The Urban Profile

Abstract

The use of the profile for purposes of expressing characteristic elements in an urban skyline is not a new idea. Artists have long singled out conspicuous structures in an horizontal line and converted them into impressionistic representations. (oftentimes silhouettes) of a city's physical form. Advertising men have conventionalized towers, spikes!, skyscrapers and other edifices to stamp upon the public mind an image symbolical of a particular urban center. Some of these profiles have been so often repeated that the general public has no difficulty in instantly identifying either their exact location or the location of a general region which their form typifies. The profile of the minarets of the Kremlin suggests Moscow itself to many, and Russia to most persons; the majestic clock tower housing Big Ben overlooking the Thames recalls London; the stately spires of the K6ln cathedral towering above the low even roof line of the noted Rhine City are familiar to thousands even though they have never enjoyed seeing them at first hand; the profile of the Taj Mahal requires no label for identification; the Woolworth Cathedral of Commerce, in spite of high skyscrapers all about, is still a land mark which people everywhere associate with New York City's horizon. German geographers have more than once utilized aerial photography to illustrate in a perspective setting the relation of the horizon line to a city plan or to the topographic environment. A recent instance is that by Creutzburgt who has published a magnificent set of cultural landscape views, selected from all parts of the earth, many of which are photographic landscape profiles. In the series of profiles illustrated herewith,2 an attempt has been made to reduce to a minimum the impressionistic atmosphere and to eliminate details of the ground contact of the structures depicted. Likewise the topographic variations of the site have been ignored. Instead, the key characteristic of what may be termed the lower and upper horizon line are emphasized to the