The Custom House: Richmond's First Federal Building

Federal Architecture in the City

The federal presence was manifested in the capital city of Virginia just before the start of the Civil War by an impressive, permanent granite building. After years of using rented or borrowed accommodation for federal officials, the U.S. Government eventually provided antebellum Richmond with yet another special building type new to the city and a further clarification of the city's urban scale. It was located on a key site in the civic plan that helped, by its relative position, to clarify the constitutional relationships of state, local, and Federal elements in the overall polity. 

The Tariff Act of 1790 set up a system whereby tariffs were collected on imported goods at all ports of entry. Tariffs provided the largest source of federal revenue until the introduction of the income tax in 1913.  The American government began building architecturally distinguished custom houses in the early nineteenth century. They were primarily intended to house the officials who regulated the export and import of goods and collected customs fees on imports. The officials had formerly been accommodated in warehouses where the goods were kept.

Exeter Custom House [[http://www.hm-waterguard.org.uk/Offices%20&%20Buildings-England.htm]

These were modeled on British customs houses and commissioned for major centers of shipping. Places in which to collect customs at ports of entry had existed since medieval times. One of the earliest purpose-built custom houses standing in England is the Exeter Custom House, designed by Richard Allen and built between 1680 and 1681 and. With its originally open, arcaded first floor, the five-bay brick building resembles a town/ market hall. It has an elaborately plastered “long room” on the upper floor and an earth-floored “strong room” on the lower level. Wren’s post-fire Custom House in London of 1671 and its successors of 1717-25 and 1813-17 were architecturally impressive landmarks on the Thames, each containing a “long room” on the main floor where duties were paid [[http://www.hm-waterguard.org.uk/Offices%20&%20Buildings-England.htm]. 

Christopher Wren’s London Custom House of 1671  [http://www.hm-waterguard.org.uk/Offices%20&%20Buildings-England.htm]

The busy Long Room in the London Custom House, where ships were reported 

and duties were paid on goods c. 1750.

The expanding federal court system needed space in the city as well. Under the Judiciary Act of 1789, each state had a district court in which a judge heard cases involving admiralty and maritime law and minor federal crimes. More important federal cases were heard circuit courts, which met in the same districts, served by two (later one) Supreme Court justices and the district judge. This system continued largely unchanged until after the Civil War. 

In Richmond, federal officials were indifferently housed for many years. Customs officials had for many years been located in a warehouse on Fifteenth Street. The post office had been located in a series of buildings, including the former museum building on Capitol Square and the Exchange Hotel. By the 1840s, Richmond's customs officials were housed in a three-story brick building on Fourteenth Street between Man and Cary, near the City Dock [Virginia Mutual Policy 12610, 1844]. 

An earlier Richmond custom house (Building A) was located in a three-story brick commercial building shown second from the corner on the west side of Fourteenth Street (north is at the top) [Virginia Mutual Policy 12610, 1844]

Interestingly, like their British predecessors, American custom houses drew on the long-established tradition of market halls and courthouses. And, unlike the earlier brick and stucco-clad masonry civic buildings of most local and state governments, the new federal buildings were the first in their neighborhoods to be clad in expensive and permanent cut stone. Like other civic buildings in the period, the more important mid-nineteenth-century custom houses employed fully developed classical forms, but in smaller cities the use of the orders was restricted to the entablature. These "market hall" inspired buildings frequently employed arcades as a principal exterior feature and utilized an fashionable Italian idiom for cornices and architectural details. 

In the antebellum period, the central government commissioned a series of significant new custom houses in major cities, designed not only to provide a dignified setting for the functions of the national government and to enable the effective regulation of international commerce, but to house other federal functions, such as courts. 

Bank Street façade of the Richmond Custom House, 1865 [LOC] 

The Richmond Custom House

 Supervising Architect of the Treasury Ammi Burnham Young produced the design for the Richmond Custom House in 1858, as he did for all the federal buildings built between 1849 and 1860. Most were intended to be fireproof and were built of granite. The floors were supported on brick segmental arches spanning between cast iron interior structural members, using recently developed building technology widespread by 1850 [Sara E. Wermiel. The Fireproof Building, 2000]. In most cases the first floor contained a post office, the second floor held the customs office, and the third floor housed a federal courtroom. Young chose a modern, astylar Italianate manner for the form and detail of the custom house.

