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04 Oct 06
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Camillo Sitte (1843-1903), born in Vienna, is a son of the arts. His father, Franz, was a famous architect who was primarily concerned with repairs and religious architecture, designing churches in Vienna, Voslaw and Erland.
He advocated the applied arts and disliked the industrialism that destroyed the old corporations of arts and crafts. Rudolf von Eitelberger, besides the father, was interested in old arts.
At 32 years old, he was named director of a professional technical school in Salzburg, which he left in 1883 to direct another in Vienna. He traveled a lot in the Central Europe, Minor Asia, Egypt, and especially in Greece and Italy, fundamental countries for his artistic formation.
With his father, he designed many churches (of Mechitaristi in Vienna, of Giubileo in Privoz and the parochial church of Temesvar), yet he was also dedicated to the professional activity of urbanism, establishing plans for expansion of Olmutz, Teschen, Lubiana, besides the general plans of Mahrisch-Ostrau and Marienberg.
Great admirer of Richard Wagner, he was friend of the scenographer Josef Hoffmann and of the designer of Wagner theaters Gottfried Semper. His book “Der Städtebau nach seinen Künslerische Grundsätzen”, first published in Vienna in 1889, is simple and clear in its theoretical structure. It is illustrated with several cases and explanatory schemes, achieving immediate and clamorous success among the public of specialists or semi-specialists in urban planification.
The works of Sitte present a feeling of refusal to the metropolis, which was constituted as the dominant means of human living in the 19 th century, as the headquarter of the illuminist notion of man as an individual able to contrast with the social body.
His urbanistic theories would be opposed to it, since they presented the public space as the antidote against disaggregation of collective life and corruption of the individual, identified as characteristics of a new way of life.
Thus, the importance of the public space as a social gatherer is modern. Before the metropolis, its role was not explicated, since the problem of social disaggregation caused by individualism did not exist. The artistic bases of Sitte are much deeper than only "urban beauty". Squares and parks should be catalyzers of public life, social condensers able to re-propose the way of life regarded as absent.
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