Urban Navigation: Terminated Vistas

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

Considering what the pedestrian and driver see ahead is one of the basic tasks of good urban design; management of vistas is not an empty formal gesture. It helps people get around more easily and interestingly, and it displays that which the civitas considers to be significant. Physical structure and social structure in urbanism are often mutually revealing.

The terminated vista is, literally and metaphorically, the most straightforward of the three types of what Raymond Unwin called “street pictures.” A terminus is what is directly ahead of the axis of movement, occupying the vanishing point framed in perspective by the buildings defining the walls of the street.  Whatever structure lies ahead concludes the line of sight, thereby taking on the importance of a goal. In this, the lines of movement and vision exactly coincide; in the two other vista types, the deflected and the layered (to be explained in subsequent Technical Pages), they do not.