As mentioned above, custom houses had, since the eighteenth century, been modeled on market halls, often with lower-story arcades and upper-story offices. As the building type increased in significance as a local representation of the national government, custom houses in the largest cites also took the form of palaces or temples, sometimes including a central dome and a colonnade or pedimented portico. Among Young’s designs, however, the level of architectural expression was scaled to the size and importance of the host city. All the Virginia custom houses, even the most elaborate, retained the architectural imprint of the market hall. In each design, the separation of functions was maintained by the provision of distinct entrances to each from the exterior.

The Custom House in Norfolk, Virginia. Architect, Ammi B. Young, 1858 [LOC].

Norfolk, as a major port, had received its first formally designed custom house in 1819.  Norfolk’s new custom house of 1858 took the form of a Corinthian temple, but, like a classical market hall, stood on a raised basement with regularly spaced entries. The Richmond Custom House, at a smaller scale appropriate to the city's status as a port, retained the market-derived arcades in the forms of an arched loggia fronting on Main Street and an arcaded porch on Bank Street. 

The Custom House in Petersburg, Virginia. Architect, Ammi B. Young, 1856-58 [LOC].

Similarly, Petersburg’s Italianate Custom House, completed in 1858, had an arcaded ground floor. Two doors in the arches on the north front gave access to a post office vestibule, while the third opened onto the stair to the custom house office. There was no courtroom in the Petersburg building, but a third story containing sleeping apartments for the officials was added to the iron-framed, granite-clad building during construction [HABS documentation]. A small public piazza in front of the Custom House was enclosed by an ornamental cast iron fence and paved with "North River flagging" and flanked by "grass plots, ornamented with trees" [Petersburg Daily Express, 22 Dec. 1858, 1, quoted by HABS].

The Custom House in Alexandria, Virginia. Architect, Ammi B. Young, built 1858, enlarged c 1903, and demolished c 1930 [LOC].

The Alexandria Custom House located close to the street on its public square at the corner of Prince and St. Asaph streets on 1885 Sanborn Map

The Alexandria Custom House of 1858, containing also the post office, and U.S. district court, was even smaller, but featured attached pilasters and a full entablature. Each of the Virginia custom houses was conceived as a free-standing civic building at the urban scale and was placed on an expansive public lot with room for expansion. Richmond’s custom house was set apart from the commercial buildings along Main Street by a pair of flanking courtyards shielded by cast-iron fences and gates. The post office was on the first floor, the customs offices on the second floor, while the third floor held the federal courtroom.

Beers' Map of 1877. Detail Showing Capitol Square with the Custom House directly south of the Capitol. The site of the City Hall of 1816 is shown north of the Capitol as a public square.

The Richmond Custom House’s position as a special building at the urban scale was as carefully composed as were those of Richmond’s other civic buildings. The City Hall of 1816 stood almost directly behind and facing the north façade of the Capitol, making a powerful alliance between the life of the city as state capital and as metropolis. The federal relationship was even more effectively expressed by placing the custom house fully on axis with the Capitol’s south front, along the bottom edge of Capitol Square (see the 1858 drawing below). City Hall was located on busy Broad Street, the city’s principal thoroughfare, and the custom house was allied with, but separated from, the city’s banks and stores in Main Street’s commercial center. The custom house and post office facade was aligned with the commercial streetfront, while the courthouse front was set back as befitted as civic building.

While the post office was directly accessible to its many clients along Main Street, the entrance to the federal court faced the Virginia legislature from the foot of Capitol Square. The Richmond Custom House was effectively terraced into the hillside at the foot of Capitol Square, so that it appeared to be only two stories in height on its northern front. A balustraded retaining wall across the north edge of the lot permitted below-grade windows in all the first-floor rooms.  

