Léon Krier: The Architecture of Community

Welcome to On Cities with host, Carrie Pennebad. Over the next hour, you'll learn from Carrie and her guests how the design of the built environment shapes the quality of our lives. Now, here is Carrie. Welcome to On Cities. My name is Carrie Pennebad and this show is dedicated to the design of our cities. These are amongst the greatest of human endeavors. They are the backdrop for our lives and the legacy that we leave for future generations to inhabit. I've come to understand that the quality of our daily lives, our health, the health of our planet, our sense of connection and even our happiness is directly influenced by the design of our built environment and yet we seldom discuss what makes great cities and how can we work together to design a better world. Today, I'm delighted to be speaking with Leon Krier, one of the most provocative architectural and urban thinkers of our time. His career has been a longstanding critique of the legacy of modernist city planning and his ideas have changed the discourse of what makes a city successful through a return to traditional principles of architecture and town planning and the creation of community. Leon, welcome to On Cities. It is always a pleasure to speak with you. It's a pleasure to be talking to you and your public, of course. Leon, you were born in Luxembourg and you spent your formative years there. What was it like to be a young child in this context? Well, I grew up in the city which is quite exceptional. It was like a child's game. It had been the biggest fortress built in Europe and in Luxembourg city which had been fortified under Louis Catoz, under Louis XIV by the greatest engineer Vobain and it's spectacular. When I grew up, it was still intact. It's a spectacular place we lived on the edge of a canyon and a boulevard with beautiful window trees. My mother was a pianist and my father was a tailor and for the clergy and so on. They were extremely sensitive to the beauty of where we were. So we grew up in this environment which seemed to be normal to us, but we also knew from our parents that there was something special here. I mean, because you cannot imagine a town being an object, a large fortress, was like the city itself was built on a rock linked by bridges and viaducts over canyons which are 150 feet deep and the forts which were outside. They were linked under the valleys by underground tunnels. So that when the city was lost, still the bastions could be defend and our house stood actually on one of these bastions and even in the basement there was still signs of this. And then I thought this was quite normal. But then my brother studied his older, he studied architecture in Munich. So he sent me material and we got very excited about a group, Euse und Le Corbusier and Modernism. And I started to do projects for my beautiful city and soon or later realized if I bring those ideas here, it will just smash the beautiful place to bits. And now it's then, I mean, you then forget when you are 15, 18, you know, you have all these past experiences and then you study and then you suddenly I studied briefly in Germany in a horrible town which had been bombed by Bombakomand in Stuttgart and the teaching was terrible. Actually Leon, before we delve into that because I definitely want to talk about your educational experiences which were unusual, but maybe if I could just linger a little bit further on these formative years, which I think when you look at your body of work and your ideas, I think played a pivotal role in your ability to create the theories that would really launch you to an international stage years later. So I mean now that I learned that your father's a tailor, I understand your Sartorial splendor. And I also know that you are also quite a formidable pianist. And so I hadn't realized that your mother was a pianist. But you know, I was interested if you could speak a little bit more about maybe the world that they were able to create because I find it fascinating that they were able to nurture such independently minded children, including yourself and your older brother, Bob Crier. Do you think that was a byproduct of your parental upbringing or also a certain sense of freedom that you were able to experience in living where you were? Meaning roaming the streets and you talked about it as a kind of almost playground. Do you think that the physical environment influenced your independent thinking? I think they were both in separate, but my father employed five to ten people depending on the workload. But my father would sit in the window because that's where the best light is. The master tailor was sitting in the window overlooking the valley. And when you walked by, I mean, it was a higher window, so you couldn't look on to his table, but definitely the workplace was for our children, was playground. Now we would play in there and even make clothes and for my teddy bear and so on. And we had also a big garden by my mother with pianist hands. She grew enough vegetables to feed a family or four children. And then we had, I would play with my sisters and friends who would play in the garden. And when the bell rang, I would go to primary school. Now we're just the first grade, I think you call it, from six to twelve. I would listen in the garden to hear the bell and it was across the street. And next we had a huge milk factory opposite our house where in the morning courses would come with cans of milk which would then be worked in this factory, but which was a beauty. It looked like a giant Swiss chalet