Camillo Sitte's planning work has rarely been examined as anything other than an application of the theory laid out in his treatise, City Planning According to Artistic Principles (1899). However, Sitte's theoretical precepts alone do not account for the transnational geography of his practice. Sitte's work as a planner developed around the distinction between Vienna, the imperial capital, where he was never able to influence urban development, and the empire's predominantly Slavic provinces, where almost all of his projects were commissioned. Focusing on the preparation of Sitte's plan for Ljubljana in 1895, this essay relates the theoretical formulation and practical application of city planning to two dynamics that dominated late-nineteenth-century Austro-German liberal culture: the appropriation of humanist Italian culture by scientific art and architectural history, and the redeployment of that culture as professional expertise in a putatively uncultured eastern Europe.
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Jun. 2003
