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=Architecture and Urban Planning: Fighting Purposes=  media type="file" key="Paragraph 1.mp3" width="240" height="20"

Architecture has always ruled the world of building. It is known to be the highest art, a great science, an admirable job. But nowadays there are other disciplines that, trying to fill the holes left by Architecture, show us it is not perfect, and isn’t meant to solve every problem of our built environments. Urban Planning is one of them. Its most sacred value is to make better life quality, but in a wider scale, that has to be more with an area and a context than a specific building. And here, in the context, is where these two disciplines crash. But why does this happen? Maybe it has to be with the purposes of both Architecture and Urban Planning. I think there is a bit confusion between one’s and another’s. Of course there are similarities: the principal purpose of each one is to create spaces. Architecture seeks to create spaces where people can live, and must make clear how those spaces are used. For example, is it used by the government or like a religious place? The key words are concept, form and order. The architect focuses on those principles, and makes them fit to each other. Urban Planning’s first purpose is creating and managing especially public spaces, which connect and form the city. Form, connections, process and order are the Urban Planner’s matters. The difference is that Architecture makes it in a single building scale, and Urban Planning works with groups of buildings, streets, parks, etc.



I think both disciplines are totally needed in today’s cities, and none is wrong. The crash occurs because, when an Architect focuses on form, and forget context, the Urban Planner got to try harder in ordering than in shaping (aesthetic matters got sacrificed); the failure in A affects B.

Caracas, for example, presents big failures in both fields. We suffer daily a horrible traffic, prison-like spaces, too much darkness and then a lot of sun, bad organized buildings, poor public spaces, hot black cubes as buildings, and so on. But we have good Architecture too, and what I call good Architecture got to have a friendly relationship with the environment. However, there are good architectural pieces like Central University, that since their creation haven’t been improved or studied and, as time goes by and population grows, have developed some big problems with flows and order.

Nevertheless, criticizing each other will not help. The real solution is simple: either we are architects or urban planners, or even simple citizens, we must love and have responsibility for what we do. (Every image in this page: Plaza Alfredo Sadel, Caracas, Venezuela)