The Architecture of Community
Selected Book Details
- Hardcover
- Edition: 1
- Author: Leon Krier
- Publisher: Island Press
- Release Date: May 2009
- ISBN-10: 1597265780
- ISBN-13: 9781597265782
- List Price: $50.00
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
Summary"No architect has explored architecture's claim to universality better than Léon Krier, and it is this which makes him the most controversial figure of contemporary architectural culture." -Demetri Porphyrios Leon Krier is one of the best-knownand most provocativearchitects and urban theoreticians in the world. Until now, however, his ideas have circulated mostly among a professional audience of architects, city planners, and academics. In The Architecture of Community, Krier has reconsidered and expanded writing from his 1998 book Architecture: Choice or Fate. Here he refines and updates his thinking on the making of sustainable, humane, and attractive villages, towns, and cities. The book includes drawings, diagrams, and photographs of his built works, which have not been widely seen until now. With three new chapters, The Architecture of Community provides a contemporary road map for designing or completing today’s fragmented communities. Illustrated throughout with Krier’s original drawings, The Architecture of Community explains his theories on classical and vernacular urbanism and architecture, while providing practical design guidelines for creating livable towns. The book contains descriptions and images of the author’s built and unbuilt projects, including the Krier House and Tower in Seaside, Florida, as well as the town of Poundbury in England. Commissioned by the Prince of Wales in 1988, Krier’s design for Poundbury in Dorset has become a reference model for ecological planning and building that can meet contemporary needs. |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
great book
Rating: 
Loved the book and the illustrations. His prose are a little circular and sometimes hard to read, that is why I didn't give it 5 stars.
Destroys the temple of modernism
Rating:
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. While Krier can point out, using his trademark caricatures, how absurd the patterns of modern sprawl are, he has no explanation as to why such patterns would exist, except that it may be just one big conspiracy. He has even less to say about community, which is strange considering the word is in the title. It is as if in the vocabulary of neo-traditional architects community and space have become synonymous. (Many of the great villages and towns of Europe are dying because their community is dying, regardless of their physical form.) For this reason Krier produces a very sharp lesson in architecture, but provides no insight into morphology, and cannot really develop a model of urbanism that isn't simply architecture at enormous scale. It should be no surprise that his disciples have practiced town planning the same way.
A True Master
Rating:
Leon Krier is a true Master of Urban Design. As a young architecture student, his work has profoundly impacted my life and how I see and understand the built environment. This book along with Krier's other work is unarguably a critical component in any architectural, planning or urban design education. This book, like all of Krier's work, will help open your eyes to see why we have the problems and failures we do in much of our built environment. Krier clearly illustrates the complete range of proven urban design principles and brings back the lost knowledge of civic art. A must read for anyone in the design and development professions.
Loud and clear!
Rating:
Léon Krier's stimulating and entertaining book, though maybe a tad repetitive, is very highly recommended and doubtlessly destined to become a classic.
In a series of short texts, the author adamantly communicates his neo-traditional point of view on urban development, explaining for instance the essential difference between modernity and modernism or how the Washington Mall should be urbanized and densified.
The book is vibrantly enlivened with his own plans and intricate drawings as well as abundant, witty and sometimes provocative cartoon-like sketches.
Not only is this great mind of urban planning a distinguished academic but he also designed various projects coherent with his principles, including the town of Poundbury on the Prince of Wales' estates.
Congruent with this perhaps, he is very confident in the clout of planners and does not seem very concerned with economic realities, even when they would tend to confirm his own positions. In that sense, the reader may find an apt complement in Christopher Leinberger's down-to-earth work: «The Option of Urbanism».
Clearing a Path
Rating:
Here's one architect and urban planner who has an appreciation of all that came before. Without a grounding in the history of traditional community building, how can designers claim professional expertise? Today...apart from practitioners like Leon Krier and Piercarlo Bontempi...the design of modern urban places has lost its way.
The book is filled with fundamental insight in designing good buildings and wonderful urban places. There is direct reference here to the extremism and excess of modern design...and an understanding that skyscraper overbuilding results in the ultimately unsatisfying mega-city/suburban sprawl syndrome. In all his work, Krier displays a classical sense of restraint and humility, that leads us away from the mere copying of good architecture and townscapes, to the underlying principles that have created excellent places. It's to these principles...and not the false modernist tag of "pastiche"...to which Krier points the reader.
The book is well illustrated with hand drawings, and photographs of built projects, culminating in the town extension of Dorchester, England...Poundbury. The town context, Krier understands, is the culmination and home of good architecture. It is in town design that socially important buildings find their proper monumental expression, and the context of all, the venacular streetscape, is established and maintained.
And it is in Poundbury...with its 40% "social housing"...that Krier has created a model for a truly believable and sustainable future. And how do we know this? By listening to the modernist brickbats? We can know this, as the author states, by asking the people who live there.
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