Leon Krier: The Architectural Tuning of Settlements

good evening ladies and gentlemen it's a great pleasure to be coming back to Pensacola when I was here first about 30 years ago we had to drive many miles to find this in place to eat no not speaking about the looks and now 30 years later it has become a real place and you don't know how this happened is really extraordinary because I used to be terribly spoiled child growing up in Luxembourg which had been destroyed by a war and in an intact City which had survived the launch that offensive and nowhere within 30 kilometers there was a forest where over a hundred thousand GIS had been killed within the fortnight so a man and I was born like six months later and so it was that kind of massacre and unbelievable destruction which in a way gave us 60 years or 70 years of peace but very bad architecture blissfully Luxembourg was reconstructed by very conservative architects who had not yet caught up with modernism they were a bit behind but in a way it went very well and some of the historic place what people think I historic place in Luxembourg I in fact originated in nineteen between 1945 and 1955 people think it's historic but we then make that distinction actually new urbanism from new urbanism traditional architecture is not an architecture of the past but of our condition which is permanent and the question we deserve interesting here the Institute when I sent a brief to Ken and he said concentrate don't talk about fossil fuels concentrate on the on the human scale because that's clearly what is interesting architecture and town planning what is the scale to which we should build despite our machine equipments because it was very really the basis for the loss of scale of human scale in cities is that the machine and if you look at the theoreticians the writers of modernism the main motivation was because we have machines we have to really rethink the scale not only of our equipment but of our cities of our life and everything has to be dictated according to that machine scale where's our theory is that whatever machines and whatever fuel and whatever energy source we use we should really know what this human scale what is the correct dimensionally and from character and from expression and I'm going to to talk about that it's rather refined subject which is know goes beyond the first lesson about urbanism and architecture but one of the problem is that one has always to give the first lesson because architecture has been so ignored by general education that that one has always to come back to the foundational principles now we live in a world where there are there's a lot of conventions but most of them have been lost in architecture know that technology or technological development is actually tradition bound and there is no revolutions in technology you go on you try you test and then you return and there's constant reference to past x/2 experience which is always passed and but I think the mythology of progress you know has particularly been damaging in architecture and but this started a fairly long time ago know for instance this building you look at this building you think it's monastery with the Cathedral contra classical style yet it's a house for a very rich man in mid of England designed by a very talented architect James Wyatt daddy is not a mosque but it is a technical building for technical equipment for pumping house for bringing water to the fountains of sanssouci in Potsdam designed by great architect Ludwig Perseus and then the reaction against his excess which was generalized already in 19th century now what should mosques look like if you build technical buildings like that or what churches look like if that is a house and the living room was exactly under the tower said there was this extraordinary access going on where just a residential apartment building in Geneva would display the entire history of form of architectural form on a simple residential building now imagine you build entire towns churches stables everything is high architecture high tuned architecture then against this kind of access there was an extreme reaction around the First World War just after the First World War and this is not speaking of lack of talent these are only in sure images of the most talented architects of the period that was a competition won by a man called diva Benson who is now forgotten but he was a very great talent proposing this new square in Copenhagen where this is an an office block these are residential buildings and this is the Opera House the same facade already this was before modernism became really large movement but it was really preparing was his extreme reaction against the excess of form and decoration which led to a modern is much finally and you would never guess but this was great architecture tricked me from the wall was most important German architect who emigrated 38 because Hitler didn't offer him the good jobs now he emigrated to United States and designed the campus for Illinois's Institute of Technology and this was the church so what should warehouse look like if churches work that way and that was of course the you know all know the Pompidou Center in Paris which was actually brought in by president who is now called Pompidou Center just protein by Pompidou was in a general of an assistant of the goal right-wing party conservative party but who brought in this incredible revolution of so-called revolution in architecture which changed France and so the question is again what should all refinery's of technical buildings who process things without humans look like if that is in culture palace which still today is the model in France for culture buildings so that is the confusion into which I was born and grew up that way and but they had as an experience growing up in this beautiful city of Luxembourg which worked perfectly there were no slums and wasn't completely traditional City and it was a small capital of society of 70 thousand people said very grand buildings fantastic landscape everything was perfect there was no reason to make a revolution yet I became a revolutionary I read local busy and I made projects where Luxembourg would be cut up in you know but gigantic buildings plowing through the hillsides and so on but then I had my second thoughts and I began to see who could actually do something for Luxembourg which would not demolish it and most architects were not prepared for looking after caring after traditional cities so I brewed up my own theory and it became actually very properly in the United States not in Luxembourg or in France and one of the I think the most striking effort to go from the idea that traditional architecture is not something historic because it's when I went to university very briefly it was still taught but doesn't as a history