now destroyed and the house is destroyed. And the town has since become a horror, a horror place. I feel sick going there. And so you had an environment which was perfect. I then when I started studying, I then went to, I studied briefly, I left because I didn't really learn what I wanted. And then I found out with the then big master, James Sterling in London that he knew also nothing about architecture or about town planning. So I started seeing where, in a way, are the great ideas. And I found out that actually my own hometown had been built according to principles which were still valid and which had been articulated by people like Otto Wagner was famous. He was the most famous secessionist architect in Vienna. And another famous architect called Sarin and Iliad Sarin and who was a cheap plan of a part of Helsinki. And they had formulated what had been realized in Luxberg because of geographic reasons. Because there were deep canyons so you only had plateaus left in between and you had to link them by bridges so that each of these quarters, four or five quarters which had been built were like independent towns. And that became then revised by Otto Wagner and by Sarin I've reformulated it is that cities should be built in form of independent quarters. That's how Paris worked for the last 200 years. Because in a horseman who was a cheap planner under Napoleon III who revised totally Paris, we organized large metropolitan area where three million people lived. From several hundred perishes into twenty arrondissement which is like districts and each of these arrondissement was organized in four or in quarters. Each one had a town hall and there you see this polycentric multi-centered large city which is the key. We grew up by one by chance. And because the geography wouldn't allow to grow together. It's what I then promoted and what we do you know. It's because it really works. Sorry to interject here. I'm gonna keep pulling you back. because you mentioned briefly that you worked for Sterling. So as you said, you studied at the University of Stupkhard, but you left after one year because you didn't find the knowledge or that you were seeking. But I'm curious, why did you decide to work for Sterling? Or how did that come to be? Because you could argue that, I think you spent more than four years with Sterling. So in a way, it became a kind of apprenticeship. Or could I say, so what brought you to work for Sterling? - Well, when I studied, I realized that university is no longer teaching architecture. No, urbanism, we had to do childish, childish, aggisized, graphic aggisized, which were called Bauer's Aggisized, which were just for kindergarten. And I knew already what I wanted. It's very quite a lot. 'Cause I had studied sort of Wagner and so on. - Independently, that is. You had studied independently. - Yeah, because my brother had studied before. So we had been a bit ahead of the, and also my brother, he was student leader in Munich where he invited 10 architects who were not fashionable like Friot or Angus, who became then fashionable 20 years later. But we were kind of trying to find a more interesting way out of the boredom, which was built. All new buildings started also in Luxembourg were terrible. Whereas when we grew up, when we were children, Luxembourg, out of Luxembourg was rebuilt in a beautiful way by craftsmen. And architects who knew about craft. Now, I went to, when I went to Lisset to the secondary school, which is, I don't know, what do you call it. But from 12 to 18, that was in a town which had been entirely rebuilt after the war. And it was a beautiful place. And we as children saw that this is possible when we drove my parents drove us always to Italy and to Switzerland and to the Kordazur to see beautiful things. But when we drove through the, from Luxembourg to Switzerland, or you had to drive through the French industrial areas of Lorraine. And Lorraine had been devastated already by terrible modern buildings, modernist buildings. And really, for good Frenchmen, why do they have to live in such horrors? Well, in Luxembourg, the new building was still in 1955, was quite good. So I had the experience that all the ideology which we were taught that you can only rebuild in an industrial way. And then I was confronted by that ideology, even at Stirling's. So why, why Stirling though? Why James Stirling? Obviously, he was a notable architect, practicing in London for those who were listening who might not know of James Stirling, but why James Stirling's office? I was enchanted with the teaching. So I went to the library. I spent more time in the library than elsewhere. And so I looked also through magazines who is interesting nowadays. And I found two names. One was Louis Kahn, and the other one was James Stirling. And then I looked more about what does this Stirling do? And I found one building which I found really, he's as good as Le Corbusier, he's a genius. But the rest I didn't like. But that building, the last engineering faculty was an absolute piece of genius and still is. So I wrote to him, I sent him my drawings and he said, if those drawings are yours, you can work for me. So I, of course, left. And my brother said, hooray, yeah, they have to waste your time in a stupid teaching. And I say this because most students now, the most architecture students, I know young people, they are brought to tears by the teaching. And they should get out of the damn schools because they learn nothing except Miami and Notre Dame and they are three or four placeways still teach real architecture, you know. And