Background and Foreground Buildings

Definition

Goldberger's distinction, adapted from Trystan Edwards's Good and Bad Manners in Architecture (1924), between the city's two classes of building. Background buildings form the fabric of a street or neighbourhood; foreground buildings — monuments, special civic and cultural buildings — punctuate it. They "have different missions in the city, different meanings, and hence different architecture." The urban-design rule that follows is a rule of ratio: "A street or a neighbourhood composed of too many foreground buildings will be a cacophonous mess, even if the buildings themselves are well designed. But a street with no foreground buildings at all will be a hopeless bore." Foreground buildings need not resemble their neighbours; the Guggenheim Bilbao is "superb contextual architecture" precisely because it does not look like its surroundings while still being designed with them in mind, acting as "a punctuation mark at the end of the vista." The distinction underwrites Goldberger's defence of ordinary and vernacular building as the necessary ground of urban experience, and connects to Edwards's claim that buildings owe one another the deference of etiquette.

Key Thinkers

• Paul Goldberger — states the distinction and the ratio rule.
• Trystan Edwards — "urban design and architecture were simply a matter of etiquette": buildings should "show deference to one another." (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• Frank Gehry — the foreground building as contextual punctuation (Bilbao).

Related Concepts

• street-as-room — the street is the scene in which background and foreground are composed.
• The Whole Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts — the principle the ratio serves.
• new-urban-paradigm — the edge-city model in which background coherence is replaced by private enclave.
• sense-of-place — background fabric as the carrier of place.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/goldberger-2009-why-architecture-matters — ch. 7 (pp. 164–66) develops the distinction from Edwards and applies it to Bilbao and to London's rows of identical brick houses.

Open Questions

• Who decides which buildings are foreground, and does the designation follow the building's design or the city's later reception of it?
• Can the distinction survive a media economy in which every building is asked to be a foreground image?