subject this is what we did in the past and now you have to forget all that and modernism is something come little different ways to understand that traditional architecture and urbanism our technology of building according to human scale with natural mostly local materials in such a way that the building process and the product are agreeable to humans and I'm not just the product of alienated work or a scale which has lost all sense of humanity so what is the most important discovery is that architecture is an inventory of forms which either of public or private use and that inner the palace of the hanger of the house of the church of the company the temple the factory the cooling tower telephone box whatever even the petrol the gas station now is a typology of buildings which are relatively permanent because as societies where either Isolite individuals or we meet as communities or we perform actions which are productive or comes to do with consumption or education those scales have not really changed I think the proper which are properly human the defining phenomenon in in traditional architecture was that you build according to climate soil altitude and that produced an enormous variety of vernaculars around the world and that actually what unites is not often the region but the altitude you know you find similar buildings in Himalaya or in the Basque Mountains Basque Country mountains or in the Alps whereas the the buildings in the plains at the foothills of these church is often very similar but there are thousand or ten thousand kilometres apart so that's really defined in fact this climate altitude and soil and it is exactly these material conditions which also define agriculture or generally behavior and even in some measure language now it is only the processing of building materials by fossil fuel energy is Kurland and then petroleum which allowed to create synthetic materials which allowed to build forms and uses internal spaces which were conditioned in such a way that you could ignore completely the soil the vegetation the altitude and the climate so the if that is possible our principle is whatever is possible we should always have these parameters because they are the parameters which are will be as long with mankind as it will exist whereas the energies sources will change radically as they have changed over the last millennia so the idea of architectural tuning is really complement to an instrument which under Stoney is probably the principle theoretician of new urbanism has elaborated which is called the urban transect which defines building typology and even massing according to you go from you analyze collective building collectively and categorizing it from the rural to the very urban to center hub this is you can analyze any territory in any country and to find these categories it's very a practical instrument to classify settlement and then reorder it find another which is appropriate for the geography for the existing networking and for the climate architectural tuning was an essay I wrote for the Prince of Wales for publications of his Institute how in how far this new form of typological reading of the territory could be linked to an architectural language to architectural expression and to architectural values it's a rather refined subject but it's very I think it concerns everyone because it's finally that which decides how cities are going to to grow and mature I've been working on the Prince of Wales's main town planning project which is called Pembrey in Dorset and which has now been building for 25 years we build about 50% of it in this area and how over many many years how you can have an instrument which everyone who is involved can adopt and behave according to it without being enforced by police and by census regression regulations because we have already too many of this I do I mean in order to understand the term of tuning you know it comes from musical instruments from dosage also and but that in order to tune you need already an instrument I mean meaning you need a form which makes sense incapable of making music and it is that instrument you know but tuning fork which allows you to really bring make the instruments sing and create harmonious sound now in order to understand this what that means when you look at the tuna he generally over stretches the string and then comes down to the actual attempt at tune I do that with my students they have to take an object whether it's about the person a car or column and then they have to modify it dimensionally by changing the diameter in this case the diameter or the vertical dimensions and so you get exactly the same composition the same sequence of forms the same whether it's a flat plate or a torus or a column shaft and it's by changing modulating these different I mentioned that you completely change the expression it goes from the let's say the classic and that is really once you try these extremes you begin to understand what does mean classic a classical form it's that which rests which is correct whereas you can apply all sorts of terms to this kind of in a club-footed or and so on it's by changing the dimensions that you actually change character now go from the male to the female or from the sublime to the grotesque and so on you can also completely recompose it and become a tectonic I mean you use exactly the same elements and this is generally the condition when you try classism nowadays with an industry which don't understand the terms not the forms not the logic that you end up by doing buildings which are composed this way and because there's general ignorant of these fineries very people are prepared to buy a house which is full of these mistakes will mend it up by making a book at your house right like showing how it's done properly and today's and this makes it easier to understand because now in architecture the terms of vernacular and classical are well used and well understood the Nakula building is generally to do with building forms which are technical using materials which can be carried by one or two persons or very few machines in the traditional sense and tools and built forms which are stable which form either wall or column or pier and and so on there is no expression other than the purpose to which it is meant to make a door a wall but without any expression without character really character comes through intent who as classical architecture which and this is independent of cultures were they good to try now to pre-columbian south mercury are the same the same phenomena that architecture classical architecture is using exactly these same elements of which there are many modern I draw it but as a principle and make them into artistic statements which have to do with giving them character this clearly not cannot be a dog house or the permanence