but I knew that from young people, they have the same feeling of boredom which is terrible for the profession. And when you are most capable of learning at that age, when you're 18 or 20, you learn like nothing. I mean, you remember everything. And so Stirling and then with Stirling, I found out that he knows nothing about urbanism because I worked briefly on a scheme which had been, was planned for the Runk on Town Centre Housing, over 2000 units for new town. And he had a scheme which I found so unsatisfactory that we had juries on Friday evenings like you have in schools and we could then the employees could vent criticism. And I said, you know, this is going to be disaster, sir. And I told him, you know, you have to take me off that job. I can't sleep anymore. And then he gave me other jobs. He rented another room for me in another street to make competitions. But so I was totally, I was looking for a master. And when you are 20 years old, you look for a master who can tell you exactly what is right and wrong because you need guidance. Like when you learn a piano or violin, there are things you don't know even if you have talent, you know. And you need guidance and you look for a master. And so I tried to find a master, but I couldn't find it. And my brother was too young to be a master, you know. And what I saw built, I admired for a while, somebody like Oswald Matthias Ungos, but I went to see his buildings and I was horrified. How can a man know so famous and so professing, Berlin, how can he do such horrors? And so. Actually, when you were working in Sterling's office, because it's interesting that you said that you were looking for a mentor. And that I think is a natural way of thinking when you are, you know, let's say 18 or 19, as you said. But when you actually worked for Sterling, you know, he hired you based on the portfolio of drawings that you sent. And the drawings that you created in Sterling's office became iconic architectural images that were printed and published in leading architectural journals of the day, the same journals that you were slipping through in that library as you sought to search for who you could work with. But from the onset, it seems that drawing plays a critical role in your work not only to depict your own projects, but as didactic annotated diagrams that are capable of encapsulating all of your ideas in just a few lines. I'm curious if you always drew from a young age and if Le Corbusier's drawings inspired the development of your own drawing technique. - Hopefully, yes, absolutely. And I found when I worked on competitions for Sterling for two years, and then on and off he then called me, I went to Germany for one and came back to do his first book, which was like a copy limitation of Le Corbusier's first volume. Not only graphically, but the whole, because Corbusier was a genius in publishing and so was Sterling. He actually had an idea what would work in publishing. So we, when I had to study very carefully, an image before it was properly drawn because, and he would, I worked, I did publication drawings for a while, even before starting the book. It's just what will be the most characteristic drawing, which will sum up the spirit and the, you know, the standard place in the building. And so, which I had the other schooling from my brother who is an enormous talent, artistic talent, who produces like, I mean, con the copier of drawing sculptors, buildings, anything. So we lived with this volcano at home. And, but, for instance, he would, then he would produce a city, a linear city from Hamburg to Munich. - Your brother? - Yes, when he was in the army, he would draw, spend time drawing this city, and then he would send like, 1500, 400 drawings around the world to different magazines. Never anything was published, not for years. Until I did, for he had produced a church, which I thought is fantastic. I am an incredible brother, he's like a new cop, you see. So I did, because it was too expensive to photograph these large drawings, I did small drawings to publish. Those were the only things which were published for years of his, because Arschlecht-Udez-Rodoui, was then the most famous magazine, published those drawings, which I had done off his church. And then, with sterling, choosing so carefully, I understood. No, I have to redraw everything I have done, redrawings for a project, very short text, not to bore people. And I sent them around, and I was suddenly, world famous, within like two weeks, I had published in all over the world, in like two months, all over the world, there were like eight major magazines that published between 10 and 15 pages, Kaza Bella, Conte was part of it. "Oh, Ashley, it was really. And then because that was the sterling system, he would produce three drawings, which were so powerful, and you probably know the drawing, you know, the history, faculty, Cambridge, there was a drawing which once you saw a duck, it really sticks in you, it's a strong, it hits you like a bomb, you know. And so it was that, that is what I really learned from sterling, that, you know, publishing is very careful, you need to be very careful, what you publish, not quantity, but just very, it's a technique. Totally unknown, totally unknown, you send three of those drawings and you get published. Yeah, so you're saying because of the power of the image, you would say even more than the content of the image, so it's more the power of the image versus the interesting. The sterling made the impression of being great master, and that's how we got this enormous project for