Urban Navigation IV. The Layered Vista

The Layered Vista combines the Terminated Vista with the Deflected Vista. (These latter were discussed in the previous two Technical Pages.) It names the situation in which the view down a street frames a distant feature which appears above, or occasionally below, the closer-in closure of the perspective made by the street walls. It sounds more complex than it is, and in fact is a common feature of denser settlements not constructed on regular grids. The Layered Vista is useful magic. Insofar as the glimpse of a distant landmark helps people know where they are, it is functional and a contribution to the sense of a place as a knitted whole. A succession of Layered Vistas encountered in the course of moving through a town induces a sense of trust that not only permits a high degree of local complexity, but encourages its enjoyment. Beyond even that, there is some indefinable satisfaction in such vistas, and consequently photographs of them make up a considerable percentage of the postcards sold in the world's more picturesque towns and cities. The Layered Vista occurs automatically in dense, irregular urban situations. But it can also be consciously designed into plans of almost any density and variety of order. While it is concerned with visual axes and near-alignments, the Layered Vista is not necessarily committed to the down-the-axis movement patterns of the varieties of formal planning. The Layered Vista is not intrinsically either formal or picturesque. For example, in Florence the view northward from the Uffizi courtyard is a classic layered vista, with the Duomo appearing just off-center above the frontal, closed end of the long, axial courtyard. Yet in terms of movement the courtyard is a sieve. Tighter Walls, More Distant focus In the Layered Vista, it is useful to understand that the degree of focus on the ultimate goal, versus the closer one, is inversely proportional to the degree of local space enclosure. That is, a tight, vertically proportioned street will have a high degree of end focus. A wide plaza or square, on the other hand, adequately defined by enclosing buildings or vegetation, will tend to lose concentration on a final point. The formula is this: the tighter the walls, the more distant can be the focus. For an infill project there may well be meaningful buildings on the horizon to which the project's local order, by incorporation into one or more of its vistas, can attach itself. For larger projects, it is a matter of first weaving a system of streets and blocks into the existing surrounding ones, then scanning for near-alignments and adjusting to make them exact. For smaller ones, even the alignment of, say, an alley within a block on a nearby steeple, is worth considering. Isolated developments can often substitute some prominent landscape feature for a man-made final vista terminus. Indeed, such a conjunction of the man-made and the natural in a Layered Vista can be extremely powerful. Walter Burley Griffin and Marian Mahoney Griffin, in their 1912 plan for Canberra, the new Australian capital city, planned many layered vistas along boulevards terminated in civic buildings, but then culminating on Mt. Ainslie, around which the city was planned. In topography-rich areas of North America such as Vermont, it is not unusual for the view up a town green with a terminal church to be capped, in turn, by a brooding little mountain. The Layered Vista is simultaneously a considerate navigational aid, a way to unite different neighborhoods or districts into a centered whole, and a way to connect local, everyday life and movement to the values symbolized by constructed monuments and appropriated landscape.