ABSTRACT
Evidence of our most ancient urban fabrics is limited. Most have crumbled, destroyed by war or natural calamity, abandoned to nature or overgrown and overlaid by new and different fabrics. From the little we do know, a field, as a species, can endure for millennia. Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavations of the early Mesopotamian city of Ur document a fabric of dead-end streets and courtyard houses that is clearly akin to a traditional Tunisian residential quarter documented a few decades ago. [Fig. 3.3]
Beijing has been rebuilt in its entirety several times and there is every reason to assume the houses in earlier versions of the city were of the same type. The gigantic Qianlong Era map of Beijing drawn for the emperor by French Jesuits in 1740 depicted each house, its courtyards and pavilions. [Fig. 3.1] Large parts of the same fabric persisted, albeit in a congested and deteriorated state, prior to recent large-scale demolition projects.The fabric of Venice, as we know it today, still reflects its Gothic medieval origins and many palazzi built at that time remain. [Figs. 2.3 and 2.4]
Transformation over time takes place in even the most constant of fields. But continuity of form and spatial organization over many generations remains the most striking quality of historic fields. John McAndrew’s observation, when comparing the early Renaissance and Gothic palaces of Venice, that their difference was “only skin deep” tells us the spatial organization of the house remained constant over centuries.1 Although the façades are
rendered in a different style, the seventeenth-century Amsterdam canal house similarly derives much of its spatial organization from its sixteenth-century precursor. While fields continuously absorb stylistic and technical change, continuity in spatial organization remains an enduring characteristic.