Rank on Town Centre Housing, it was like a whole town building a whole town, but in fact became a suburb, it was demolished after 10 years, but that came purely out of his authority of having produced three or four buildings, which were really exceptionally interesting, and the rest was rather common, you know, uninteresting book or busy copies and so on. So, but, you know, you learned by your own mistakes or by others' mistakes, and when I did the book to about sterling, I looked through all those archive, I had no workspace, no room, only for myself. I had all his archive and I went through everything, and I saw that there was actually no consistent way of drawing. There were very core graphics, I mean, going from Tranclot, right, Tranclot, right, Tranclot, right, Tranclot, this and that, and copious, and a bit of this and that. And so, I said, you know, we need a unified way to represent this, and the way to present your work is Corbusis, a synographic presentation in his overcomplete. He looks at the project and he presents it like it's a script for a film, and you can look at those books and go from the entrance to the exit to the to the parking, and you live in one, five, six pages of publication, you can get the spirit and the place and the geometry, everything, it's not just nice pictures, no. Actually, I know a few other individuals who have studied the work of Le Corbusier to the degree that you have, Leon. In fact, I've heard you, and even in this interview, you've heard to Le Corbusier as a great artist and a graphic genius. But I'm curious, how do you reconcile this admiration? I don't know if you would say it's admiration, but admiration with Le Corbusier's own philosophies about the cities, as his ideas are so dramatically opposed to your own. But, you know, he's a human and he's a genius, and but geniuses may also terrible mistakes. If you ask Robert Oppenheim about world government, you will only get real, you know, BS ideas. Well, he was a genius in his field in physics and mathematics, and he was a great master of leading people to build a bomb. But so that is one of the poems of our time, is that the geniuses, they are geniuses in one field and can be complete idiots in other fields. Corbusier was totally ignorant, was as far as urbanism goes. He had no clue about urbanism. And he started by making interesting traditional towns learned from Camilo's it, the famous Austrian heritage about urban space. But then when he wanted to do his own, he became really, it's not, it's destructive. He wanted to destroy Paris and replace the West Bank, you know, with 24 skyscrapers, creating just a desert. So, and you find this, you know, Hitler was a genius in propaganda. Now, he was also terribly evil person. And that is the proper, the common of modern man is that we are geniuses, one little thing, and the rest we are idiots. I mean, listen to people now in the Pentagon, talking about the strategy. I mean, let me ask you, what were, so what were the greatest lessons that you learned from Corbusier? Because in a way, you said you were looking for a mentor, right? But maybe in a way, you've, you've, you've at the very least engaged in a lifelong conversation across time, with Lake Corbusier. So in a way, he has served a bit as a, I don't want to say a mentor, that would be too strong of a word. But I think you've drawn lessons from your studies of Lake Corbusier. So, what, what are the greatest lessons that you've taken away in looking and studying Lake Corbusier? Well, when I was 14, I wrote to Lake Corbusier and he actually replied, so I would tell him, but I was in, in boarding school. The foundations, they still have my letter, but I, my, my, the letter from Corbusier was burned in a book, which was burned by accident. And no, I would have worked for him because he was, he's an inspired artist, he's a fantastic writer. I mean, to come, not so much the content, but more the poetry of his texts are so powerful and convincing. And so you have to take the problem is when you, when you have a man like that who has a vision. And then, but then you go to see what he did. You see that, of course, he was unable to, to actually build his vision because his vision was absolutely failed. No, he had no, no clue of town. I went to see all these buildings and also the town, the new town in Punjab, in India. And you clearly see that he has no, no, the authority he had came from publications and he should have never been asked to design a city because it had no clue. But then you discovered that it was not only him, but only his contemporaries, the modernist, the Congraea, international-dashdactual modern, they had no clue about urbanism. They, they were badly influenced by the impression which 19th century pollution and excessive development of historic towns made on them by creating slums and having too much noise in the streets and having buildings too high for the width of the streets. But they had, they wanted to destroy the what they called the historic town, the historic city model, to replace it by open air, by mixing countryside and city, which is not possible. Because, you know, to build a city, you need to respect certain proportions, certain building heights, certain numbers of laws, sizes of public spaces, otherwise just becomes desert. And we can afford to build deserts because we have cars and we have lifts and we have air conditioning. But traditionally, people had to build intelligently with the materials they found in a certain place, with a topography they found, the materials they found and the the the human, the