The circle

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

Rotary, circle, and circus identify urban spatial elements associated with circular traffic movement. The first tends to occur towards the Rural end of the Transect, the last towards the Urban Core, while variations on the circle occur in between.    

Circle and circus differ in important ways. The concave building faces around a circus (see June issue) create a spatially stable place with center emphasis, while those around a circle are convex, emphasizing not a common space, but themselves as an independent mass. A circle balances movement and placeness. The idealized drawing (right) depicts a particular point on the Transect with sufficient mass to define a place. The space flows outward — thus this is a circle.