LEON KRIER

________________________________________________________________

Architecture: Choice or Faith

from A&C N. 3

For many centuries Europeans were expert at building cities, towns, urban centers, in all climates and locations; suburbs inevitably sprang up in their wake (grew up in their shade).

In the last hundred years instead, countless suburbs mushroomed but these have seldom become real towns. Indeed, the XXth century has failed to develop an urbanism of its own; it has at best practiced forms of sub-urbanism.

The results are no substitute for the secular art of building cities. Historic Paris, Munich or Roma can do very well without their suburbs, but La Defense, Perlach or Spinaceto are unthinkable with our established historical centers. In fact we do not designate as "historic" places because of their age, but because of their structural and formal maturity.

When contemplating the panorama of historic cities like Bombay or Venezia , we are moved by the sheer harmony of forms, functions, colors and materials; XXth century agglomerations instead often strike us by their incompleteness, their fragmentary appearance. Our industries are well able to produce vast quantities of perfect dormitory towns, business parks and commercial strips, but an attractive town is infinitely more than a sun functional zones and buildings.

Urban centrality and urbanity can only flourish where the greatest variety of urban functions are housed in, pedestrian proximity in well scaled, correctly dosed densities, and in a meaningful and pleasing way.

The organic quality as a town, its plan, its skyline, in whole and detail, stand or fall with the fulfillment of this proposition.

Traditional urbanism is to do with more than functional zones and traffic flows. It defines the quantity and quality of public spaces, it specifies the use, the location, the shapes and sizes of urban plots, their plot ratios and numbers of build able floors.

There are typologies, dimensions, ratios and numbers which stimulate urban or suburban developments. Mega-projects, mega-profits or failures, on one hand, urban projects, urban profits on the other; the first based on economic and territorial warfare, the others on the development of civilized urban economies. Traditional European urbanism allows a multiplicity of variously sized economic enterprises to live and compete on urban neighbors.

An economy which allows mega-developments to proliferate as the expense of family based units, lead fatally to the destruction of urban civilization and possibly to the destruction of civilization itself.

The balanced development of the large and the small scale are the foundation of an urban renaissance.

The fiasco of the suburbs is also the fiasco of a mass-society, its ideals, its ideology and visions; the results can be seen and felt everywhere; they offer no model for the future.

Traditional architecture and urbanism are on the other hand again a well known and practised craft; they are now producing inspired and successful results in many countries. Port-Grimaud, Gassin, Port Royal en Provence, Plessis Robinson in France, Richmond Riverside and Poundbury in England, La Heredia and Lomao de Marbella in Spain, Windsor and Seaside in Florida, Potsdam-Drewitz in Germany are built evidence of a world-wide urban renaissance.

In the piano guide for Firenze-Novoli we now have the first complete instrument allowing to transform over several decades, a deprived suburban area into a number of mature and attractive urban quarters.

The forthcoming urbanization of suburbs, presents not only a vast potential for inner-urban growth, it frees both historic centers and the open countryside from ever threatening development pressure.

Here lies the challenge of the XXIst century.

Whether cities and landscapes will be further degraded by a generalized sub-urban metastasis, or whether we will build again real places and cities is not a matter of irreversible historical phase, bus of free political, cultural and ultimately of democratic choice.