Camillo Sitte

Today, Sitte is best remembered for his 1889 book, City Planning According to Artistic Principles, in which he examined and documented the traditional, incremental approach to urbanism in Europe, with a close focus on public spaces in Italy and the Germanic countries.

He challenged, among other things, a growing tendency toward rigid symmetry in contemporary urban design, including the isolated placement of churches and monuments in large, open plots.

Sitte believed in an incremental approach to urbanism, formed by the aggregation of many sophisticated site plans within a more general scheme determined by street patterns and other public factors.

Building on some of his principles, he follows his criticism of contemporary development on Vienna's Ringstraße with proposals to improve the spatial and aesthetic dynamics of some of its major sites.

An English translation was not published, however, until 1945 -- a factor that may explain his relative obscurity in the British Empire and the United States in the years before World War II.

[3] Nevertheless, Sitte's ideas made their way into the English-speaking world through the writings of the British urbanist, Raymond Unwin, who was deeply influenced by The Art of Building Cities.