Main Street façade of the Richmond Custom House of 1858 

[Beers Atlas 1876]. 

Enlargement and Expansion

As a result of its multi-purpose function, internal subdivision, and substantial form, the Richmond Custom House was chosen to serve as the principal government office building for the newly founded Confederate government. The building not only housed Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ office, but the third-floor courtroom was the site of his trial after the end of the war. It was enlarged in 1887-89 by the addition of wings at each corner. The inclusion of a new pediment at the center of the Main Street front set the structure even more apart as a public building. The Bank Street façade appears to have been moved north, closer to the street, to increase the size of the building.

Richmond Custom House, c 1900, after addition of side wings in 1887-89 [http://www.fjc.gov/history/courthouses.nsf/getcourthouse?OpenAgent&chid=AFD1D82C40B6D0F48525718C004B08AD].

North front, Richmond Custom House, c. 1900 [Wikipedia].

South front, Richmond Custom House, c. 1900 [postcard, Wikipedia]. 

In the past, the only limit to the footprint of a building was the block on which it stood. Since the custom house was placed at the center of its half-block site, it was able to gradually expand to fill all the space available without losing its imposing symmetry. The reach of the Federal judiciary expanded greatly in the early twentieth century. Additions in 1912 and 1932, including the addition of a fourth story under a tiled, hipped roof, transformed the structure into a massive, symmetrical, five-part palazzo. This included a careful reworking of the rhythm of the Main Street façade by the addition of advanced entries flanking the central loggia. Recessed light courts along the north front give the Bank Street façade a very different character. 

Richmond Custom House (by this time known as the 
Post Office) after the addition to the west 
of 1912 [Wikipedia].

Expanding Traditional Buildings

Because architects in the early twentieth century were not constrained by notions of historical style, the building could be expanded successfully. A consistently expanded  adaptation of the Italianate forms first employed by Ammi B. Young allowed later architects to maintain a consistent and effective architectural setting as they met the changing needs of both the federal court system and the US Post Office. 

The fully developed Richmond Federal Court House/Post Office in 1958 

showing the addition to the west of 1912 and the addition to the east of 1932

[http://www.fjc.gov/history/courthouses.nsf/getcourthouse?OpenAgent&chid=AFD1D82C40B6D0F48525718C004B08AD]

The south front today [http://www.gsa.gov/portal/ext/html/site/hb/category/25431/

actionParameter/exploreByBuilding/buildingId/680].

.

When the building’s functions grew too large for the block, a typical local solution was employed in 1935-- a bridge to a new building on an adjacent block. Finally, the post office was moved to a suburban location, freeing up the building for exclusive use as the Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Federal Courthouse, today the oldest such building in continuous use in the nation. The diagram below indicates three phases of the building's growth over time.

Unattributed drawing of custom house evolution. 

Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:

Lewis_F._Powell,_Jr.,_United_States_Courthouse,_1858-1935_Drawing.TIF]

Richmond's Second and Third Markets

As detailed in an earlier post, the legislation through which the city was chartered in 1782 established a common council and court of hustings as the local government, a clerk of the market, and a sergeant. A city market and market square were also mandated by the charter. The newer, less developed, and more elevated section of the city located on Shockoe Hill was selected as the site of the new capitol. The state authorities, encouraged by Thomas Jefferson, planned a new city around six adjoining public squares on the hill. Jefferson’s program for the new city, enacted in 1780, included placing the market on one of the squares. The authorities, however, demurred, undoubtedly because there was insufficient population on the hill to support it. Instead, the new market was placed directly between the old town of Richmond to the east of Shockoe Creek and the new capitol city on the hill to the west.

Although the city began with one principal public market at the crossing of Shockoe Creek, as the city grew subsidiary markets would be needed in new quarters or neighborhoods. These would be built as diluted versions of the First Market, responding to and reinforcing the organizational structure of the city, in much the same way that, in later years, branch libraries and post offices would express through their relative scales its hierarchical order. 

