The circus

Category: public open space. Subcategory: plazas and squares. Subsequent pages will cover the urban circle and the rotary. A circus is a regular, concavely curved urban open space; a circular variant of the urban square. Circuses are the spatial manifestation of the popular roundabout of modern traffic engineering, as buildings are disposed in support of the vehicular geometry. Although a simple intersection, the streets entering a circus give the effect of converging in an intensely spatial urban place. The most common circus is an intersection entered from four directions. Variations include the triple entry, which terminates the vistas, and the multiple entry etoile (star). The center of a circus may be developed as landscape or punctuated with a monument. The architecture of any curved, urban streetwall is best when expressed with regular, steady facades of uniform height and cornices reinforcing the line of the silhouette. The circus has its origins in the Roman Circus, the stadium type which retained its form when the ruins were urbanized in the Middle ages. In the 18th century, the English architect and developer John Wood the Elder rationalized the type at Bath. In America, the circus as an urban form is rare. The earliest example is the Tontine Crescent of Boston, now demolished. More recently, certain high-density new urbanist projects have employed partial circuses. Examples are Reston Town Center, Orenco Station, and Addison Circle. None have the quality of those of John Wood, possibly because the architectural expression is insufficiently steady to reveal the spatial form over the texture. u