{"id":30318,"date":"2021-06-16T10:17:29","date_gmt":"2021-06-16T09:17:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsblogsnew.ihbc.org.uk\/?p=30318"},"modified":"2021-06-16T10:17:29","modified_gmt":"2021-06-16T09:17:29","slug":"ihbc-signpost-leonardo-da-vinci-designs-the-ideal-city-see-3d-models-of-his-radical-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/?p=30318","title":{"rendered":"IHBC Signpost: Leonardo da Vinci Designs the Ideal City: See 3D Models of His Radical Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The roots of the discipline we call urbanism run all the way back to the 15th century when, early in the European Renaissance, thinkers were reconsidering a host of conditions taken for granted in the medieval period, but few figures thought as far ahead, or across as many fields as Leonardo da Vinci.<\/h3>\n
image: Open Culture website<\/em><\/h6>\n

<\/p>\n

\u2026 thinkers were reconsidering\u2026.man\u2019s place in the universe\u2026.the disposal of his garbage\u2026<\/span><\/em><\/h2>\n

Open Culture<\/em> writes:<\/p>\n

Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ray Bradbury: they and other 20th-century notables all gave serious thought to the ideal city, what it would include and what it would exclude. To that extent we could describe them, in 21st-century parlance, as urbanists. But the roots of the discipline \u2014 or area of research, or profession, or obsession \u2014 we call urbanism run all the way back to the 15th century. At that time, early in the European Renaissance, thinkers were reconsidering a host of conditions taken for granted in the medieval period, from man\u2019s place in the universe (and indeed the universe itself) to the disposal of his garbage. Few of these figures thought as far ahead, or across as many fields as Leonardo da Vinci.<\/p>\n

In addition to his accomplishments in art, science, engineering, and architecture, the quintessential \u2018Renaissance man\u2019 also tried his hand at urbanism. More specifically, he included in his notebooks designs for what he saw as an ideal city. \u2018Leonardo was 30 when he moved to Milan in around 1482,\u2019 writes Engineering and Technology\u2018s Hilary Clarke. \u2018The city he found was a crowded medieval warren of buildings, with no sanitation. Soon after the young painter had arrived, it was hit by an outbreak of the bubonic plague that killed 50,000 people \u2014 more than a third of the city\u2019s population at the time.\u2019 This could well have prompted him to draw up his plan, which dates between 1487 and 1490, for a cleaner and more efficient urban environment.<\/p>\n

While it wouldn\u2019t have been particularly hard to envision a less dirty and disordered setting than the late medieval European city, Leonardo, true to form, performed a thoroughgoing act of reimagination. \u2018Drawing on the knowledge he had gained from studying Milan\u2019s canals, Leonardo wanted to use water to connect the city like a circulatory system,\u2019 writes Clarke, who adds that Leonardo was also studying human anatomy at the time. \u2018His ideal town-planning principle was to have a multi-tiered city, which also included an underground waterway to flush away effluent.\u2019 The top tier would have all the houses, squares and other public buildings; \u2018the bottom tier was for the poor, goods and traffic \u2014 horses and carts \u2014 and ran on the same level as the canals and basins, so wagons could be easily offloaded.\u2019<\/p>\n

Though its ambition would have seemed fantastical in the 15th century, Leonardo\u2019s city plan everywhere marshals his considerable engineering knowledge to address practical problems. He had a real location in mind \u2014 along the Ticino River, which runs through modern-day Italy and Switzerland \u2014 and planned details right down to the spiral staircases in every building. He insisted on spirals\u2026 \u2018because they lacked corners, making it harder for men to urinate,\u2019 but they also add an elegance to his vision of the vertical city, a notion that strikes us as obvious today but was unknown then. Of course, Leonardo was a man ahead of his time, and the 3D-rendered and physical models of his ideal city in these videos from the Ideal Spaces Working Group and Italy\u2019s Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci make one wonder if his plan wouldn\u2019t look both alluring and impossibly radical to urbanists even today.<\/p>\n

Read more….<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The roots of the discipline we call urbanism run all the way back to the 15th century when, early in the European Renaissance, thinkers were reconsidering a host of conditions taken for granted in the medieval period, but few figures … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ihbc-newsblog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30318"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30320,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30318\/revisions\/30320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}