Cities of Delight: Pienza (Part 5 of 5)
If Beautiful Architecture and Urban Spaces are to Shape Us, We Must Shape Them First
If you haven’t already done so, I would recommend reading Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
When we arrived in Pienza, an hour’s drive from Siena, the sky was blue, white puffy cumulus clouds dotted the sky, and the smell of spring was in the air. After parking, we approached the small hilltop town, weaving our way through flower stalls, fruit bins, and gardening supply sellers, finally reaching the archway, which led to the Corso Il Rossellino, the main street of Pienza.
It was the middle of May, and we had come to Pienza to continue our exploration of cities of delight. As we have seen from parts 1-4 in this series, cities speak to us, and in the process, they shape us. But we were about to learn that if cities are to shape us, we must first shape them. Cities of delight don’t just appear out of nothing. They take planning; towns like Rome, Florence, Siena, and Pienza may be miraculous, but they are not accidents. “Chance can’t hold a candle to Design,” Mayernik writes in Timeless Cities, “as a way to generate noble, beautiful, allusive and richly complex urban environments.”
Often called the first planned Renaissance city, Pienza was the brainchild of Pope Pius. After reading Alberi’s The Ten Books on Architecture in the summer of 1460, Pius began buying up land in his hometown of Consignano, a small city in the countryside outside of Siena. He loved the place of his birth: the beautiful countryside, the hilltop location, and the simple but kind farmers who lived there. He wanted to give back to the town that had nurtured him as a child, and he also wanted it to become his personal retreat. So, renaming it Pienza, Pius hired Bernardo Rossellino, a well-known sculptor and architect who had worked with Alberti on the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence, to rebuild the city. His mandate to Rossellino: create a beautiful city that would endure. And obviously, he did.
After stopping for gelato, my family and I meandered slowly through the town, noticing how much every shop owner cared to beautify their section of the street: it gave the impression of being in the hallway of a well-maintained home. It elicited a sense of order and security but also expectancy and the unknown, unaware of what room might appear next.
As we have said, creating beautiful towns like Pienza takes time and effort. And they take planning, which is often a bad word to those who only want the market to dictate growth. Market versus planning. An age-old battle.
But Mayernick rejects this battle as a false choice. To achieve beautiful cities like Pienza, Mayernik is not calling for a completely top-down approach to city planning, imposing some idealized view on the city, leaving no place for the freedom of the builder. But neither does he think that total market freedom can produce great cities. Look no further than the suburban sprawl in the United States to understand that the market alone can’t create great cities. Comprehensive planning and total freedom are false alternatives. Another choice — a third way — exists. Cities like Siena and Pienza illustrate this third way.
In his monumental The City in History, Lewis Mumford beautifully illustrates this third way. Mumford was not a fan of over-the-top Baroque planning in places like Paris or leaving the building of cities totally up to market forces like much of the post-WWII West, where lousy architecture is the norm. Mumford championed a different way, what he called organic planning. According to Mumford,
“[it] does not begin with a preconceived goal; it moves from need to need, from opportunity to opportunity, in a series of adaptations that themselves become increasingly coherent and purposeful, so that they generate a complex, final design, hardly less unified than a preformed geometric pattern.” (The City in History, 302)
Great medieval cities accomplished this over time, not because of an overly-formalized plan but because of a strong, almost universal consensus in these towns about what comprises a good city.
“For all their variety, they embody a universal pattern… the consensus is so complete as to the purposes of town life that the variations in detail only confirm the pattern.” (The City in History, 302-303)
But along with this universal consensus on what makes a good city, it also took tremendous effort. “The aesthetic unity of the medieval town was not achieved any more than its other institutions without effort, struggle, supervision, and control.” (Ibid, 311)
As we would soon find out, Mumford’s description fit Pienza. Though it was to receive more planning than a place like Siena, Pius and Rossellino were careful to build on and extend the wisdom of the existing city organically. As a result, much of the city was left intact, and when they built a new building, they took into account the understanding of many centuries of organic planning, codified, in part, by Alberti.
