The Designer's Lexicon

Planning for community character requires that architects, planners, urban designers, policymakers, and citizens clearly communicate their goals. Planners must then write plans and ordinances to enable those goals to be met. Unfortunately, many of these groups seem to speak different languages. There are a considerable number of terms used by architects and urban designers that are not commonly used by citizens, elected officials, and planners. Likewise, planners tend to use a number of terms typically found only in zoning ordinances.

To help facilitate the discussion about community character goals, this chapter introduces a design and planning lexicon. A great number of the urban design and architecture terms have been in the literature for decades. This is true of some of the planning and landscape terms as well. In developing community character for suburban and rural areas, I have developed additional terms over the past thirty years.

This chapter is organized by topical areas, so terms are grouped by their relation to one another rather than alphabetically. It begins with three terms that describe major classes of character, and then explores space, mass, and other elements of which they are made. Another set of terms addresses organizing buildings or spaces. The chapter concludes with landscape terms, which address the physical environment, along with planning and zoning terms.

There are a number of terms that describe aspects of communities and human settlements. Three descriptive ways of relating to space are discussed here—architectural, garden, and landscape—which connect to how the three classes of character (urban, sub-urban, and rural) are seen.

DESCRIPTIVE TERMS

Architectural Space

This describes outdoor space that is enclosed by man-made structures to house businesses or families (see figure 1-1). Buildings and their layout define architectural space. The design of the space itself is architectural. Spaces are paved and greenery is limited to small planters or tiny yards. In general, impervious surfaces, buildings, roads, plazas, and parking occupy nearly all the land in architectural spaces.

Garden-Like

The term "garden-like" refers to a space in which landscape elements provide a setting for the building (see discussion of negative space, below). The space is green and pervious rather than paved (see figure 1-2). Garden-like is intended to represent the presence of vegetative mass that is equal to or greater than the building mass, and whose height is generally greater than that of the buildings. Its green nature and softer shapes directly contrast with the hard-edged architectural environment.

Landscape

The term "landscape" is intended to evoke a natural or agricultural environment that extends to the horizon (see figure 1-3). A landscape requires that the built environment be in the background and trivial. Landscape planning follows the same rules as landscape painting in that buildings and communities are diminished to background elements or hidden from view. A landscape exists when one can see to the horizon in all directions without buildings breaking the horizon line (see the section on infinite space, below). Their other characteristic is that as people or cars move through them, landscapes seem to flow or expand as the horizon changes with movement.

Mass

Buildings, stands of vegetation, and landforms are all volumes that occupy and fill space; visually, they appear as solids. Whether they are truly solids (as is the case with a large boulder), hollow (as a structure containing rooms), or spongy (as a dense stand of vegetation with a visual shell of leaves) is immaterial. It is the visual characteristic that is important. Solids are visual elements that are shown on plans. They can also be walls that are two-dimensional, having little volume. Solids may contain human activity within them, may contain a space, or may serve only as a visual barrier. Mass can also be considered positive volume that occupies space visually.

Space

In planning communities, space means exterior space, open to the sky. Architects use this concept of space, but they also use the term to refer to interior spaces (rooms). Space may be pervasive, as it is at sea, where it is unlimited to the horizon. At the other end of the spectrum it can be a tightly contained void or area between surrounding walls or buildings. For this reason different types of space are defined.

Positive space (see figure 1-4) is exterior space enclosed by buildings or walls (basically an outdoor room). Positive space is sometimes referred to as centripetal—that is, the space pulls or focuses activities inward. The degree of enclosure is very important for a positive space. Failure to provide enclosure weakens the space. Enclosure, which contains and focuses activity, is a key element in urban design and is a measurable concept (see the section on distance/height, or D/H, ratio, page 31). It is also appropriate, in most cases, to consider positive space as architectural space since it is inseparable from its surrounding buildings and their architecture.

Negative space is space that surrounds a building, as in figure 1-5. The space is considered centrifugal—it radiates out from the building, and the building is buffered by the space. Instead of the building enclosing space, space surrounds and highlights the building. Negative spaces, as the term is used here, may be highly designed, organized, and architectural. As seen in figure 1-5, negative space is often surrounded by buildings, which focuses attention on the central building.

Borrowed space is a subset of negative space. Borrowed space "expands" the views from inside a building by creating either outdoor rooms or views of open space. It is not focusing attention on the building. The Japanese brought this concept to a high art form in designing small gardens to expand rooms (see figure 1-6). In planning, space is borrowed by the development, cluster, or community, not just a room in a house. Borrowed space may be a garden, a larger yard, or common open space. It can also be temporary, such as vacant land adjoining a development that can later be developed, thereby changing the character of an area.

Infinite space, or landscape, is where the space extends to the horizon.

Buildings are a background element or hidden completely (see figure 1-7) and are never the center, as with negative space. The horizon represents the boundary of the space.

Planes

Walls

A wall is a mass that is a two-dimensional plane rather than a...