and above all a beauty which is beyond the simple beauty of fitting a proper wall or not there is an art it is an art form and classicism is about an art of building it's not about an art of expressing something about your mother or your love is about the art of giving expression to building elements so it's a language of building an artistic language or building now and this ends up by having a vernacular culture and the monumental culture cultural for public buildings and cultural for private building culture for the collective or the individual now in this instrument I introduced those that distinction also in town planning when you look at generally when people look at a city plan which has grown over many many centuries they say this medieval medieval you know medieval planning no it's sort of it's not straight whereas this would be considered as Euclidean geometry and that is more natural geometry Euclidian geometry classical geometry classes miss very much research associated with that and vernacular would be this free when hillside towns and and so on but this has nothing to do with Middle Ages whatever we do if you walk through landscape and you walk along you create the track and there are many many people walking along that track over years avoiding puddles and trees and growth and so on it will eventually always be that way the straight line never comes about by simple use it is not fisting a tent it is an intellectual intent it is to do with artistic or intellectual culture it's not natural this doesn't exist in nature whereas this natural you find it in mud puddles which dry and they you know they form these interesting blocks of dried mud off dry tire of ice breaking up and so on so it's very close to nature to natural nature this is artificial nature a second second nature created by man now often classism is associated with this but I think it's a mistake it's actually a story or graphic mistake whereas the most interesting classical compositions are really those which mix vernacular and classical in a very elaborate way very sophisticated way now this very simple illustration of this monastery in Venice where you have classical architecture of the church and then vernacular for the residential wing and it is actually these two languages one purely of construction and one of artistic expression in order to give a special sense this more for the private and this more for the public collective now what is bigger than everyday and grander which transcends individual and interest and purposes now clearly traditional buildings traditional cities are built that way that you have lot of vernacular making the streets and squares being used for everyday purposes for work the economy Commerce and and then symbolic buildings of the community of whether it's Civic or religious which from the classical academics the the marriage of these two which I think from the most powerful and mature urban ensembles I'm now going through some illustration which make this very clear because it's for everyday use it's for everyone there's not a sophisticated construction is extremely rudimentary it's not high-tech and it's easily understandable when you look at traditional cities whether it's Williamsburg or Paris or you generally have the tourist maps they illustrate the vernacular by simple imprint and not two-dimensional imprint of a plan because that is what interests the private realm where's the public buildings the church is the museum and so on often illustrated in three dimensions and this is really the subject of architecture and that is subject of a vernacular very simple and easy to understand but these can these categories have been completely overhauled or so to speak overhaul but I didn't think ADA legitimized by modernism which claimed that because there are new conditions of industrial production of synthetic materials we must adopt these new materials in order to create an architecture of our time architecture is not should not be of our time it should transcend our time because it has to be for use to many many generations are not just for the next ones so we go here from vernacular completely hundred-percent vernacular constructions like animal architecture to 110 percent classism which was the Chicago World's Fair in all these illustrations of fantastic unbelievable delirious classicism briefly constructed in the white city in Chicago by the greatest architects of the time but they were also in declaration of war against the Victorian confusion it was really a statement of high classism but to such a degree that it was very difficult to sustain at that level of quality for more than let's say one-and-a-half generations it ended all with the First World War and then there were some survivors but Second World War completely deleted the legitimized the system now I think how much classes more vernacular do you need for happiness when you look at the best cities in the world it's I would say I found the best city in this country is Williamsburg the nobody visited but as a model town as the best balance between architecture and vernacular and I've seen in Europe it may be Venice or Rotenberg in Germany and where you have often the good city is basically you know like a good cake it's a lot of dough and then some fruits which make it really interesting because this is leads inevitably to digestive problems not only of of your physiological a reality but even of your spiritual mind and people go you know you can't sustain this kind of excellence of a long period of time now when when you look at these conditions you find the same in music that you find the same in in painting or in in agriculture in in gardening this contrast of vernacular and classism is is a constant with anything worth talking about and of course as we are not no longer used to it as we went through 200 years of power hubris I don't know what petrol energy extraordinary powers we gained through the use of coal and petrol has also made us drunk in the spiritual sense James Caan saw says that we are literally drunk on fossil fuel we are so powerful we can do so many things that our mind is not able to control kind of things when you start now doing an classicism of course you can't get this right straight away but it's the fact that when if this would be the the traditional condition where the necklace relatively small buildings functional buildings for agriculture or for production and the temples of the the grandeur symbolic buildings for the republic of other stock receiver ever rains is not only larger but because it's larger it needs an art in order not to be crude because if you inverse the system if the glasses becomes small it becomes it becomes a mini-golf type decoration it becomes mean and this becomes gross so it's very important that these two scale difference are also