The Amazon Santa visited me this year and left Léon Krier’s latest, and likely ultimate, publication, The Architecture of Community. (Thanks to those who made generous purchases on the Emergent Urbanism Amazon Store, remember that you can also purchase anything at all.)
Back in the 1970′s when architectural modernism began to fall apart or be outright demolished,
the architectural intelligentsia decided that it was okay to start
using ornament again, to make buildings flashy, to take the dry
structures of modern buildings and decorate them with absurd icons whose
purpose was to entertain long enough that no one would notice that the
architecture was still terrible. Léon Krier, a renegade amongst
renegades who had no formal architectural education, had an other idea
in mind: that there was such a thing as objective laws in architecture,
that these laws remained unchanged over time, and that classicism was
the best expression of these laws. Any other architect’s career would be
destroyed by such a claim in such an era – Léon Krier just kept going,
publishing article after article, book after book, until the estate of
the Prince of Wales gave him his big break and commissioned the design
of an entire neighborhood based upon his ideas. If there is a
neo-traditionalist movement in architecture and urban design today, it
is because Léon Krier imagined it first. This book is the compilation of
the product of his career as an architect, but mostly as a writer.
Having read through the book, my conclusion is that Krier gives a
thorough lesson in architecture, taking obvious pleasure is shredding
the myths of modernism to pieces and exposing its false prophecies.
However, the text never goes beyond the most superficially descriptive,
often involving comparisons and an appeal to common sense.
Léon Krier:
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