Josef Stübben, city architect of Cologne, compiled Der Städtebau for the Handbuch der Architektur in 1890: close to a thousand pages on street widths and cross-sections, junction geometry, block depths, building lines and setbacks, the services laid under the carriageway, and street planting. Where Sitte argued from artistic effect, Stübben codified the ordinary technical decisions - the alignment or Fluchtlinie that fixes where a facade may stand, the ratio of street width to building height, the depth at which a block becomes unusable. He treated the street cross-section as the fundamental design object of the city and the building line as the instrument through which a public plan actually binds a private owner. Three editions carried it to 1924.
It became the working handbook of European city extension and exported German practice to Vienna, Brussels, Latin America and Japan, making the building line rather than the individual building the point where plan meets property. Its annotated street sections are the ancestors of modern design manuals and complete-street standards.
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