The historic relationship between a successful market and a traditional conception of the city's ideal order is shown by the repeated attempts to establish a prominent market on Shockoe Hill, where Jefferson envisaged a market as part of his new capital. The common council rejected a plan 1793 for  a new Shockoe Hill Market in the middle of Broad Street. This would have followed a pattern used when markets were inserted into existing street grids in many eastern cities.

Shockoe Hill Market Hall at Broad and 12th (on the right) with the unfinished Academy Building beyond from a sketch by Latrobe, 1797 or 98 [From Bryan Clark Green, 1997] 

Site of 1793 Shockoe Market (near the Baptist Church labeled "O") beside the Quesnay Academy ("P") [Young's Map of 1809]

A market actually built to serve this area on the north side of Broad at Twelfth streets in the later 1790s was a failure.  A sketch (above) shows the Shockoe Market Hall to have consisted of a long arcaded frame building similar to contemporary market halls in small towns across the state. Like the first market house, it was located off the grid. It was placed on the common land on the eastward slope of Shockoe Hill where many public buildings were to be located in the coming decades, including the Academy, the Theater (and, therefore, Monumental Church), as well as the Medical College near the top of the hill and the Lancastrian School and the City Jail at the bottom. Benjamin Henry Latrobe also proposed sites for his planned theater/hotel and church of c. 1798 at this key nodal location where the main route (Broad Street) turned to descend the hill. 

The 1858 Adams Map shows the Second Market at the upper left in relation to the First Market (unlabeled near the creek) at the lower right corner.

It was not until the upper town had grown in density and diversity a decade later that it could rise to urbanity by establishing a second market. By that time, Jefferson’s program for the new metropolis on the hill was, for all practical purposes, complete.  At about the same time, the urban governing function was separated from the old First Market and moved to Shockoe Hill, where the City Court (City Hall) occupied a Neoclassical temple-form building behind and in an axial relationship to the Capitol, facing the city’s principal axis, Broad Street. 

The extension of Richmond's Second Market on the north side of Marshall Street after 1834, showing the Market Hall on the left and the new square to the left of the central lot line. Virginia Mutual Policy of 1865.

Richmond’s Second Market. The original c. 1817 Market Hall is on south side of Marshall and the Market Square of 1834 is to the north [the 1876 Beers map at top and 1889 Sanborn Map is at the bottom. North is to the top on each). The 1889 map shows the Headhouse/Police Station with an arched opening on each side as is visible in the 1865 image below, by this time surrounded by shed roofs.

Leslie's Weekly illustration of 1865 showing the City Dogcatcher at the Second Market with the 1817 Market Hall at right and the c 1834 Headhouse/Police Station at the center with bell tower

The new Second Market filled a lot on the southeast corner of Sixth and Marshall streets on Shockoe Hill in 1817. The illustration above shows it to have been arcaded like its predecessor in the valley below. The market square was expanded across the street to the north in 1834, and eventually lined by shops.  It appears that butchers had expanded in the original location so that produce sellers needed a new market hall of their own.  The old hall was probably enclosed at this time. 

The city constructed an open market house along the west side of the new square and the fish market and the city scales were housed in separate structures to the east. The north side and an alley running along the east side were lined with shops.  The illustration above appears to show the head house which fronted the market hall. Like the First Market Hall, it housed the police station and had a cupola and bell on the roof, looking not unlike the arched tower at the First Market. The elegant structure was designed as a two-story, classically organized loggia, with a parapet roof.  By 1889, it was surrounded by a projecting canopy (see the Sanborn Map above).

1909 Market and Armory at Sixth and Marshall streets, same view as the 

previous view from 1865

Second Market- Detail of 1924-5 Sanborn Map of Marshall between 6th and 7th Streets. It shows the Armory Building to the north and the Meat Market to the north of Marshall Street.

The town hall form was reiterated there when, in 1909, when a new, appropriately castellated Market and Armory was built on the same site. The market function was enclosed as the ground floor and the upper floor was dedicated to public events and the use of the Richmond Light Infantry Blues as an armory. The Sixth Street Market operated in this building until it was uprooted for the construction of the Sixth Street Marketplace development in 1985. The market function here was made visually secondary to the military. 

