City Vision
Urban Design and Vision in
“The City as a Text”
The Music Garden
“The Street that Got Mislaid”
Architecture in Taipei
Image source: 迪化街
Outline
Starting Questions
“Metropolis: The City as Text” (1)
3. The Music Garden
4. “The Street that Got Mislaid”
5. Conclusion
6. Reference
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2.
Starting Questions
What have we learned so far?
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Modern city vs. Postmodern city;
Urbanism as a way of life (impersonal,
transitory, segmental, and mostly
utilitarian human contact)
Organic city vs. planned city (with utilitarian
purposes– Paris as an example)
Historical Perspectives:
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Taipei in (“Taipei, Taipei”〈古都〉、《牯嶺街》),
Montreal (“Canvas of Time,” No and “North”),
Toronto (In the Skin of a Lion)
Starting Questions
What are we discussing today?
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Different visions or interpretation of a city
(religious [divine order], naturalist [body],
Foucaultian [grid], Marxist [dynamic
structure])
urban planning: social welfare, landscaping
and domicile registration (census)
Vision and reality; landscaping, music film
and “nature”
Garden and green bottle – relevance to our
cities?
Starting Questions on
“The City as Text”
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How do we describe/represent a city? Why is
city an “imagined” environment (422)? Why can
a city be a text (written with signs, to be
interpreted)?
How do city planners ‘imagine’ a city? With what
metaphors and charts? What could be their
limitations? What could be the limitations they
place on city-dwellers? (e.g. pedestrian areas)
How about us? What metaphors or images do
we have in mind about a city? Can we ‘map’ a
city? How do we walk in a city such as Taipei?
Metropolis: The City as Text”
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Focus: representations of cities from 19th century till now.
(human body, machine, [Paris], [Vienna], labyrinth, modern
city and mental life, flows; p. 423)
1.1 Prologue: excerpts from Bleak House and The Asphalt
Jungle –
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Similarities: effect of the weather on the cities; the city –
alien; civilization – sophisticated but fragile; technologies
and forces constituting the life of a city
 Asphalt Jungle – city as a machine and a strange and
magical place; with awareness of the class and ethnic
differences
1.2 The city as imagined environment – organic and
mechanical
2.1 Capitalist City – “Police”
2.2 Concept vs. Experience
Metropolis: The City as Text”
A. Two paradigms in the 19th century: (425-29)
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The divine order “the invisible hand” of the market in
giving order to a city  like a body with ‘the instincts of
brute creation.”
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The medical paradigm: ills attributed less to commercial
systems than to urbanization.
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Develop social welfare system through both investigation
and administration systems.
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Urban government . . . Includes surveillance and
discipline.  concrete, quantifiable and precise info. 
系統的多重關係．
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E.g. 〈馬桶〉 its view of the city—similar or different?
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The last SARS epidemic –multiple systems of
surveillance
The police: City as a statistical grid of
investigation and surveillance
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B. Grid (surveillance + welfare)
(Michel Foucault) the police:
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1. political, 2. pastoral
a technology of government which defined the domains,
techniques and targets of state intervention. It involved
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cataloguing the resources of a state, both material and human,
in minute detail.
Identified a new object: polulation (429-30)
e.g. District Offices (domicile registration) + District
Health Center
“The City as Text (2)”: Dynamic
structure
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Engel’s Marxist view: relations between the
have’s and have-not’s as a complex, concrete
totality, and whose parts have meanings that
are only decipherable in relation to all its other
parts. (432)
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– determined by modes of production
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Summary: pp. 433-34
“The City as Text” 2.2: Concept vs.
Experience
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1.
Michel de Certeau: p. 435
Concept city (435)– in utopian or urbanistic
discourse; with a perspective both ‘god-like’
and voyeuristic that can encompass all the
diversity, randomness and dynamism of urban
life in a single panorama (statistics).  a
proper space, a pure space, a space of rational
organization.  urban and human ills
repressed
“The City as Text” 2.2: Concept vs.
Experience (2)
Michel de Certeau: p. 435
2. Lived city –beneath the discourses, the grids
and combinations of powers or a fixed pattern
of statistical relationships.
The people, who are ‘unpredictable, inventive and
devious.’
Who have ‘illegible improvisations’ of the spaces
on the streets or at home. (435-34)
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“The City as Text” 2.2: Concept vs.
Experience (3)
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Rational city vs. mythic experience: Max Weber
vs. Walter Benjamin (436)
Max Weber – 18th, 19th centuries –abstract,
formal rationality as the organizing principle 
demythification and disenchantment of the
social world
The new urban-industrial world –fully reenchanted. --in the new shopping arcades.
“The City as Text” 2.2: Concept vs.
Experience (2)
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Paris as an example –
 城市的遠見:
 Houssmann’s plans (boulevard,
underground sewage, underground
canal, street furniture)
 improvement of Chamsee-lysee
(quality control and
 Park of Bercy
 眾志成城
Houssmann vs. Baudelaire (438-39)
Rational organization vs. flaneur
e.g. Taipei City Hall and Capitol Hill
Washington DC
The Music Garden
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What do you think?
