Take the forms of a new architecture from modern life, modern materials and modern construction, not from past styles: what is not practical cannot be beautiful, and a building should show plainly what it is for.
The uniform street of the metropolis
Accept that the modern city is made of rental apartment blocks of equal height and similar floors; line its streets with them in long uniform rows, and give it variety and dignity through monuments, squares and parks rather than through fancy dress on each house.
In Die Großstadt Wagner imagined Vienna growing without limit, district by district, each district a grid of uniform apartment blocks round its own centre of parks and public buildings. He treated the uniformity of the blocks as the honest expression of mass housing and the equality of their tenants, not as a fault to be disguised with the historical ornament of the Ringstrasse era.
Related rules
Regulate the river, run the city railway beside it, vault the river over and build a great boulevard on the vault, so that engineering and city beauty are planned together.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The uniform street of the metropolis”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/wagner-uniform-street. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.