Book Review: The Architecture of Community
Reading The Architecture of Community by Léon Krier, you really get a sense of his outsized influence on New Urbanism specifically and modern urban planning more generally. The Architecture of Community is a collection of essays and drawings by Léon Krier from throughout his career. While this leads to slightly disjointed reading, the essays are grouped into chapter by subject. The first and most robust chapter is on classical architecture and modernity. In fact, the first three chapters all have to do with Krier’s critique of modernity. These chapters are foundational to the rest of the book. The ideas presented here continually resurface throughout.
Unfortunately, the ideas presented in this first section are a real mixed bag. Some of the ideas make a lot of sense, such as the use of buildings – especially unique uses within a city – should be identifiable from the form of the building. However, other ideas seem misplaced or come from personal preference. These first few chapters spend most of the time decrying modernism and modern styles of architecture. Much of this comes from a point of view that the built environment of the past is better, based on the buildings that remain from the past. This ignores the fact that most buildings from the past have not survived to today, which is a common critique of people who advocate for the use of traditional building materials, styles, and practices. Overall, this section feels very much like old-man-yells-at-clouds, but that doesn’t mean the old man isn’t right every once in a while.
The most interesting and relevant section of the book for urban planners today comes about a third of the way in. The chapter titled The Polycentric City of Urban Communities. This chapter introduces many of the germs of ideas that have solidified into the current conversation around the 15-minute city. His definition of an “urban quarter” as an area of about 500-600 meters (1,600-1,900 feet), or a circle in which someone could walk within about 10 minutes, and meet all of their daily needs is very similar to how the 15-minute city is defined today, just about a third smaller. The essays in this chapter are their accompanying drawing help illustrate the historic roots, need, and desirability of having compact communities that meet resident’s needs.
Related to this idea, but not directed tied together in the book, is the idea of expansion of a city through duplication. While this focuses on a city’s initial growth (as urban planners and designers so often do), there are many lessons we can take while growing a city within its existing fabric. In essence, Léon identifies two ways cities often expand, through a horizontal separation of uses (i.e. suburbanization) or through the vertical separation of uses within ever increasingly tall buildings (which he describes as vertical cul-de-sacs). A third way of expanding cities, the one he advocates for, is the duplication of complete cities adjacent to the existing city. As planners today, focused on city building within the city’s existing fabric, we can use these ideas to work towards a series of interconnected complete communities within the city. To do this, we must bring missing uses into the monocultural expanses that are defined by our traditional Euclidean zoning. In other words, add homes to our retail and office centers, and add retail and offices to our residential subdivisions.
As the book goes on, it is filled with more and more drawing and photographs of Léon Krier’s work. While educational if you sit and study them, they are often presented without context or explanation. This feels like a waste of pages. It would have been great had Dhiru Thadani, as the person who conceived of this book and helped assemble it, provided his own words to help bring context and tie everything together into a cohesive whole.
In the end, The Architecture of Community feels like a collection of blog posts stitched together into the physical form of a book. While it is interesting to see the origins and source material for so many of the ideas that permeate new urbanism and modern planning, there are many other books that present these same ideas more cohesively and thought through than what’s in this book.