A square reads as a satisfying outdoor room only when it is substantially enclosed by continuous building walls, with streets entering at the corners rather than breaching the sides. Open-sided plazas feel like leftover gaps because the eye finds no containing boundary to rest against.
In well-formed historic squares, each entering street meets the square at a corner and is set so that no single sight line runs straight through and out the other side. This staggered, pinwheel arrangement keeps the enclosing walls looking unbroken from any standpoint within the square.
Statues and fountains in old squares sit near the edges or against building walls, not in the geometric middle, following the spots that foot traffic naturally leaves open. Centering a monument wastes the usable floor of the square and leaves the object stranded without a backdrop.
Judge an urban space by the sequence of framed views a person actually encounters while walking through it, not by how it looks as an abstract plan seen from above. A layout that is orderly on paper can produce disorienting, empty, or ugly experiences at eye level.
The rigid rectangular block system adopted in nineteenth-century planning optimizes for surveying, land division, and traffic while erasing the irregular, enclosed, artistically arranged spaces that gave older cities their charm. Treating the plan as a purely technical problem produces monotonous streets and shapeless residual plazas.
The crooked streets and asymmetrical squares of medieval and classical towns are often the result of gradual adaptation to terrain and use, and they create the enclosure and varied views that modern straight-line plans destroy. Apparent disorder can be the source of a city's visual richness rather than a flaw to be corrected.