General Intro.
Music + Landscaping
Efforts – Arts, Business and
Politics
General Design
Toronto Music Garden
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From Boston’s City Hall
Plaza
to Toronto’s Harbor Front
Music + Landscaping: Why and How?
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Musical piece-- Ma: “A document that is visual, aural
and spatial at the same time. […] it affects and
animates people so much in different places and
times.”
The first suite of Bache – Ma: nature
Garden – nature made ‘simple and readable’
Transferring audio language to spatial language;
Lobbying (film: 4:19—9:00)
Note:漢 both are 1) abstract art appealing to our senses;
2) pervasive; 3) rhythmic (rhythm made with beats,
proportional shape and spatial arrangement)
Artistic Efforts: Music  Landscaping
1. Landscaper:
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Drawing blue prints, making models
The choice of plants – e.g. Ginko (銀杏)
Understanding music (dance—vertical [sinking and rising]
2. Filmmaker:
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Filmic visions (9:00 from the room to Ma’s performance to
garden scenes; 18:30 from a model, to concrete building to
garden; from the city hall front to a garden; 39:00 – out in
traffic  plants growing)
Low point – Sarabande
Visual messages: e.g. Images fading, officials’ backs
Music, Film Landscaping and Nature
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To use human languages to
shape nature, or create
order out of disorder
Ma’s intention: to create a
space for music, or a
concert hall without walls.
 what about traffic? (e.g.
51:00; 53:30)
The Practical Concerns
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Privatize the space (12:17) –income
from real estate  improves the plaza
Security
Get corporate support (“to ‘massage’
the corporate power.”) --naming (the
movements, the flower beds) to get
support of one movement/area after
another.
Artists have a different vision.
Deadlines – of filmmaking.
Bach & Garden Plan
Suite#1 I – Prelude II – Allemande III -Courante,
IV – Sarabande, V - Menuet I , VI - Gigue
Prelude: An undulating riverscape
with curves and bends.
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“a seascape, a riverscape, a wavelike motion
that carve out space”
Response to
the
environment
3:43
Allemande (an ancient German dance): A
forest grove of wandering trails.
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swirl
Original plan:
12:00;
adjusted in
the new plan
Bk 14
Courante: A swirling path through
a wildflower meadow.
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Spiral in and out, twisting and turning
The film camera: pans away from Ma to
butterflies, circles around Ma (- 29:00-)  the
project falls through
23:29
Sarabande: A conifer grove (針葉
樹) in the shape of an arc
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A glade(森林中的空地) in the forest
30:00
Sarabande: a poet's corner
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the garden's centerpiece is a huge stone that
acts as a stage for readings, and holds a
small pool with water that reflects the sky.
Bk 13
Menuette: A formal flower
parterre (花圃的草坪).
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Formal garden, symmetrical
41:44
Minuette: formal dance
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Julie Messervy: (1st movement) To shape
nature in simple forms
Hand-crafted with ornamental steel, a circular
pavilion is designed to shelter small musical
ensembles or dance groups.
Music and Nature: The Gigue (51:54)
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Gigue: Giant grass steps that dance you down to
the outside world. (steps and exiting and leaving
the piece)
or "jog" is an English dance, whose jaunty,
rollicking music is interpreted here as a series of
giant grass steps that offer views onto the harbor.
Administrative perspective:
"The Street That Got Mislaid"
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Is it possible for the story to happen in real life?
Is it possible for a missing person to remain
incognito for all of his/her life?
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identity checks: employment and education,
customs/immigration office, credit card, driver’s license,
ID cards, social security/insurance card, etc.
If you could choose, would you like to live there?
Administrative perspective:
"The Street That Got Mislaid"
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Marc’s life at work vs. his life at home
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total familiarity with and belief in the bureaucratic
system he supports (e.g. his discussion with his friend
re. the truth of his residence in Oven street—
established by his files.)
loneliness; neighbors – noisy or even violent
Marc’s choice: too quick and too radical a
change, accepted too quickly by the woman
Other possible problems of Green Bottle Street:
work and money? Procreation and family building?
Buildings– Which of them have
humane design?
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大陸工程總部辦公大樓 － 民生、
復興北
宏國辦公大樓 –敦化、長春
More …
(modernist: 1)
(postmodernist 1, 2)
Image source
Conclusion?
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A city can be variously defined, imagined,
desired for, and connected to the past.
Concept City does not just belong to the city
planners. We also develop our concepts of
the city in our use of signs, through our
walking and living, desiring and recollections
in a city.
Reference
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《為建築看相》 (Examining Architecture).
漢寶德. 出版社, 藝術家出版社.
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Toronto Music Garden Photo Gallery---Inspired
by Bach: Yo Yo Ma http://www.nakayoshi.org/musicgarden/
Loraine Hunter http://www.garden-
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time.com/magazine/03september/article_gotw.php