treated size differences are treated in a very different manner a distinguishing manner now you now see this enormous hotels often in the Alps where you have cottage palace size cottage style dinner or you have palaces cottage size well there's a reason why policies should be grand and cottages should be modest I lived for a long time in this small town you know which is very picturesque but there's almost no architecture there's just a few columns in the church and and the rest is just walls and tiles and a bit of decoration and it's its natural paradise now character and urban paradise so I think that is the ideal condition where you have a lot of vernacular and then some buildings are distinguishing when you have small ensembles you can virtually do without the architecture villages can be without architecture be without becoming boring because you have mountains or trees or something which really establishes beauty amongst these very modern extreme great beauty sublime beauty among modest amounts of buildings when you have large cities you need something more of art in order to make it bearable and this led to the extraordinary access which we had identical or which was common with Victorian building where everything even the teapot was a masterwork and we we now fall back with laughter but these people took it extremely seriously because without a teapot like that people would have been unhappy everything had to be over decorate decorated and so on curtains everywhere enter and we suffer getting it so you know the it's very one has to see what is actually the ideal balance we do not make architecture so important that it will be rejected or become a matter a subject for revolution now let's see what are these extremes you're all nerds and Patricks in fifth avenue and is very painful feeling to have this rather grand cathedral in the shade of this rather bland and poor buildings which i called private imperialism obviously the over dominance of the private over the public and then you have these let's say Soviet or Nazi classism which has enormous monuments where everything is public and you have no more public actually public imperialism or that was the Lenin Congress as Soviet Congress palace with Lenin 400 meters high and like the World Trade Center and where's the ideal is is a mix of these scales not too much not too little but just enough to be happy now when you the interesting thing comes when you mix vernacular architecture and classical architecture with classical or vernacular urbanism you would have here clearly the center of Pensacola is a Euclidian grid no it's a gridiron plan with very rigorous straight lines meeting at cross on crossings and forming relatively square blocks for these kind of geometry of urban geometry you need a high very special architecture which is not vernacular wouldn't be enough to make it bearable because when vernacular is so exposed on straight lines it becomes extremely boring now and because you see everything at once and you see often the poverty whereas when you have a very picturesque town plan clearly with vernacular can often be charming because there's so many picturesque views and you never see to the end of one street and it's very rich experience and I identified you know mixing these two urbanism and architecture and then vernacular and classical what is it classical or vernacular and then you mix these with vernacular urbanism classical urbanism vernacular and classical mixture and these are nine categories in which you can mix these four or six elements and when you it's very interesting when you travel around the world in whatever region you are you can always fit whatever you see whatever having experienced architectural experiences you have whether it's building on ensemble you can fit them in one of these categories and so it's not only an instrument for analyzing situations where you live in over which you visit but particularly for planning and so the question is for planning new situations the question is what is the most appropriate for where for what purposes for what climate for what geography now for instance I said you know when you have this Euclidean very rigid urban order what is very inappropriate is to have an ocular architecture it's what we call barracks architecture because it's kind of rigidity to it there is kind of uniformity to it and it can be amusing when you have a great mixture of uses but gets particularly unbearable when there is single use occupying in that poor architecture this kind of very rigid geometry wears almost every other categories can be extremely interesting now there some ground conditions how to make a city or how to what to avoid and a mixed-use is an absolutely necessary condition mixed-use allowing any form of economy to allow activities within where community lives for daily or weekly or even monthly uses so you should be able to reach them without the use of league of artificial vehicles and that is often the territory which would not be more than seventy or eighty eighty acres in which you should find your shops and your your church and your school and your work if possible and it is now except for some very large uses like airports very large energy plants most production which is now performed in our countries can be fitted into office type development and actually the control of emissions in these factories is of more severe than the emissions which are produced by suburban homes now they're often extremely toxic the suburban homes the first chemistry goes as far as music goes and files noises go much more noisy than most factories and so interesting to see that here this high-tech development is all done in in rather modest spaces we went to see this laboratory where they built this most refined of of robots it's all done in a row in an environment which can be next to homes because they didn't produce very noisy conditions so mixed uses foundation foundation it's absolutely in Pompeii it's not sufficient because if you put the mixed use all in one large land liner as I call it it's not the city it serves a building with many many uses but it's not the city a city needs to be done of separate buildings of separate uses and mix in such a way that they make really good the streetscape and a good tan scape and a good a good location of public buildings and private buildings so I think this is a kind of ideal where you have a mix of functions symbols and destinations which through their architectural expression make a language which is readable evident to everybody you don't have to explain it throughout the 19th century there were four cities like Paris they were extremely rigorous controls for instance of cornice lines that you had to build to a certain building height and you could not exceed it for residential buildings there are almost for