Terra cotta bull's head from the Second (Sixth Street) Meat Market as reused at Seventeenth Street 

The original market hall on the south side of Marshall Street, now the meat market, was replaced by a new building at about the same time. The top of this one-story brick building was ornamented with terra cotta bulls heads, two of which are now at the market on Seventeenth Street.  It was, sadly, demolished in the 1970s to make way for a multi-story parking garage.

The Second or Sixth Street Market area from Broad, 2nd 1/4 20th c., showing the Blues Armory at rear with the Meat Market in front of it with the terra cotta bull's heads visible along the top of the facade [Sanford 1975]

Market halls declined in importance as time passed. Their function was transformed in the late nineteenth century by the development of new technologies for the production and preservation of food and new concerns for hygiene. These changes, coupled with the growth of truck farming and neighborhood grocery stores, in the words of Bryan Clark Green, "removed the market house from the economic, administrative, and social center of Virginia's towns."  

Third Market, Richmond Virginia [VCU Archives]

As a result of the growth of population in the western end of the city, the city planned a third market for the area known as Sydney (today's Fan District). The Richmond Third Market hall was built on West Main Street in the early twentieth century. Like its predecessors, it took the traditional form of an arcaded market, only on a much more ambitious scale. It appears to have consisted of a single open room lit by the prominent roof monitor. The market did not, however, prosper at the Sydney location and was converted for use as a civic assembly hall. It was to be better known as the City Auditorium and has recently been rehabilitated as the Cary Street Recreational Center of Virginia Commonwealth University. 

Urban Planning according to Westfall and Muratori

The outpouring of manifestos, histories and theories has produced a tremendous din, but it has not stilled the voices of reason that understand that ratio is a complement to fabrica and that theory is a guide to practice and a link to the larger body of knowledge that assists men to know themselves. One of the first to disregard the distractions and listen to the music of architecture was Thomas Jefferson. . . . as he set about producing a series of important buildings and city plans suitable for the new republic’s civil purposes and the unique American landscape.  Carroll William Westfall, Why We Need a Third Architectural Treatise.

Urbanismo thought that we might run through an overview of American approaches to the design of cities. We hope that this brief rehearsal will prepare us to further explore with our readers the convergent parts of what seem to us to be the thoroughly admirable theories of Saverio Muratori and his student Gianfranco Caniggia, who were chiefly concerned with traditional building, and Carroll William Westfall, who principally focuses on classically derived architectural theory and its application to the cities of today. So here goes: 

Traditional Town-making

American cities benefitted from the classical theories of politics and architecture brought to their founding by the young nation's leaders. Most American cities, such as Boston, Williamsburg, and Charleston, were ordered as urban entities in consonance with classical theories about the role and placement of cities articulated during the Renaissance and closely followed by American political theorists. At the same time, since there was no theory of urban morphology separate from the practice of political science, the unfolding of cities proceeded in tandem with the commercial, social, and cultural development of the American nation. 

Building tissue and the city’s transportation armatures coincided closely and unremarkably with the texture and conduct of urban life.  As economic life intensified and the demands on the city’s collective institutions expanded, the self-healing tissue  of the urban fabric was able to adapt in a way that generally coincided with the expectations of many (but, to be sure, not all) of the users. This was because an understanding of the city’s form and function were shared by most of the users at a very basic level, making it unnecessary for the community to resort to a theoretical debate at each decision point. This shared understanding, and the theoretical framework within which the nation operated, is what made cities possible in the pre-modern era and its loss is the cause of their ongoing crisis. 

Planned Cities

The profession of urban planning, which came of age in the late nineteenth century, is the American response to the crisis of the modern city. It relies on sociological analyses of human behavior and on critiques of city life developed under the influence of the Progressive Movement. Following nineteenth-century Beaux-Arts architectural theory, modern planning divides the city into sectors by function or use, linked by a highly developed and articulated transportation system. Urban planners did not take into account the organic nature of the building tissue they served, although cities did continue to grow and change as long as traditional patterns remained operative.

