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All traditional architecture clearly distinguishes between public symbolic institutional buildings and utilitarian private buildings. #goodurbanism
Léon Krier
268 posts
Léon Krier
@LeonKrier
Dedicated to the architecture and design work of Léon Krier with permission. Sponsored by @CNUCal
- [Poundbury] is in Europe the first coherent and very successful countermodel to suburbia and motopia. The latter are futureless forms of settlement. The functional zoning of cities is driving the daily mobilization of the entire population in the performance of everyday tasks.
- A root cause for the degradation of cities, landscapes and built environment since WWII are the territorial mono-functional zoning ordinances, a planetary tragedy w/o precedent. They drive the daily mobilization of the whole of mankind in accomplishing even the most basic tasks.
- In the manifestos of modern architectural culture, no notion has been stressed as much as that of ‘space, total space, irrational space’ (Mies). The escape into vague and confused formulations has coincided historically with the loss of precise urban spaces such as... 1/2
- Single-use, functional zoning has destroyed architecture because it demands repetitive development programs.
- Functional zoning drives the daily mobilization of entire populations in the performance of everyday tasks. This enforced geographic segregation is responsible for the catastrophically global wastage of time, land, and energy of modern societies. It is profoundly unsustainable.
- Human settlements are structured into into private & public realms. Yet, neither public/private enterprise generate a robust and elegant public realm as a mere by-product of its activities. Its beauty, its socializing power are the fruit of conscious intent, of civilizing vision.
- We have to distinguish categorically, not between historic and modern, but between towns and non-towns. Modernism hasn’t built cities so far. Age doesn’t turn a non-town into a historic town. It is not history, but fabric and material which comprises value.
- Le Corbusier corrected. His colossal ambitions as a reformer of urbanism, his Radiant City Project was and remains a functional, formal, social, political, energetic, ecological insanity. His 'monumentalization' of suburban sprawl is unsustainable in ecological and human terms.
- Modern ‘development programs’ such as housing estates, shopping centers and business parks are generally defined not by a vision of what a city wants to become but by established development, manufacturing, financial and management patterns.
- The timeless splendour of historical cities belonged to the sublime inventions of human spirit. These cities survived 1000 yrs of wars and plagues, of fires & ceaseless reconstructions, but a mere 60 yrs of industrial innovations managed to reduce them to meaningless settlements.
- In Berlin this week, and just before sunset, the lantern with cross (after long political quarreling) was raised to its position on the dome of the reconstructed Berlin Castle.
- The myth of unlimited technical progress and industrial development have brought the most "DEVELOPED" countries to the brink of physical, cultural, and ecological exhaustion. The fever of immediate profit and the empire of money have ravaged cities and countryside.