anything and I think this leads to not official kind of boredom so you can have the most diverse you can have the temple the you know public offices private apartments commercial buildings industry buildings all to the same building height and you put the cross on the roof just to signify that is a church that's not enough to make a nice city this is over ordained bureaucratic bottom bureaucracy induced bottom another situation which I think should be avoided is mixed-use in completely wild anarchic disordered no the temple is just little dog house and the condo is curves anyway I mean the grumpy grumpy old man would protest is this our reality because of time but I think this the ideal to achieve and I think seaside became comes very close to it it will take a lot of time to realize that but you know 20 30 years and finally Robert is tuning this every day this right is wrong and this appropriate is not appropriate and with very large except for some protesters very large agreement of those live there and the people who choose to go there and it's an enormous success now with young people it's the language which works everyone understand it goddamn it works we saw yesterday the thousand youth assembling on the beach and they were standing around like like was very funny but seaside was meant to be for all people now it's has become trend because it is the language which is universal I think to humans now for instance large ensembles near like a monastery or a university or often when you identify the parts which are public which are architecture and those which are more private or or less without rethoric let's say that this would be the correct reading you read these obviously for use which are for individuals and dads for the collective if you have the same mix of use Mis applied architecture you have suddenly the the modest part becomes monumental and the chapel is just reduced to a doghouse and so you see what I mean it's very interesting instrument to read and then also when all this becomes architecture and everything every small corner and even the the the toilets are decorated becomes terribly boring and and we'll finally the language will die now if we go over to urbanism to see what happens to us this kind of hubris of scale of sprawl and I call this vertical sprawl because this is horizontal cul-de-sacs plugged onto a National Grid but inevitably it causes Geographic congestion and this is vertical cul-de-sacs only one way in and out or to know but always congesting way it's plugged into the regional or national grid and I think it's really these things which should be avoided there's enough propaganda about it and we choose to promote actually the opposite model because this has enough this is what is taught in architectural schools is how this study in planning schools and did the system which doesn't need any ideological defense it's there whether we like it or not whereas the traditional model needs a lot of articulation they're only two schools in this country which teach it and the nura business not even one now and very few of the planners and architects actually conscious that they are building into the wrong kind of the wrong type of building with the wrong type of materials in the wrong location in the wrong climate everything is wrong what we do is enormous effort and colossal amounts of energies we are really wasting an incredible occasion to do a good cities but I think the wheel is turning and and there's now a lot of people conscious of it that we are do something wrong and then what to do how to put it right is not an easy job but basically we have been repeating the skyscraper type the suburban home and then the land scraper ground scraper in very large quantities in mono-functional zones by excessive amount of the same use and this kind of zoning has now shaped the economy it has shaped the mentalities it has shaped society and to build an alternative model takes a lifetime like like Robert took to to build seaside which does not respond to any of these types but really makes mixed-use and mix symbols which make a meaningful language which will survive as all I think so traditional building is matured to build to mature size and the mature shape and then multiply go over to novice build another town noise that will nerve in all the languages you have these concepts where the last hundred years have been vertical over expansion and horizontal over expansion due to excessive this vulnerability of fossil now when you look at the property sizes like traditional towns throughout ages whether it's Roman R or medieval or our classical were made in proximity of a very large difference of plots sizes and character and use large medium and small which would form an urban neighborhood around finely shaped squares and streets and alleyways and mixing often income and races and whatever in the ideal situation well let's say it's not dream but it is the instrument which transcends political differences and allows to build the chavita's they're really the public space where the differences of economy of race are beliefs I actually have an instrument where to meet in a common space where there is a natural place to meet and live their rivalries in a civilized manner vanity in French means Venice means good manners and that is what urban shaping is about you have done throughout the last three four centuries an extraordinary growth in scale of building lots and finally in totalitarian States or now in in very large so of modern developments you had the enormous building Lots for single use which often the size of to three traditional towns and of course when you are an architect and you get to build in such an area 1 million square feet for a university what we do has one single architect you get born you draw the same draw five windows and you repeat them have a soft it's preordained boredom architectural boredom what happens if you are bored you go you go nuts you become Frank Gehry you can't stand it an mind you drive you make crazy buildings which are supposed to be interesting but they should be interesting of their use and that the forms generate different forms which create language imagine now a whole town designed like a Frankie reward really mostly influenced by Finster Dino was a crazy german expression is not in 2003 cities and mountains and they all were crazy I mean they sometimes form interesting buildings but you cannot conceive of an entire village an entire town an entire region an entire country a state a country a planet built that way it's impossible it's just done possible because you can explode budget beyond anything which is a sense it and so it's certainly not a model to to admire because it's already admired enough and you can find amusing but certainly not a way to build cities and now you find this excess of in crab