The City Beautiful

At the same time, the City Beautiful movement, initiated by a group of classically-trained architects,  was successful at the urban scale in providing a humane setting for the great civic projects of the American Renaissance, like Daniel Burnham’s Chicago and Arthur Brown’s San Francisco, and a host of smaller boulevards and civic centers. However, under the custodianship of the growing planning profession, mature American cities previously transformed by the “City Beautiful” movement deteriorated in the mid-twentieth century into engineer-designed wastelands, increasingly dominated by techniques of social control and disruptive municipal redevelopment schemes privileging central management and revenue generation over a close-grained, self-healing, and risk-laden urbanity.

Contextual Design

Under the influence of International Modernism, the breakdown of the American city came under sharp critique at the same time that the cities showed signs of near-fatal decay. Some activists, resigned to or even exhilarated by the loss of the vital city, were content to keep its shell intact, both as a key to understanding historical change and as a sign of progress. Others thought retention of a richer physical context would enrich modern life. The historic preservation movement, determined to hang onto as much existing fabric as possible, was balanced by positive, but largely ineffective, efforts on the parts of architects associated with the New Urbanist movement to return certain elements of the city (details at the architectural and building scales) that had been lost. 

Unfortunately, many professionals at the leading edge of the New Urbanist movement failed to recognize the depth of meaning and potential for growth carried by existing and potential building tissue. The laudable intent of the movement was to combat the commnly acknowledged problems of the modern city, however, its theory and application betrayed a fatal flaw. The implementation of prescriptive codes and aesthetics and the catch-all “transect” unintentionally reduced the prosperous marketplace of urban architectural forms to a set of styles. This has resulted in a series of so-called traditional neighborhood developments that only serve to validate the modernist claim that classical and traditional architecture and urbanism is nothing more than a pastiche.

Unable to look at the city through the eyes of its makers, practitioners resort to “quotations” of the most superficial elements of the architectural scale (window patterns, roof forms) rather than critically examining, or “reading,” the invariably complex hierarchies of individual places. The result has been that the deep form, profound continuity, and tight grain that underly every mature city is ignored. This neglect eventually results in the emergence of an inadvertently “picturesque” design process. It tends to impose the appearance of age-old growth on a tightly controlled new development that has more in common with the ossified fabric of a protected  historic district, than with the organic tissue resulting from a human pattern of building.

Historicism

The loss of confidence in the vernacular and classical design “grammars” that made the historic city possible was unavoidably occasioned by the Enlightenment’s ambivalent attitude to authority. The historicist approach to urban design that resulted (the reduction of architectural history to a series of styles inextricably bound to their time and place) and its lack of clarity has failed to adequately address the crisis of the city. Designers tend to diverge into either picturesque contextualist or reductionist style-based approaches. The Venice Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites of 1964 was used by managers of the design process to confirm the historicist approach to urban design. Legibility of the styles or periods of construction (the history) of each building is given precedence over the self-healing coherence of the city’s fabric. New buildings and additions that, conforming to the detailing and materials of their neighbors, do fit their time and place, are regularly rejected by planning authorities. In our historic districts, the signs of continuity, both in form and material, that characterize the continually changing historic city, are subjected to a rigid conservationism because both the decision makers and the users have, unknowingly, lost access to the old ways of thinking. 

Alternatives: 

Muratori School

The urban theory that has developed among the students of Saverio Muratori in Italy (also known as the Italian School of Processual Typology) began among cities and villages that originated in the Iron Age or earlier. Their understanding of these ancient cites begins with a “reading” of their form. They have developed a sophisticated way of understanding the direction followed over millennia by cities with little other historical record than their form. Gianfranco Caniggia and Gian Luigi Maffei, students of Muratori’s thought, have offered a profound critique of modern urbanism. By presenting a completely realized  and philosophically astute theory of urban morphology, the Muratori-Caniggia School has been able to provide an alternative to both traditional urban planning and contextualism. 

