The Planning ot Open Spaces in the City 
FIG. 32—BRUGES 
a third little square. The Cam¬ 
panile, now, alas! fallen, mount¬ 
ed guard between the two chief 
places. Other causes than that 
of the actual plan have, of 
course, contributed to the ex¬ 
traordinary beauty of this com¬ 
bination: colour, sculpture, ma¬ 
terial have each inspired the 
scene. But you have only to 
imagine St. Mark’s standing in 
the central axis of a large regular 
square, and the Library, the 
Procuratie, and the Doge’s Palace, instead of being 
gathered in a single composition, distributed along 
a great street 150 feet wide, to realise that the 
masterly ordering of its parts is, above all, that 
which delights us in the splendid masterpiece we 
still enjoy. 
I should have liked to put before you some exam¬ 
ples of the great seventeenth and eighteenth century 
“places” showing the stately effects, though of a dif¬ 
ferent kind, which are attainable by other methods 
than those we have studied. This pleasure I must 
forgo on this occasion, and the limits of time at my 
disposal allow me to off er you only one or two brief 
notes on street planning. 
I will not trouble you with the theoretical systems 
which have each their advocates when a new city or 
the extension of an old one has to be planned. Rec¬ 
tangular, radiating, or triangular, they are one and 
all devoid of artistic interest; nor does such a consid¬ 
eration enter the minds of the engineers who design 
them. Their regular geometry even is only appre¬ 
ciable upon paper; it cannot be perceived by those 
who see the executed work. The one obvious idea 
FIG. 31— LONDON 
Mansion House 
FIG. 30—ANTWERP 
Quartier du Sud 
is to construct the shortest route between any two 
points in order to save time in transit. Being, as l 
have said, inartistic, it follows also that they fail to 
solve even this practical problem in the best way. 
One example only by way of proof. In ancient 
towns you will find, first, that nearly all side streets 
enter main thoroughfares at right angles. In the 
modern triangulated and radiated schemes acute ang- 
les are inevitable, as may be seen by a glance at the 
plan of the contemporary “Quartier du Sud” at 
Antwerp [fig. 30]. In the second place the ancients 
avoided as far as they could the delivery of several 
arteries of traffic at the same point. This principle 
is now quite neglected, with the result that we obtain 
such hideous jumbles as the nameless space in front of 
the Mansion House [tig. 31]. 
Let us turn again to our forefathers whose work we 
may see pretty much as they left it at Bruges. Do 
not smile at the juxtaposition of the Mansion House 
and Bruges as incongruous; in its time Bruges was 
the commercial centre of Europe, with 200,000 in¬ 
habitants, and its streets and squares were planned 
for the requirements of a dense traffic. In the whole 
of Bruges you shall hardly find a street which forms an 
acute angle with another, nor a 
crossing of more than one street 
with one other. Where a street ap¬ 
proached another obliquely, or 
threatened a complicated intersec¬ 
tion, its line would be curved so 
as to avoid acute angles and con¬ 
fusion [fig. 32]. Nowadays we 
should have carried a street (a) 
through in a straight line, and so 
rn " ,n "n'TTTnrrvrrTTTTTTTTrr, have destroyed the little “place” 
FIG (b), besides giving wasteful build- 
Three directions from which carriages may arrive. ing blocks at the street corners. 
Three collision points 
