Trends in home décor have changed, and urban architecture design has taken the front seat. Its popularity has grown over the years and has gained much attention from many new homeowners. This is mainly because of its minimalistic yet impactful designs. It holds a sophistication that you can achieve in any home.
Urban architecture is all about making any space functional with an industrial look. There’s a particular comfort aspect that’s taken into consideration. After all, the idea of urban design is to borrow, not duplicate, the city life and industrial designs.
Developing a sense of urban architectural design is as simple as the idea itself. Continue reading to find out how you can turn your home into a place that’s simple, contemporary, and a place of comfort, with a clean industrial finish.
Flooring and structure in Urban Architecture
Wood, brick, metal, stone, and concrete are stapled materials used in urban design. Having any of these materials be part of the floor, wall, or frame will instantly switch up the place and bring that urban design element to your home.
Addingdecking and an open room to a portion of your backyard to complement your home’s interior is good. It allows you to blur the lines of your interior and exterior spaces. This represents the idea of continuity and utilizes and stamps on the notion of the homey industrial look.
Contrast in colours
Urban design is also all about contrast. It involves contrasting sizes, textures, saturation, and materials.
Use warm and neutral or low-saturated cool colours to add a subtle pop to your living spaces. It’s not about taking an industrial design into your home but taking the design and making a home. The area or room determines the type of urban feels, such as having more calming and casual elements in the bedroom and more lively and contrasting elements in the living room.
Add warm, vibrant paintings against a dull grey or cool brown background. Vibrant flowers placed in a grey, black, or even steel, glass, copper, or bronze vase can add the perfect contrast. A good rule of thumb while deciding what colour you should pick that doesn’t become an eyesore to you and visitors is to use warm colours on selective things that are there to draw attention.
Contrast, but make it urban
Allow the more significant items and elements like furnishings, walls, flooring, and, in most cases, the room’s rugs to adopt more neutral colours. Then allow the more minor and removable objects to give the room more life with their warm colours. The warm colours bring the right amount of warmth and welcome to a conventional urban design. Use it to create the perfect pop for a room.
It’s not to say that the smaller objects should always be warm. However, when contrasted with something dull, even a neutral-toned contemporary decoration piece can bring interest to a room.
For that perfect industrial style look, choose wood or stone flooring. It’s hard to imagine marble or tile flooring in a warehouse. Nothing says industrial-like open spaces and cold floors. Building a loft to occupy some high ceiling space and adding a new area for you to design is a good idea.
Make it comfortable
The style, patterns, and décor should remain abstract and sleek, and furnishings should be soft and cozy. This is where contrast comes into play again. You can put soft, fluffy throw pillows, cushions, and a fleece over a full-looking sofa with plush shag rugs to add comfort and contrast. Choose things that can soften and add to the comfort of a rather harsh, sculpted structure.
Play with scaling
Unlike the classic minimalist look, urban architecture is there to make a statement. A great way to achieve this is through scaling. Think plush soft bedding and pillows surrounded by sleek furniture or a big extravagant chandelier over a minimalist staircase. Your home is an empty canvas full of numerous possibilities.
Urban design architecture is, at the core, an industrial look. However, it is not as aggressive as the eyes. Colours should stay at 30% and 70% in contrast to each other. This allows more emphasis to be sprinkled around a room. You can keep it simple, sleek, and modern, but soft and comfortable. Play with contrast, but keep it simple. Spaces should remain minimalistic without the possibility of adding clutter. Have talking points in every room with something that makes a statement. It is for the best that you don’t go overboard with it. An eye-catching painting or hanging light fixture would do the trick quite nicely.
We hope this article proves insightful and inspires you to try urban architecture ideas for your home.
Cities have decorated their constructed environments with eye-catching and fascinating colourful schemes throughout human history. Colours have risen in the urban environment to combat environmental factors such as heat and sun gain, as well as to build what has now become a tradition. These cities have drawn the attention of visitors as well as architects and urban planners who have been charmed by the vibrant streetscape that greets them.
When we think about cities, colour selection isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. In fact, we hardly observe architecture in today’s fast-paced world. In the concrete metropolises we’ve been accustomed to, few buildings and structures stand out. Cities, on the other hand, do not have to be associated with grey. Chefchaouen is difficult to conceive as a rainbow metropolis or as a completely blue town. Around the world, there are a plethora of vibrant cities waiting to be discovered.
Let your imagination wander to the vivid locales of far-off places if the grey of mid-winter gets you feeling a little down. A vivid photo can spark wanderlust like nothing else, and some of the world’s most attractive towns are bathed in sage, lavender, blue, and other vibrant hues. The colours of a place may leave a lasting impression on our travel experiences, whether it’s a street with every hue of the rainbow or an entire town done out in monochrome blues or pinks. It also makes your trip photos the envy of all your pals, thanks to Instagram.
