The Street as a Room

Definition

Goldberger's urban-design thesis that the street, not the building, is the primary unit of urban experience, and that a well-made street behaves like a room: an enclosing, agreeable, socially productive space. The epigraph from Louis Kahn — "The street is a room by agreement" — names the idea that the street's quality is a collective artefact of many buildings consenting to a shared order. Goldberger's own formulation is deliberately provocative for a critic: "If I have learned anything about what makes a city feel comfortable as a work of design, it is that streets matter more than buildings." The pleasures he cites are streets with no significant buildings at all — Madison Avenue in New York, the Strøget in Copenhagen, Rue Jacob in Paris — where activity, pedestrian scale, and variety keep the eye engaged and "monumental architecture would almost get in the way." The concept draws on Camillo Sitte's City Planning according to Its Artistic Principles (1889) and its plazas as the city's "rooms," and on Trystan Edwards's analogy of urban design to etiquette: buildings should defer to one another, and the resulting street is a scene of sociability rather than an assemblage of objects. It is the urban-form corollary of the wiki's whole-is-more-than-the-sum-of-parts principle.

Key Thinkers

• Paul Goldberger — the street-over-building thesis and the Kahn epigraph.
• Louis Kahn — "The street is a room by agreement." (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• Camillo Sitte — plazas and irregular open spaces as the city's rooms; the pedestrian orientation of urban design. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• Trystan Edwards — architecture and urban design as etiquette; deference between neighbouring buildings. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• John Nash and John Wood the Younger — Regent's Park and the Royal Crescent as streets composed like a chorus line. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)

Related Concepts

• new-urbanism — the movement that revives pedestrian-scaled street making.
• sense-of-place — the street as the carrier of place.
• background-and-foreground-buildings — the compositional economy that makes a street legible.
• public-sphere — the street as the classical public realm.
• whole-greater-than-parts — the urban composition principle the street exemplifies.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/goldberger-2009-why-architecture-matters — ch. 7 (pp. 159–66) develops the street-as-room thesis through Kahn, Sitte, Edwards, Paris, London, and Bath, and through the examples of Central Park West and the American main street.
• source-notes/jacobs-1961-death-and-life-great-american-cities — the sidewalk as the city's primary public room and its intricate order.

Open Questions

• If streets matter more than buildings, why does architectural criticism remain building-centred — and what would a street-critical practice look like?
• Does the street-as-room survive the privatisation of the public realm (the mall, the atrium lobby, the gated enclave) that Goldberger elsewhere diagnoses?