This organic approach insists that successful urban forms were built into the unfolding of human political life and can appear in spite of any barriers thrown up by planners, builders, and users. The key is the understanding that the traditional city emerges from the accumulation of countless thousands of “spontaneous” transactions, supported by a built-in catalog of solutions to problems that were inherent in the family and shared, at various levels, by the larger culture. Designers are today no longer able to access that spontaneity and must, instead, use their critical skills to continue the urban project, principally by intellectually recreating the kinds of responses that would have been elicited by “spontaneous consciousness.”   

According to Muratori, the city is organized into a hierarchy of scales. Each element, placed in an ordered relation to the others in the urban tissue, adds to the legibility and meaning of the city. The tissue is arranged along routes that connect nodes and centers that make it possible for the city to grow, change, and even contract, without losing its coherence. The Muratori approach recognizes that we have all, inevitably, lost the key to the city’s health. The lack of any readily accessible solution to everyday questions-- the same kinds of incremental design problems that our predecessors responded to each day-- brings the city to its current “crisis.” This theoretical approach in no way precludes any design solution to the crisis that cripples the modern city. It demands only that each proposal be critically related to the way the city has grown heretofore. In this sense it is a totally descriptive approach to the traditional city. It is concerned with the way man builds, or at least the way he built prior to the self-evident crisis we are in today. It is only prescriptive as a solution to the fragmented modern city. The arguments usually raised against Historicism, a way of thinking that was designed to short-circuit the unreconcilable questions raised in the post-Enlightenment world, do not apply to this alternate approach.

While the principles first enunciated by Muratori have not found much application in the United States to date, Urbanismo is sure that they have much to offer us, if broadly applied.

Classical Analysis

The approach to urban design advocated by Carroll William Westfall in his book, co-authored with Robert Van Pelt, Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism (Yale, 1991) can be seen to be indirectly related to that presented by the Muratori School, but is at once more classically based and broadly theoretical. Westfall, following Aristotle, maintains that political life is the highest human activity and that the city is the place where political life is best able to realize its full value. Every city is successful to the degree that it is ordered to support its political life. The city’s urban and architectural forms are unavoidably hierarchically ordered, and that order can confirm and strengthen the public good and the prosperity that supports its growth and change. Just as the city’s institutions are designed and placed in relation to each other to make clear the city’s political values visible to the citizens, the city’s neighborhoods and ordinary buildings seek to be appropriately aligned with this order. Classical architectural theory permitted this organizational pattern to be articulated within the city across the broadest set of scales.  Westfall maintains, and Urbanismo concurs, that the practice of urban design requires the renewal of a vigorous and adequate architectural theory based in the classical understanding of the city. 

Both Westfall and Muratori explore the concept of “building type” and come to related conclusions. For Westfall, a good city consists of both classical and traditional elements. Most buildings are traditional rather than classical, and make use of conventions and materials appropriate to their time and place. Each building, however, whether in the public or private realm, best embodies the civic good when it corresponds to its type, the “generalized, unbuildable idea” that contains “all the possible examples of actual buildings of that type that have been or can be built” that is “independent of time and place” [Westfall, 1991, 152]. By effectively embodying their type, each building or urban component will, by manifesting the city’s political form, establish the means by which its citizens can pursue the moral life.

Muratori, as explained by Gian Luigi Maffei in Interpreting Basic Building, based his understanding of the city around a typological series describing, not only basic building (dwellings and shops) and special building (serving civic or religious purposes), but every feature of the city at each of a range of scales. In the production of any object in a period of “civil continuity,” makers can be guided “without thinking twice” by their spontaneous consciousness to satisfy a particular need. Type is the “pre-projection of what the end product will be, albeit prior to the object becoming a physical being.” The health of cities can be recovered by the exercise of the “critical consciousness” of the urban morphologist performing a historical and typological analysis. We can thus resolve the “contemporary architectural crisis,” the conflict between the “live fabric” of the city’s tissue and “the formalistic, solipsistic exercise” of most current architectural interventions [Gianfranco Caniggia and Gian Luigi Maffei, Interpreting Basic Building, Florence: Alianea, 2001].