legs as of scale throughout the last hundred years this was these are traditional towns whether it's Paris or brave you know or Roman town in Africa and so on they had human scale and I don't speak about human scale as something sentimental it's human like our trousers are human because I adapted for our body it's a matter of dimensions which is comfortable and can produce good forms so it throughout the nineteenth century and then 20th century totalitarian models or socialist models are core bizzy's find mad city of three million people where everything is completely disembodied and torn apart by mechanical systems of transport and communication and so on so what we are talking about is that we have the pedestrian city we use vehicles but in in a modest sense when necessary not because we are forced to every day since that we have to limit even quotas or urban neighborhoods or traditional neighborhoods as they are called here to about 70 acres that the actors horizontally and vertically to three to five stories because that's what you can walk as the same person 20 times a day and very good for exercise 100 steps if I could make one law I would make a law that thou shalt not build higher than three floors nowhere and if it is a general condition societies will adapt to it that's what it is were like and the economy you know will be shaped according to it when you impose three floors you will have end up with five no because you just can't stop it but this complete madness this is with the first major crisis which will hit us within our lifetime this system will collapse in a dramatic catastrophic and absolutely unforeseeable ways and you know these are presidential issues which is not just architects for fun it's really the choice between suburban suburban promotion of sprawl or promotion of community sized cities so that's the model of the last 100 years that the small town grows bigger bigger bigger bigger and forms enormous sprawl leading to excess amount of trans daily transport inside outside Guatemala City has now everyday 2 million people travelling into and out of this small historic center and everybody goes mad sitting for 3-4 hours in politic ingestion so as the the model of the future must be you know that the large metropolis is family of small cities with the reduced amount of mechanical transport or a very large Commonwealth of small cities spread according to geography and Natural Resources I mean this is a model of the future but it will take generations to to get there and that's really biomorphic trying to imitate nature in that a healthy growth is always multiplications of cells whereas SiC the one of the definitions of sickness of is the excessive growth of single cells destroying the the caring system now families grow by multiplication this as if families would grow by hypertrophy of the parent bodies it's a tragic joke who's calling home this I will now illustrate this with some product is the town for the Prince of Wales we have now built these two quarters and we are starting this one polycentric instead of single centre as this town walls we are going towards a polycentric situation that was the first phase not medieval it's now it's vernacular geometry with very modest architecture central square and radiating streets and you don't get the whole picture that was meant to be church but it became an office block because I already too many churches in town but anyway you can't get get everything but the picture is right you know why do polycentric city now with modest heights because this excessive concentration of uses on the single top creates not only mono-functional boredom and but it creates enormous social divisions excessive real-estate values in the center and then a spread outwards and the division is also a zoning of societies now for instance in Colombia all the rich live in tower blocks and the poor live in slums up the hills and they don't meet there is no space for them to meet so the I think we are Christian societies I'm not a practicing Christian but the TV does the Christian model of societies fantastic and laughing transcends any an emitter physical belief or transcendental believes and is I think that model which we have to return to so that the size and the verticality or as on tality the core or lack of the core make a language we understand I don't have to explain to you know this evident to everyone that's for the tunnel that's what we plan the press it is impossible Prince of Wales gone mad I mean know his need yet and this is what what is built and people who visit that they think it's historic it's modern it's twenty years old these are new and we now find the after twenty years of training craftsmen we get very good quality of building they're as good as any Georgian buildings sometimes better we have great architects doing this and we have above all now New Orleans type as you have also here because they extremely cheap to build and these balconies and so on that's the future Queen Mother square which will build our queen next year so we limit the building height not to a metric height which leads to architectural repetitiveness and also the compels builders to build as many low floors as possible in this limiting envelope whereas when you say three floor height limit of five floor height limiter or one floor height limit you can a very a great variety of building heights according to another company lay of the famous company leav dropper in Florence is five-story high building 100 meters height 300 feet high until you have it Eiffel Tower is a three-story high skyscraper no 1 2 3 the Capitol building in Washington is a one-story high skyscraper it dominates not only Washington it dominates American politics what would Washington be without that building just a single-story high building and so on so in a way the meaningfulness of the monumental pertinency of a building augments as you reduce the number of flaws in relationship to the volumetric expression now when you build a traditional town it becomes such an machine for improving real estate values for improving social values for improving for creating chavita's that you have to protect it against a speculative and hostile takeovers and the skyscraper is a hostile takeover and destruction of value now it makes a lot of it can make a lot of money for a single individual but if you go to the bitter logic of these skyscraping madness imagine every single building lot built as a skyscraper there can be no nightmare more unbearable than this now and it will be nice to be on top but gets help the more you go down to the street level one of the reasons why we we have not only relatively small buildings or buildings never larger than they need to be typologically now is to employ very small builders rather than handed out to national house builders small