I have compiled a list of the most vibrant cities around the globe, with a focus on lesser-known gems. Sure, there are a few obvious choices on this list, but there are plenty of sherbet-coloured towns that will hopefully inspire and leave you yearning for more.
Jodhpur, India, is a meandering maze of blue-box dwellings, all nestled beneath the majestic Mehrangarh fort. The indigo hue stands out against the bordering desert and is especially beautiful at night.
To distinguish themselves from the rest of the community, the priestly caste of Jodhpur, India, painted their homes blue generations ago. It wasn’t long until the remainder of the old city, Brahmins and non-Brahmins alike, followed suit and painted their houses blue. Despite the fact that the city has grown well beyond its original boundaries, its core is almost exclusively indigo.
Today, if you ask a few people in the neighbourhood about the colour decision, you’ll get a lot of different responses. Some think the blue keeps their dwellings cool in the blazing Indian sun, while others claim it fights off bugs. The effect is stunning, regardless of the cause. Travellers visiting Jodhpur may see one of the world’s most colourful cities, with each brick, beam, and wall coloured in this cool, soothing style.
Jaipur, India
Hawa Mahal
While many towns have been painted blue, Jaipur in Rajasthan, India, is one of the few places on the planet where the prevailing colour is pink. According to legend, in 1876, King Sawai Ram Singh had the city painted pink to prepare for the visit of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria to India. Since then, the entire city has remained terra-cotta pink, much to the joy of Instagram-obsessed tourists.
Panjim, Goa, India
FountainHas on OutlookIndia
The significance of Portuguese culture can be found in Goa’s culture, gastronomy, and architecture. Portuguese architecture was distinguished by its use of immaculate white buildings or the use of white to highlight openings on colourful façade. Many of the buildings in Panjim are coloured in vivid colours, including blue, green, yellow, orange, and red, with white frames surrounding their doors and windows.
FountainHas is a well-known street in the city with a row of brightly coloured structures sequentially placed. The colourful variety of the many structures reflects the Goan culture’s unconventional, joyful, and free spirit.
Gamcheon Culture Village, in the Korean seaside city of Busan, is the perfect blend pretty and chaos. The former slum is a hodgepodge of pastel-coloured dwellings nestled into the side of the mountain.
After an artistic makeover in 2009, when students chose to light up the neighbourhood with ingenious touches up the stairs, down the lanes, and around the corners, this historically rich mountainous slum became a tourist destination. It’s now a vibrant, eccentric town of Lego-shaped residences, cafes, and galleries, perfect for a walk and a few selfies.
A small town in Mississippi, Yazoo City, is as distinct as its title implies. Even though it is only 10 square miles in size, it has enough to offer to make a visit worthwhile. With a name like Yazoo City, pull over simply to look at the name, which is derived from a local river. Yazoo City is a flourishing community in Yazoo County, Mississippi, despite a terrible fire in the early 1900s and a catastrophic flood in 1927.
La Boca is well-known for its distinctive multicoloured wooden houses. The neighbourhood is actually home to artist colonies that perform on the streets. It is most renowned for its tango dance performances. El Caminito, or “the little walkway,” is a hub where tourists from all over the world can come to enjoy the street shows, buy trinkets and souvenirs, or just take in the scenery and admire the shanty houses.
Every day at dusk, the small settlement that looks to be carved into the edge of a crater and totally painted in white glistens and dazzles. Old houses were all painted white, mostly to reflect sunshine and keep interiors from becoming too heated.
The village includes tight corridors, alleyways, and steps with white walls and blue window and door shutters, which add to the village’s attractiveness and complement the surrounding hills and ocean. This picturesque village, located just a few kilometres from Santorini, is a famous tourist destination where visitors come to marvel at the island’s pristine and breathtaking landscapes.
San Francisco, USA
Photo by TheCoolist
San Francisco, despite its reputation as America’s most culturally progressive city, is home to a spectrum of colours. The variegated paint style that changes from door to door reflects the vivid architectural individuality of this closely packed peninsula metropolis. The Painted Ladies, a row of houses in San Francisco’s Lower Haight district, are one of the city’s best-known works of art, although vibrant colours can be spotted all throughout the city.
Tokyo, Japan
The aesthetic of Japan’s capital is quite distinct. This colour scheme incorporates the bright neon of Tokyo’s advertising as well as other vibrant hues. It’s difficult to imagine a city with more colour than Tokyo, and this palette captures that vibrancy against the city’s famous inky night sky.
Tokyo is among the world’s busiest and most colourful cities, with a population of over 9 million. Countless of neon signs and an atmosphere that never sleeps can be found in areas like Kabukicho, a famed entertainment and bright district.