manpower they had and the animal power in order to build places and to build fantastic cities, the poor and the rich. No, even the poorest architecture in Africa or in Europe or in China, historically, when it is still there as it was intended, was beautiful, was practical, was ecological, was sustainable and everlasting, as long lasting as humans can afford. And modernism, in a way, destroyed that by our, as Jim Künstler, which you have interviewed, he said, we are drunk on fossil fuel. The power which fossil fuel gives to us allows us to build not only with a might, I mean, just a physical force, lift things, build numbers of laws, which nobody ever could have built before or even build glass buildings in the desert where they have no, without air conditioning and fossil fuel, which you need, have no chance to function properly for very long one. So in a way, that access and that is the problem of evolution, that evolution, we live in a human civilizations are evolutionary, but evolution does not necessarily mean progress, it means not necessarily a progress in all aspects. It may be progress in using concrete or using steel, but compared to, we had no progress in city building in the last to all the deals. Leon, when I hear you describe, I guess what I hear is, you know, part of what you learned or you take away from like Orbusier is, you know, again, his artistic might and his kind of graphic genius, as you mentioned, and also his ability to promote and market himself. And for that, he was extraordinary. And you're able to still study him despite the fact that his ideas for urbanism as you state were flawed at best, you know, which I think is an interesting thing for individuals in the audience, those that might be listening, those that are familiar with your work, those that might even, you know, follow your theories. Because I think that many of these individuals may not even look at the work of Like Orbusier. And I think what you're arguing is that when you see rare talent in whatever form, you know, you shouldn't be afraid of investigating it and taking from it the lessons that you can. And that's what I think makes you a kind of curious and independent-minded thinker. So actually, maybe despite the fact that you left the university, because you mentioned this, you went to work for Sterling, you engaged in the kind of voracious dialogue across time with Like Orbusier and so many others, because every time that, you know, we've emailed, you never send an email without sending an incredible reference or, you know, some book that I've never heard of. And so I feel like you're always in the process of learning, which I find fascinating. But despite the fact that you left the university, you actually returned to academia as an influential teacher at the Architectural Association in London. And you were there for more than 20 years, I believe, starting in the late 1970s. Can you share a little bit about what it was like to teach architecture at the AA during that period? Well, I was invited. I went to London to work for Sterling with a thought that maybe I do a diploma later in the Architectural Association, which was a school, which was fairly open. And but then I was asked while I was working for Sterling, I was invited to teach, even though I had no qualifications. I was invited to teach by Elia Zangallis who was a famous teacher and so on. Did he invite you based on the drawings he had seen that you had done? Yes, I had published in Italy for the Treanor in Milan and he soventy liked it and we became friends immediately. So he asked me to teach. I had no clue how to teach. So I assist it for a year and then had my own unit. And I was sitting between Brian Nelson who was an anarcho-communist and Berna Trumy who was a young Swiss elegant Swiss intellectual until he had Zangallis, people like that. And Peter Kuku, who was the founder of Archie Graham, was a high-tech fantasist. And they were always very nice people. It's fantastic, atmosphere and always. So how is this possible? These people, they totally disagree with each other and we were all friends. And that was very stimulating and but also confusing for students because I knew more or less what I was interested in. So I started inviting people and I found that I disagreed with almost everybody I invited to teach. They wouldn't agree with me. So the second year I had when I was a unit master, I then did all the lectures myself because I was fed up in having arguments with the people I invited and we had jurists only among students who are much more severe than the outsiders. Because when we had jurists, the jurists would not criticize the students but me. Saying that why do you design urban blocks that's finished? Or why urban quarters that's a past? Public space, urban space that's replaced by telephone and by aeroplanes and all these nonsense which was so fashionable and still is fashionable now. And so but the school allowed me to, I only taught for three years actually then. Oh really? Okay. Yeah, no, I was there for three years and then I found also most teachers. So there was in the end after three years became very people like Richard Rogers who in the beginning was famous for, you know, was doing Paris, Pompey, do center. But he was very supportive in the beginning but in the end you felt it's not going to end well. And so in the final after three years sitting overlooking students work, I just quit because it was impossible to to find any common ground, you know, to judge students. Because you know, the jurists would be extremely severe with my