builders are extremely and it was policy which was worth it all these builders we employed started with 5 to 10 sometimes 15 employees they have not become major builders over 20 years but is to bring back traditional forms our building with natural local materials and training crafts on site as also I think see site has been um powerful regionally to change the quality of the monocular not just in seaside but around the whole province around the whole state and sometimes the the imitations of off seaside we should get the seaside projection they're incredibly good particularly when you drive past me probably when you study the detail you could actually improve them but it's to bring back a small scale enterprise and investment which has been completely wiped out by a larger and larger in a by zoning land with enormous lots where you can only develop with very large investments this is a project in Guatemala City where a very large family within this scent of Guatemala City and these are the properties of the real family over several kilometers long and we are building this is now finished we are just nearly finish planting - and they are linked by a high street linking the mall up with the University and Jesuit University at center and so on all this is building concrete no way to avoid it 20 years ago I would have resigned but now concrete is it's very good material if you use in the proper way and also because there are such stringent anti-seismic laws that there is no way you can build in traditional ways here but this all this building has been built in the last five years so you don't need thousand years to build a real attractive urban piece of land this was supposed to be a restaurant it was a temporary Church and after 50 years of abstinence I even was taken by my architects there to have communion so never too late you have this very fine in a craftsmanship being developed for we avoid art work like hell no art in ours it's because when art is so bad we don't need out we have good buildings and some fountains and but it will come back because all this training of crafts also trains talents which are naturally born and the traditional crowds are building there are 39 different crafts are building when you have young people and they find their ways into these crowds you find all these vocations are suddenly coming back this vocation which was supposed to be dead and matter of the past and find good work people who are apt to do good woodwork or good hiring work or good masonry in a traditional building many people modern modern modernist artists think this is too simple the thing in our house is not just windows and and doors and roofs but that is all a house is about it is very sophisticated artifice it's not natural nothing like that exists in nature is an analogical imitation of nature there are apertures and closures and protection and so on but in order to protect an artifice against erosion that you have roof is not a matter of style and reinventing the house is completely is not only useless but a ridiculous exercise which will be very quickly forgotten what we have to struggle with is fake that is fakeness that most of building now which looks traditional is in fact fake doesn't stand up to inspection and that is what we have to to struggle with and why universities should at least have one faculty teaching traditional crafts and traditional construction and language this is very large building complex I did with my brother in Luxembourg my brother proposed big palace for justice and I proposed the little city which was finally built and the way each different branch of the judicial system occupies one the High Court of the youth youth tribunal or collective services librarians on deform like a small-town build on this rock in Luxembourg City I give up after seven years of struggling with the Luxembourg bureaucracy my brother went on for another seven years to build it and it became an object of hatred for architects so much so that it polluted the media in such a way that my sister was stopped in the street by a friend who said Miriam tell me why can't your brothers be modern the person has nothing to do with architecture but the media as you know that in fact it's very pleasant it fits very well into the historic towns gave of Luxembourg and there's a big project for the mayor of Rome who is now has been voted out but was to reform a very large twenty nine thousand inhabitants slum outside Rome unspeakable ugliness but the mayor of Rome then he said we have to reconstruct the metropolis in a polycentric fashion adopting this political of meta political aspect of planning to rebuild communities so that you do not have a single center and the suburbs but that the Rome again becomes fully centric situation because he Adam had had done a study how much different classes of Roman citizen spent in time and money and energy on traveling to and from their work and is absolutely catastrophic for the lower income classes it's unsustainable of a long period of time but he lost the elections and he is now investigated by the Mafia because there are two mafias not just one and it's to transform a suburb of cul-de-sacs of geographic cul-de-sacs over 25 years into metropolis of each independent course and these are the this was the first phase the transforming this arboreal on cul-de-sacs twenty-five thousand twenty-nine thousand people live there this would become a town of 44,000 people of four different quarters and basically done by the private industry and this surplus which would then help to rebuild this from eighteen towers would come down and sixty slabs this one is holy ground we couldn't touch it and that's the view there's the holy ground and this is this new quarter and I adopted and all these small blocks is what the Roman middle class is living very pleasantly in the pareidolia courtier prim falen and which has never been used for social housing it is small it's a palutena small palace but sixty by sixty five or seventy feet with parking under it and lots of views around so forming a dense urban pattern and that's what it looked like this was presented to over an audience of over three thousand people extremely hostile developers intellectuals university organized a seminar against it to save this slum because it's considered as historic was all built in three years and it's leaking like sieves and it's on the communique and no longer pay for the maintenance so that's the traffic hierarchy very fast traffic outside then very slowly ten to fifteen kilometers inside and this is the aspect of and then of course lots of private and public use is mixed with schools and the Town Hall a public square major public square the market building fountains a which is nice in the center of Rome would be also exporting to the suburbs the residential