SITTE, LIMITATIONS OF MODERN CITY PLANNING

Sitte proposed instead to follow what he believed to be the design objectives of those whose streets and buildings shaped medieval cities. He advocated curving or irregular street alignments to provide ever-changing vistas. He called for T-intersections to reduce the number of possible conflicts among streams of moving traffic. He pointed out the advantages of what came to be know as "turbine squares"--civic spaces served by streets entering in such a way as to resemble a pin-wheel in plan.

His teachings became widely accepted in Austria, Germany, and Scandinavia, and in less than a decade his style of urban design came to be accepted as the norm in those countries. There were, of course, critics of this approach, and ultimately the kind of carefully studied informality that Sitte endorsed came itself to be regarded as old-fashioned. Nevertheless, from 1890 until the outbreak of the First World War, the majority of the numerous extension plans for enlarging the rapidly growing cities of Germany incorporated all or some of the elements so strongly supported by Sitte and his followers.

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