If colour were an addiction, addicts would have long since fled to Old San Juan. Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, is a vibrant kaleidoscope of colour in every aspect, a city with a culturally rich legacy shared by the Taino natives and European explorer descendants.
The architecture in Old San Juan varies from one step to another, with some being warm and primary and others being bright and pastel. The blue bricks that pave the alleys of this UNESCO World Heritage Site were transported over from Spain piece by piece during the 16th century. Its people are as colourful, diverse, and lovely as the colours that adorn its streets, and their welcome is something that everyone should experience.
Chefchaoen’s environment is reminiscent of Jodhpur in India, with its many tones of blue. Historic buildings, painted in various colours of cyan, powder blue, and periwinkle, frame the cobblestone walkways and alleys.
The “Blue Pearl of Morocco” is named from the various shades of blue that appear to cascade down the hill. The city is a lovely maze of ramps and stairs, nicely framed against the homes and buildings.
Some say the city was painted blue by Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler, while others say the colour of combat mosquitoes. One popular theory is that the city is designed to resemble the sea, which it does quite well, situated between the hill and the sea.
Little India, Singapore
Little India in Singapore is one of the most colourful areas in the country, whether you visit the Sri Veeramakaliamman Hindu temple or the Chinese House of Tan Teng Niah. Colors of many hues can be found on beautifully patterned structures or in the little colourful figurines that adorn the facades of holy sites.
Procida, Italy, is less well-known than Cinque Terre, but this off-the-beaten-path island off the coast of Naples is just as lovely. Sherbet-coloured buildings tower above dazzling waterways, flanked by narrow lanes. The most vibrant hues may be found in Marina Corricella, where legend has it that fishermen used vivid colours to distinguish their homes from the sea.
Guanajuato, Mexico’s silver city, is known for its cultural and mineral significance during the colonial period and afterwards. The Guanajuato silver mines were the most productive in the world for 250 years, producing 30% of all silver produced. As the mines were being investigated, a city grew up around them, as seen by the colonial-era architecture. Yet, from one end of town to the other, the spirit of Guanajuato is mirrored in the hue of those structures, which range from light to dark.
The vibrant city of Guanajuato, like the other cities on this list, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This is one of Mexico’s most attractive cities, with narrow alleyways, Baroque and neoclassical architecture, and the red and yellow Cathedral Basilica Nuestra Seora de Guanajuato.
Juzcar, located 113 kilometres from Malaga and 25 kilometres from Ronda in the autonomous province of Andalusia, has become a popular tourist destination and one of Spain’s most recognisable settlements. The lovely hamlet, which was once a classic white village, was transformed into the world’s first and only official Smurfs village.
Juzcar turned all-blue in the summer of 2011 as a promotional effort for the Smurfs movie, while other places donned blue for religious or practical reasons. Despite the fact that the change was intended to be temporary, the idea was so effective in drawing tourists that locals voted to preserve the unique coloration.
Colour and architecture have a way of inspiring people to explore deeper, feed their hunger for knowledge, and marvel at beautiful things. These are just a handful of good cities that have become popular tourist destinations and centres for photography, travel, and art over the years and continue to entice visitors with their bright beauty.
The built environment has long inspired social responsibility and the need to enhance society. Theories are ideas, thoughts and contemplations thought meticulously with the application of science and current or future technologies. Many conceptual urban planning theories have been developed over a period to further think about their application. There are many urban planning architects and urban designers who have projected their ideas to streamline a theory based on their observations, including a few which stuck and a few which faded away and some got success and attention to apply them. The theories of urban planning have progressed over time, with the traditional theories as a guide further influenced by postmodern thoughts.
What is Conceptual Urban Planning?
Urban planning is the regional planning, civic planning, city planning, and rural planning, a technical and diplomatic process aimed toward the development and design of land use and the built environment including the planning of using resources like water, air, and local materials. Urban planning impacts our transportation system, infrastructure, layout, and prescribed densities of residential, commercial, and industrial areas. Urban planning is a management and communication device, the popular documentation.
History
There is also evidence of urban planning and designing of communities dating back to the Mesopotamian, Indus Valley, Minoan, and Egyptian civilizations within the third millennium BCE. Archaeologists researching and analyzing the remains of cities have discovered paved streets that were well planned and laid out at right angles within a grid pattern.
The earliest known example of Urban planning is Mohenjo-Daro and Harappan civilizations located in present-day Pakistan’s Punjab and Sindh provinces. The civilization was said to have sophisticated and technologically advanced urban culture is evident with the proper drainage system, city layout, well-planned and placed houses, market area, gathering spaces, etc. Few excavated cities of this urban plan comprise the world’s first known urban sanitation systems with the use of hydraulic engineering to form the Indus Valley civilization. The Indus Valley civilization made them the first urban center in the region.