blocks they have always very large therefore flats per per floor with very large loads on the corner nude balconies and that's your balcony social housing civil play and of course you would have I mean this would attract probably also tourism and hotels public buildings market building not a church designed according to the Vatican two principles that there must be no symmetry and a sacred geometry has to begin to dance and every one of these palutena has then also a penthouse which is the most agreeable form of urban living now not a single image of these renderings was published in Italy I used to be one of the most published architects in in Italy for like 30 years not one of these images was published in one single professional paper so I believe in conspiracy now thank you It was as if there are any questions thank you very much recently a group of psychologists on public radio mentioned that social media had just causin the narcissism rate among Americans are just really the world really just to skyrocket is there any relationship between narcissism and toxic architecture I think I think we are all narcissistic now we have to be in order to to live but there are forms of Nazism which are which are really dangerous and particularly when they when they produce environments which are cannot survive for a long period of time well away you cannot imagine what will it be if this goes on for many many generations and I think artists I mean not only artists but everybody is is narcissistic and everybody has a right to be happy with himself and to look at his navel and and be happy because otherwise you get depressed but I think the traditional crowds and talents and whether it's music or literature or economics or whatever we are good at when we find the right Mickey to exercise we can exercise our narcissism in a productive and pleasant and poetical way which is to of public good instead of becoming poisoning the water and becoming criminals sometimes I think the town is the town plan is as important as law as common law it's part of common law so that we can behave in a good manner without being forced to it but because it's much better there's extra advantages but now when you had you know people being asked to build a 900 meter high skyscraper in the middle of Paris who do you think would refuse if you upon an architect designed by the President of France nobody would refuse even though he knows full well that is going to destroy Paris so common-law this kind of principle which is governed by by moral law it should become also a geometric law that according to comes imperative that you should act in such a way that the principle of your action become can become a principle of common law if you apply that to architecture you get seaside or Poundbury or traditional towns do you have any good examples a good American subsidized public housing in the architecture vein well days of course is hot you know I have not seen good examples but I hear that they are good examples the problem is often that the programming of hub is very mono-functional you get I think a thousand houses to build somewhere in district and thousand houses without anything else is I think an error so I think those programs should be should be really be much more complex and if you can't plan for instance many of the public buildings or those uses which should come later when the community is established cannot be the burden of a single developer because the private developer cannot possibly build a public time I mean the Society's isn't completely exceptionally heroic is a work because he followed really Davis followed certain principles which should be really principles of public authorities but you can't build it all in at once because you know you can't build a public building if there is no public once the the city is there of course there will be demand so I my technique of doing it is that if you build even if you have mono-functional program you should build it in such a way that you maintain certain Lots within the town which will be once the community is established will be able to respond to any public necessity for school or for I don't know shops or whatever is not in your program but that's very difficult to convince in a private developer of the very few time for to more succinct questions for days wanted to say some 40 years ago shortly after he became Mayor Joe Riley stopped the public housing program and went to Washington renegotiated with HUD to invest the money in scattered site Charleston single houses and that then got revisited about fifteen years later as a hope six program which did create quite a few mixed-use and mixed income communities not as good as Charleston of course but it still is a program that had quite a bit of success in various communities Norfolk Virginia has one of the earliest and best but I think we use we are in this probably the best example we have 35 percent of search lousing which is imposed by by regional government and but I think it's very dangerous because it's very artificial why should you know and but the the way we do it we pepper pop the sides so it does not create the zone of low income they are just amongst other houses and but often the the money which goes into building these houses is sometimes more actually than private private terms there's other money in public housing still despite Margaret Thatcher trying to reduce it so it is I was hoping you would speak to trees and greenery in the urban landscape well you know that was a joke of course now the sense of humor of the Prince of Wales is is very misunderstood by English media who like to denigrate because they are against royalty everything the prince does must of course be that of an idiot and the more he does he act intelligently his demonstration that there may be actually legitimacy for world so which drives him nuts in a Republican it they in England the anti Royalists are called the Republicans but I think that he has actually found the role for for which no legitimacy which had been completely lost for royalty I think one more question in the polycentric model where do the arts congregate there well a polycentric model i mean the arts congregate in new york where were the arts congregate in a polycentric model they don't congregate and that's we don't want excessive congregation you know but you with arts you want all your do want all your I mean we'll go to New York to see shows because that's where all the talent is how does that work that is a personal opinion I would say I mean I find out so bad that I follow the advice of young assistant who said we should form a society for an art free society I'm not happy no let's thank our 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Length: 72min 39sec (4359 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2015