Even in a city like Boston, which is still fairly compact, large sections have been torn down. You have a feeling of disintegration.

Dillon: You mentioned earlier that one aspect of a sense of place is continuity. Could you talk more specifically about continuity and what it means to a city’s sense of itself?

Norberg-Schulz: A city, first of all, is a meeting place, not just of human beings but a cultural meeting place. In a city, elements come together which may also come from far away. When people come to Dallas, they bring with them ideas and images of city life which grew out of the conditions of another place.

These imported elements must always be adapted to the local situation in order to make sense. For example, classical architecture started in ancient Greece and was certainly related to the Greek landscape. But because it contained elements that had common human importance, classical architecture was exported, first to Rome, then to the rest of Europe and the United States. If you look at it, you will see that everywhere it has adapted to the local conditions.

In my book, I use Rome as the major example. As the saying goes, Rome is the city to which all roads lead. The interesting thing is that this means not only roads but various kinds of influences. Peoples, cultures, elements of the whole ancient world came together in Rome and melted together. So to understand Rome, one has first to go back to what it was before: What was the natural setting like? The character of the landscape? The Fascists never understood this. They wanted to make Roman architecture and recreate the splendor of Rome, but they made something abstract and out of place, because they didn’t understand the local character. All they had was an abstract idea of grandeur.

Dillon: Without pressing the comparison, are there buildings in Dallas where this synthesis has been achieved? Where does the new city hall fit in this scheme?

Norberg-Schulz: Today, especially in modern cities like Dallas, the important buildings from the community’s point of view, such as city hall, are usually much smaller than many office buildings. This is a reversal of the situation in the past, when the buildings that represented the city as a community, a city hall or a cathedral, were dominant. They created the image of the place.

Now that that has been turned upside down, a problem has arisen. One solution here in Dallas is that these large office buildings are becoming more neutral. They are often dressed up in glass so that they become reflecting surfaces, backdrops against which the smaller structures appear more sculptural and articulate. It’s the simple psychological principle of figure and background. If you make the big buildings a background in glass, which reflects light and has an airiness about it, and then in front of it you place a stronger sculptured form, you have an image of the modern city that is intriguing.

Dillon: I’m assuming that these background buildings would have to be integrated in some way. You couldn’t have one here and one there and parking lots everywhere else as we do in downtown Dallas.

Norberg-Schulz: That’s a difficult question. I tend to understand the city as a meeting place, and that means that it has to have a certain density, a certain coherence if you like. But whether this is possible, especially in the United States, 1 can’t say. In Dallas, where everything is based on the use of private cars and the need for parking lots, density might be impossible.

Dillon: An obvious sign of density is street life, which we have very little of here. The streets aren’t really people places.

Norberg-Schulz: Remember, though, that a city is not just one structure. In my books I talk about environmental levels, implying that our environment consists of units of different size and scale. The structure found on one of these levels must not be the same as the one you find on another. Dallas as a whole is now scattered, but within it you find dense places like the Quadrangle, where you go inside and get the feeling that it is for people.

It’s important to remember that there is a hierarchy. You have large structures where you find one kind of relationship among spaces, and then you have smaller units within them and so on down to the living room that we’re sitting in now. You need interiors of various sizes.

Dillon: What should these interiors be?

Norberg-Schulz: We need interiors where we can be alone, interiors where we can be together, interiors for public life such as squares and piazzas. We also need parks and green spaces for strolling around and for more occasional sorts of encounters.

Dillon: And what is the function of older buildings in this system you are describing?

Norberg-Schulz: Older buildings make it visible that different ideas and people have come to this place and left something here. We need to feel that we belong to a rich environment, where many things have met. We also need buildings which illustrate that those meetings meant an adaptation to the local situation, so that we can say, “Ah, at the time they understood Dallas in that way. We have other problems, but we should interpret them as the same problems in a new context.” By having these older solutions around us, our new interpretations become more meaningful. Preservation of old buildings is extremely important.

Dillon: It’s difficult to convince some people of that. You often get the response that, well, if such and such a building were really a piece of good architecture we’d consider preserving it, but since it isn’t, we’ll tear it down and put up something that is.

Norberg-Schulz: There is another verydeep psychological element to this. Yousee young people today reacting againstalways living with new things that theythrow away quickly. There is an international trend towards using old clothes,not because they are cheaper but becausethey are old. There are a lot of shopswhere you can buy the clothes of yourgrandparents and wear them. Girls dressup in all these things, and I don’t think itis just because they want to look charming or funny or old-fashioned, butbecause these clothes tell a story. There isa human content to them. You feel thatyou belong to something. And that’splace again. Dressing in old clothes andpreserving an old house are closelyrelated. They are felt as psychologicalneeds. We cannot always make everythingnew and throw it away and start fromzero again. There would be no humanqualities left

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