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        • Roberto Damiani
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        • The Figure-Ground Plan and Its (Dis)content

        Abstract
        Over time, the figure-ground plan has gained considerable popularity among architects and urban designers. This essay presents the history of the figure-ground plan and the contemporary struggle to cope with the increasing formlessness of the modern city. In the early controversy over modern urbanism in the late 1880s, the figure-ground plan functioned as a polemical drawing. From Camillo Sitte to the New Urbanists, through the British critic Colin Rowe’s influential writing and teaching, architects and urban designers
        mobilised the figure-ground plan to study the morphology of cities and criticise the modernist context-free drawing of plans and zoning maps. Since the late 1970s, the figure-ground plan met with increasing resistance from designers, who dismissed it for its inability to represent the spatial and temporal dimensions of the post-metropolis. This article wants to reconsider some of the arguments embedded in the figure-ground plan and its discontents.
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        Citation
        Damiani, R. (2020). The Figure-Ground Plan and Its (Dis)content. The Drawing in Landscape Design and Urbanism, OASE, (107), 63–68. Retrieved from https://www.oasejournal.nl/en/Issues/107/TheFigureGroundPlanandItsDiscontent

        Download PDF (2.11 MB)

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