book review : The Architecture of Community

Leon Krier's The Architecture of Community is a primer on the fundamentals of the language of architecture and urbanism. In normal times, since time immemorial, one would know this language without being taught it. But in the Babel to which Modernism has today reduced these arts, we must be taught this forgotten language, and Krier's childlike drawings, distilled captions and hornbook-like aphorisms makes this the perfect textbook with which to begin reclaiming our lost literacy.

The book is a collection of essays, cartoons, drawings and photographs of proposed and built places and buildings from the author's lifetime of work, from Europe to America. It is a book of exceptional wit, wisdom and perceptiveness. The task this book lays before us is nothing less than a global ecological reconstruction. Accordingly, Krier addresses all the really pressing building issues of our times, from sustainability to the urban transect, from the nature of materials to the nature of man, from historic preservation to "architectural tuning," and so forth. This last term is a Krier invention that describes a process by which the kind of architecture that best suits the urbanism to make a beautiful city may be determined. To facilitate such aesthetic analysis, a number of potentially useful pictorial matrices are presented. This approach might well prove to be as helpful a design tool as Andrés Duany's urban transect, to which it bears a close resemblance.

But why did The Architecture of Community take the form of a children's book for adults? The reason, we discover in the book, lies in Mr. Krier's uncompromising rejection of the whole Modernist building process – from flawed aesthetic concepts to failing curtain wall construction. Thirty years ago, he famously declared, "I didn't build, because I am an architect," and "I can make true architecture because I do not build."

His way out of this impasse was to think, write and draw. And where better to begin than the beginning? So, he returned to first principles, and has made the rediscovery and explaining of these to a deaf, dumb and blind generation his life's work. The result is this book, which is perhaps the most important and oddest book about architecture ever written. It is important because it brilliantly reduces the vast and complex field of architecture and urbanism to its smallest, irreducible subatomic units. With these basic building blocks, cleansed of all dross and thus now comprehensible, we are enabled and beckoned to begin assembling an "authentic, traditional culture," to replace in toto the debased prevailing building culture.

This approach resulted in a book that is about architecture, but not of architecture. As an analogy, a human being reduced to atoms is no longer a recognizable person. Just so, Mr. Krier's buildings, reduced to the simplest of parts, seem more like built ideas than actual buildings. Should one attempt to construct a human out of atoms, without Intelligent Design and/or the infinite instructions from DNA at work through countless generations, a recognizable human could not be created. To create a human you start with a complete man and woman, and with a felicitous combination of genes and upbringing, you will produce a being like the parents, and perhaps even an improvement. The buildings that Krier has assembled from his subatomic units are of uncomfortably unpleasantly severe geometry, unsettling scales, blank unadorned surfaces, bizarre architectural devices and eerie mortuary allusions.

In short, comfortable buildings are best built from buildings, not diagrams. This book is invaluable, but not to provide models for actual buildings. The hazard of this book is that its ideas are so persuasive that it might be misused in this manner. Indeed, many a New Urbanist project boasts a building in the Krier manner, marked by what to my eyes is a characteristically awkward eccentricity.

Ironically, despite the book's condemnation of Modernism, to reduce traditions to some kind of essentials is arguably a Modernist project. The essay, "Why I Practice Classical Architecture and Traditional Building" perhaps points to the thinking behind this project. The author concludes: "I am not primarily interested in the history of traditional architectures and urbanisms but in their technology, in their modern practice," and, "The question of modernity can therefore no longer be one of period and style but one of persistent utility and quality."

I would counter that to reduce one's interest in traditional architecture and urbanism to the pragmatic concerns of technology and "their modern practice" is to fail to grasp their full art and humanity. Style, furthermore, defines the character of a building and marks its time period. How can architecture be fully human and ignore style and time, these twin inescapable realities of human life?

My admonition against the misuse of this book aside, it is imperative that we dig a bit at the roots of architecture, so that the rotted underpinnings of today's building culture might be cleared away, to release the new shoots of a vigorous renewal. For this reason, every serious architect and planner needs to spend time with this book, which James Howard Kunstler refers to in eloquent epilogue as "Mr. Krier's gift to the coming generations." With prophetic gravity, Kunstler concludes: "They are going to have to inhabit what remains of this planet … and Mr. Krier's heroic, often lonely labors have produced this indispensable beacon of principle and methodology to light their way home."

Those of us engaged with traditional architecture and urbanism know that the way back home is a long one. And on this journey, The Architecture of Community is the essential travel book.