{"id":1770,"date":"2011-04-16T01:00:40","date_gmt":"2011-04-16T05:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/info-libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/?p=1770"},"modified":"2023-07-12T15:58:57","modified_gmt":"2023-07-12T15:58:57","slug":"1960","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/2011\/04\/16\/1960\/","title":{"rendered":"Year 100 – 1960: The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published: Cambridge, Mass., 1960<\/p>\n

Could you direct a pedestrian from Post Office Square in downtown Boston to Myrtle Street on Beacon Hill? How about from Mass General Hospital to South Station? And could you describe what that pedestrian would see once they got there? As one part of his 1954-1959 \u201cPerceptual Form of the City\u201d study, Kevin Lynch sent researchers out into the streets of Boston to ask people to do just that. That study laid the groundwork for The Image of the City<\/em>, Lynch\u2019s seminal 1960 work on the urban environment.<\/p>\n

Kevin Lynch studied at Yale University, Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, and at Taliesin under Frank Lloyd Wright before earning his Bachelor\u2019s degree in City Planning from MIT in 1947. He began lecturing in city planning at MIT the following year, became a full professor in 1963, and retired in 1978 to cofound the design firm Carr, Lynch, and Associates.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In 1954, Lynch and Professor Gyorgy Kepes, working under the MIT Center for Urban and Regional Studies, received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study city form. Their \u201cPerceptual Form of the City\u201d study explored 3 American cities \u2013 Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles \u2013 using two principal methods: they interviewed a small sample of residents regarding how they perceived their environment, and they systematically observed the \u201cenvironmental image evoked in trained observers in the field.\u201d<\/p>\n

The five-year study led to the publication of The Image of the City<\/em> in 1960. The book considers what Lynch calls the \u201cimageability\u201d of the American city, or the quality which makes a city likely to evoke a strong image in an observer. Lynch argues for a \u201cbeautiful\u201d city environment where the city’s various parts can easily be recognized by its inhabitants and organized into a coherent pattern. Such \u201clegibility,\u201d he contends, plays a crucial role in city planning.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the first line of its preface, Lynch asserts that The Image of the City<\/em> is a book \u201cabout the look of cities, and whether this look is of any importance, and whether it can be changed.\u201d The continued influence of the work both at MIT and on architects and planners around the world \u2013 more than 50 years after it was originally published \u2013 affirmatively answers that query.<\/p>\n

Lynch\u2019s fingerprints are on the city designs in parts of Boston, Cleveland, Columbia, Md., Minneapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. His influence can also be seen in countless other designs by urban planners who studied his work. Lynch\u2019s 1984 obituary in \"\"<\/a>the Boston Globe<\/em> noted that The Image of the City<\/em> has been called \u201cthe most influential 20th Century writing on the design of cities.\u201d<\/p>\n

The MIT Libraries own numerous copies of The Image of the City <\/em>(including translations in German and Spanish). MIT’s Institute Archives and Special Collections hold the Kevin Lynch papers<\/a>, which contain project documentation on the “Perceptual Form of the City” study. The Libraries hold nearly nearly 2,000 black and white photographs from the Boston portion of the study. The photos have been digitized and are available online<\/a>, or as prints in the Libraries’ Rotch Visual Collections.<\/p>\n

Find it in the library<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Published: Cambridge, Mass., 1960 Could you direct a pedestrian from Post Office Square in downtown Boston to Myrtle Street on Beacon Hill? How about from Mass General Hospital to South Station? And could you describe what that pedestrian would see once they got there? As one part of his 1954-1959 \u201cPerceptual Form of the City\u201d study, Kevin Lynch sent researchers out into the streets of Boston to ask people to do just that. That study laid the groundwork for The Image of the City, Lynch\u2019s seminal 1960 work on the urban environment. Kevin Lynch studied at Yale University, Rennselaer Polytechnic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":false,"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-years"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1770"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4309,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1770\/revisions\/4309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}