As we meandered a gently curved street to the center of the town, we suddenly entered the piazza with the bright sun bursting in, unobstructed from the countryside behind the Cathedral. The buildings were ordered and measured. They were also typological. Each of the six buildings represents or symbolizes one of the four main parts of the civil order of society: the church, the state, the public, and commerce. The layout of these buildings speaks, telling the city that each pillar is an essential part of the fabric of the city, and that each one shapes the inhabitants as they enter them.
But as much as these buildings represent order, Rossellino (guided by Alberti) and Pius ensured that the order did not eliminate freedom in design. Each building has a different shape and design, a different material and stones, a different form, and a different placement. So ordered, yes—but with variety.
“It is varietas, or ordered variety, that surprises and delights without sacrificing logic or poetics.” (Timeless Cities, 197)
The potential for discordance was great with six different buildings, each with a different form and function. But the genius of Pienza and the classical model is how this varietas works in reality.
“The intention, and it was a meaningful one,” writes Mayernik, “is to create a concord of potentially discordant, competing forces, forming an integrated harmonious whole (embodied in the piazza and the polis it broadly represents) that does not suppress individual character.” (Timeless Cites, 208-209)
Visitors find Pienza beautiful because of the order and the varietas; an ordered variety. Rational planning like Le Corbusier or even Baron Haussman’s Paris got a bad name, partly because they tried to eliminate discord — to wipe it away as a relic of our medieval past. But this discord, this variety, is often part of what makes us human — both our sinner and saint sides. To think that we can eliminate all sin and brokenness from life is just as much a romantic illusion for tyrants and some planners. Pius, Rossellino, and Alberti understood the need to work with the flaws of life.
As I strolled around the piazza, I recalled something Mayernik told me back in Rome. He has a theory about beautifully designed cities. And it goes like this: Turning a flaw into an integral part of the design is a virtue, and if a flaw doesn’t exist, the architect would have to invent it; that is, without a flaw, the design would lack ordered variety. It would be too perfect and would not move us deeply. Thankfully, these flaws existed in Pienza and were maintained and worked into the city’s new design, giving it an ordered complexity that is so aesthetically pleasing. A kind of broken beauty.
After we left the piazza, we continued to the other end of the town, a short five-minute walk. With our back to the city, we stood at the wall, looking out into the Tuscan countryside, amazed at its beauty, unsullied by suburban sprawl.
Reluctantly, it was time to go, so we made our way back through town. As I strolled, the ambivalence I first felt in Rome had returned. But, although I was feeling deep delight, I was also despondent at the fact that the vast majority of the cities in America are subpar; in fact, many of them are cities of horror and despair.
Why don’t we have towns and cities like this in America? Because, unlike Pius and Alberti, we have lost the vision for what makes a city beautiful, what makes it speak and shape its inhabitants, molding its citizens into people of virtue, character, and civic concern. We have not been willing to see that to produce this kind of citizen; we must be ready to shape our cities, guided by the idea of a good city.
But as we exited Pienza, I was not without hope. Knowing that cities like this one exist, that they show us what is still possible, and could regain this Idea of the City again gave me a glimmer of hope. But are we even capable of recovering this vision again?
Mayernik is at least hopeful. Pienza, he writes, inspires us because
“Pienza … shows us that we can, if we draw on the fullness of our cultural traditions, invent places that have both order and variety, that are both simple and sublime, that bring nobility and grace to the humble and plain, that reconcile city and countryside while compromising neither….It wasn’t really power or money but ideas that [Pius] brought back with him from mighty Rome to his little hometown” (italics added).
It is this ancient wisdom of city building, best articulated at the time by Leon Battista Alberti, master-builder of the Italian Renaissance, who stood in the tradition of Saint Augustine, and whose thinking changed the way we build cities of delight, that we must regain. May God give us the wisdom to do so before it is too late.
Hi Jim! Thanks for writing about your family experience in Pienza, Italy! I have got to buy your book, Cities of Delight. Dan Love