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The Dispatch

The street that climbs to the city hall

Words
Kiran Dhal
Published

A narrow uphill street of colourful houses, closed at the top by a reddish dome: a civic building placed where every walker will see it.

A narrow uphill street of colourful houses leading to a city hall with a reddish dome, under a clear blue sky.
Photograph: Daniel Díaz Canosa, CC0-1.0

The street rises between two rows of houses painted in different colours, and at the top it stops at a dome. From the bottom of the hill the building ahead is the only thing in view that is not someone’s home.

A view that points

Placing a civic building at the head of a street is a quiet form of instruction. The narrow walls on either side work like the sides of a lens, and the dome is where they focus. Anyone walking up is looking at the city hall long before they reach it.

The houses matter just as much. Their mixed colours make the street feel lived in, so the civic building reads as part of the neighbourhood rather than set apart from it.

An aerial view of a city with a triumphal arch at the centre of a star of radiating avenues

The same idea at the scale of a whole city: avenues laid out so that every one of them ends on a single monument.

Anyone walking up is looking at the city hall long before they reach it.

One city uses an entire street plan to do it; this one needs only a narrow street and a hill.

Elsewhere in this issue