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> inside of outside spaces. But with careful composition, it is
also possible to form lively interior figures of urban spaces by
means of individual buildings, examples being Mies van der
Rohe’s Federal Center in Chicago or Allison and Peter Smith-
son’s Economist Building in London. Individual buildings are
capable of tying together important locales and key places
in the city through a network of relationships. While urban
areas and residential quarters acquire their identities through
the structure of the urban texture and the character of specific
quarters, it is the ‘primary elements’ (Rossi 1966/1982) – par-
ticularly in the form of > monuments – that contribute their
historic and symbolic significance to a city’s identity. They are
the orienting and pivotal points of the urban structure, and
form the guiding elements and arrival points of > routes. More
than the individual building, the city is experienced through
> movement: the spatial edges of > squares and streets pro-
pel or interrupt movement, guiding it into various directions,
or allowing it to come to rest through closed spatial frames.
The countless resources available for shaping space in urban
design, the contrast of > expansiveness and constriction, > in-
timation and > confrontation, the application of > thresholds
and > joints, of > axes and > sequences – all of these form the
toolbox of a > dramaturgy of the urbanistic steering and guid-
ing of routes.- To grasp the city as ‘architecture’ in the sense of a co-
herent structure presupposes that it is perceived not as an ac-
cumulation of buildings and streets, but at least to some extent
as a deliberately designed whole. This can proceed through
a regular geometry or figure, as found in ideal, planned cit-
ies such as Palmanova, Karlsruhe, Brasilia, or more recently
Chinese cities such as Lingang. In place of strict geometry or
incisive figures, the well-planned gestalt of a city may be rec-
ognizable in freer formal structures such as the network or
an organic pattern. A basis for the unmistakable gestalt of
a city is its site within the > landscape and the impact of the
surroundings on the character of urban space. Cities are dis-