FROM LE CORBUSIER TO LEON KRIER AND NEW URBANISM

From Le Corbusier To Leon Krier And New Urbanism

From Le Corbusier to Leon Krier and New urbanism

In Architecture: Choice or Fate, his manifesto for New Urbanism, classicist Leon Krier produced many inspirational images of urban complexity, going as far as a fractal comparison of modern and traditional buildings. The cover of the book, a fictional resort town for Tenerife, presents a fascinating case study of complex symmetry; no building is the same as another, but all share the same geometric properties. That would not be unusual had it not been an architectural manifesto. Competent artists have always been able to imagine dream cities, and they continue to do so with every blockbuster fantasy movie that hits the screens.

The dream city of Coruscant in Star Wars

The dream city of Not London in The Golden Compass

Like the dream cities of Le Corbusier and his modernist colleagues, the dream cities of artists have in common the fact that none of them have ever been realized. Leon Krier's dream city, Poundbury, has been realized by the capital backing of a supernaturally rich patron, and even then it has been built very slowly and carefully. In the time it has taken to develop Poundbury, millions of urbanisations have occurred elsewhere. Like the New Urbanist TNDs of America, no matter how much we enjoy their architectural quality, we cannot consider them to be real cities. The real city has been built in the emergent dimension, not by the mind of a single artist but by the material necessities of all people. While it is fairly straightforward for an artist like Leon Krier to invent and apply his own form language to imagine a complex cityscape, in order for this design to be adapted to the material necessities of millions it must also involve millions. We obviously cannot burden a single artist with this task.

And so urbanism has a wholly different starting point from architecture. The artist does not have control. No one can possibly ever have control. Everything is happening all at once everywhere at once. To attempt to stabilize this process has caused chaos everywhere.

The starting point of urbanism is the same starting point that the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, set for himself when he established the Internet's now most indispensable website. Instead of asking how to publish the expert opinion of specialists as an encyclopedia that would compete with the print powerhouses (a venture he had already attempted and failed at), Wales based his system on the theories of economist and complexity scientist Friedrich von Hayek. The idea that Hayek proposes is that there exists specific knowledge that only individuals possess, and that can only be utilized with their cooperation. Wales saw his task as the aggregation of this knowledge into one coherent system.

The world-wide-web had, since the early 90's, become a massively hyperlinked knowledge network that everyone could publish in. The reality at the time of Wikipedia's creation was that this power had not produced ...