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16 Jun 08

Cities for Living by Roger Scruton, City Journal Spring 2008

www.city-journal.org/...18_2_urb-leon_krier.html - Preview

architecture culture modernism design city urbanplanning

“Humanity lives by trial and error, sometimes committing errors of a monumental scale. Architectural and urbanist modernism belong—like communism—to a class of errors from which there is little or nothing to learn or gain. . . . Modernism’s fundamental error, however, is to propose itself as a universal (i.e., unavoidable and necessary) phenomenon, legitimately replacing and excluding traditional solutions.”
Modernist vandals like Richard Rogers and Norman Foster—between them, responsible for some of the worst acts of destruction in our European cities—live in elegant old houses in charming locations, where artisanal styles, traditional materials, and humane scales dictate the architectural ambience.
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- Krier identifies the leading error of modernism as that introduced by Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: separating load-bearing and outward-facing parts. Once buildings become curtains hung on invisible frames, all of the understood ways of creating and conveying meanings lose out. Even if the curtain is shaped like a classical facade, it is a pretend facade, with only a blank expression.
- Moreover, such buildings use no architectural vocabulary, so that one cannot “read” them as one does classical buildings. The passerby experiences this as a kind of rudeness. Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification.
- There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines—lines that may come to an end but that achieve no closure.
- The lack of vocabulary explains the alienating effect of a modern airport, such as Newark or Heathrow. Unlike the classical railway station, which guides the traveler securely and reassuringly to the ticket office, to the platform, and to the public concourse, the typical airport is a mass of written signs, all competing for attention, all amplifying the sense of urgency, yet nowhere offering a point of visual repose.
- Krier’s solution is to replace the “downtown plus suburbs” system with that of the polycentric settlement. If people move out, then let it be to new urban centers, with their own public spaces, public buildings, and places of work and leisure: let the new settlements grow, as Poundbury has grown next to Dorchester, not as suburbs but as towns. For then they will recapture the true goal of settlement, which is the human community in a place that is “ours” rather than individual plots scattered over a place that is no one’s.
- Where God is at home, so, too, are we; the real meaning of the modernist forms is that there is no God and that Big Brother is now in charge. Krier is inclined to agree with me; but the problem, he says, is to find ways of building that will enable people to rediscover truth for themselves. To try to impose a comprehensive vision against the instincts and the plans of ordinary people is simply to repeat the error of the modernists.