The concept of a planned urban area has evolved and continued as various civilizations implemented it. At the birth of the 8th century BCE, Greek city-states were mainly centered within orthogonal plans. Further, the ancient Romans were influenced by the Greek’s urban planning methods and incorporated orthogonal plans for their cities.
The garden city concept, the idea of a planned residential community, was developed by the English urban planner namely Ebenezer Howard. Howard’s concept for garden cities was a way of developing a solution to the urgent need to improve the quality of urban life. According to him, a garden city would be a place that behaves as a community where people from different backgrounds of life can live as well as work in coherence and harmony.
The garden city concept was based on the creation of a succession of small cities that would blend the advantages of both environments. The five main features of Howard’s scheme were to initially purchase a large agricultural land, the further layout of a compact town surrounded by a widespread rural belt, the accommodation space for the residents, industry, and agriculture for the people residing in the town, the provision of restriction of the extent of the town and prevention of encroachment with the town and finally would lead to a natural rise in land values to be used for the town’s general welfare.
Towers in park
Source
Le Corbusier pioneered the “tower in a park” morphology in his unrealized 1923 Ville Contemporaine he came up with the concept after he couldn’t unsee the squalid conditions of cities in the 1920s. In the park is a morphology of modernist high multi-story apartment buildings branded by an even taller high-rise building surrounded by a wrapping of lush landscape. Towers in the Park was an idea for a style of housing planning that accentuates a separation of different kinds of uses of space and access to public green space and amenities. According to Le Corbusier, people would instead prefer to live in the suburbs than settle in a city.
The neighborhood unit concept was developed by Clarence A. Perry. The idea was that all cultures, even in different shapes and under different definitions like a sub-public area where the most concrete and original form of neighborliness takes place and social cooperation and organization are possible. The neighborhood unit theory was a proposal to bring everything into a single unit.
Geddes was thinking about the relation between people and the places and their impacts on each other, creating a certain interdependency. Geddian trio concept was aimed towards contributing to the adaptation of material of the people as well as their way of living towards the certain chances, and the effects on the changes of culture through education. Geddian trio Concept challenged the basic norms in the form of the design material but was also employed through culture design.
Sector Model was developed by Homer Hoyt, who was a renowned academic and consultant of real estate market analysis during the mid-20th century. Homer Hoyt’s sector model tweaked the concentration zone concept to make it more realistic. Hoyt maintained the sectoring factor of the concentric zone model instead deviated from the geometric patterns. Hoyt proposed that cities do not develop in the form of simple rings, instead, they have “sectors”. It was mainly based on residential rent patterns and the effects of transportation development.
The Concentric zone model concept is also known as the Burgess model, which is one of the first few theoretical models used to illustrate urban social patterns. The Concentric zone model was designed by sociologist Ernest Burgess and proposes a vivid framework in which both characteristics of human ecology in terms of physical land-use patterns and human relationships are interdepended.
The concentric model is based on a process of invasion and succession. Invasion is a process that necessitates the continual expansion of inner zones into outer zones because of the natural ‘aggression’ of the migrant into the city. According to the conceptual model, it has five main zones: i.e., the Central Commercial Center, Zone of transition, Working class residence, Middle-class residence, and Commuter zone.
Harris and Ullman claimed cities don’t just grow around a single unit nucleus, but instead numerous unit nuclei. Multiple nuclei are suggested as the former settlements, while the others evolved from urbanization and outer economies. Characteristic land use zones expand since some activities might repulse each other. There is also an issue where not all land users can afford the expensive land at the most desirable locations, and some also require easy access to the location.
An evolution of single nuclei theory, where two legends Harris and Ullman proved a city doesn’t grow around a single nucleus but has multi foci, and each point acts as a growing point. Further, Harris and Ullman argued that a city might start with a single central business district (CBD), but over time, the activities scatter and gets modified.
Urban development has been a constant phenomenon since we can even remember, but with the increase in this development and the population. There is a rapid use of limited resources like water, fuel, and especially land. Resources being in such a finite amount, there is an urgent need to adapt various planning techniques to inculcate disciple and management within our society. Many theorists have developed such concepts as mentioned above to fulfill the urgency to conserve the environment. These concepts have helped to provide an idea of how urban planners can manage the settlement of people, to create further civilized patterns, systems, and layouts for urban development.
The principal question of planning theory is the analysis of the probability of attaining an improved quality of human life contained in the context of a global capitalist economy. Exploring the different theories has helped many planners understand no planner acts in a value-free vacuum. The technical-rational planner represents their views of how the world works through their choice of planning methods. There have been many planning theory concepts developed over a period, some of which have faded into oblivion because of their disadvantages, but some have provided other designers with an idea that there are several alternative concepts to adopt from.