students who had done rather, I mean, reasonable work but I was not able to allow to be critical with their work. In the building cities in the air and I didn't have flying circuses and London in fire or things like that. So I left and I taught then briefly at the Royal College and replacing Can Trampton and then then American Princeton and I was invited around. But from then on I had published a lot and I had done enough work to serve up by myself, you know. Leon, you have an interesting story with Zaha Hadid at the AA, don't you? She was, was she your student? She was a student in my first year when I was full, when I had a full unit. And she was an extraordinary character in permanent crisis, a very adorable person but very crying a lot and in a struggling with her own temper. And also with her own disability because she was not good. She tried to draw, but we did my first project with them was for to rebuild the Dijklesian camp in Palmyra, which is fantastic. Building which is like a small town all by itself, four blocks with a public building and, you know, street crossing and marketplace. Fantastic place. They had to rebuild this from scratch. And she had, she had no, she was mathematician. She had studied mathematics and she was qualified in mathematics but had no clue about architecture. She had had one year previously where the year was, was also had terribly weak sides. I mean, you could do, you know, cook pizza and call that architecture. Whereas I, I really demanded them to do, to draw buildings which had the building type would sit on a public space and know what you are doing, you know. But maybe what I had heard was that you were fundamental. I mean, clearly, I think your views of architecture and city was not aligned with Zahaz, but I think you were able to witness, I guess, a talent and that you were able to connect her to Zengelis, which I think eventually placed her in a place that. That was, but that was later. When she was with me, she did rather, she performed rather poorly. Yeah, well, maybe because of the, I mean, she's not with us to be able to, no, but she was not, we know what she wanted. She was not yet onto the what she wanted. And she did sketches which were rather poor and but I always encourage my students. I mean, they were, I was not severe with them. So we even published the work. So it's published, I can send you if you want to see it, but it was not very good. She was not, but we, we became friends and she was always there. No, I would wait for students, but Zahaz would be there. So we talked a lot. She had to organize the first exhibition. I organized at Ard Nadshon. She was always there. And when she then, the second year, she went to another unit. She, but we, we stayed friends and she kept on, I kept on seeing her. She would trim me her sketches and suddenly, after I think the most influential was because I had a lot of people staying with me in London, no artists from all over the place like Massimo Scolari and Toronto Valent. And she would meet all those people at my place. And I think she was mostly influenced by Massimo Scolari. And, and that suddenly set her off. And that, because I also lectured on, on a co-busier and as a man, I respect the non-Semaya Christian. I don't know where I send you some stuff or, you know, and construct, Russian constructivism. So she did her own and got interested in, in Maliyevich and suddenly when she showed me, oh, it's her sketchbook. And one day she showed me the first sketchbook she had filled with Maliyevich kind of crossism. And so, Zahaz, I mean, it is really getting very interesting. I have to send you to Ilya. No, to Ilya Zangelis. And they really then, you know, they even from the partnership. And that is from where she explored it. She really, but it was, I think, was Massimo Scolari's influence. She, I don't think she would have agreed to that. But I saw it's happening. That's interesting. Well, I think it is heartening because given her successes in the industry that, you know, we're all searching initially, you know, it doesn't just happen. So I think there's a there's lessons to be learned there as well. So turning back to your own work, the work that would really make you internationally renowned, your thought about cities, you have the book, The Architecture of Community, and you expanded upon your earlier publication entitled Architecture, Choice, or Fate. Leon, could you explain the theories that you set forth in this book and how they can create a more sustainable and beautiful set of towns and cities? Well, two two titles which are still important for me, Architecture, Choice of Fate. You know, you could save the same for marriage or for anything, Choice of Fate. What is our time? We live in God, we live in democracy. So the highest good in democracy is the choice. Not which goes against fate in many. And whereas in architecture schools or in architectural ideology, you are told that we live in an evolutionary stage where modernism has superseded all previous developments in architecture. All the traditional architecture are now there on the garbage heap of history. And you should just study modernism because that is a new language. Well, it turned out that modernism was no language. And that is why I work on Le Corbusier because if there is equality in Le Corbusier, it can be done with traditional architecture. And on top of that, that is one volume. The other volume is about where I turn modernism into a real language. And it becomes beautiful because it's the interesting part of modernism was very much influenced, one hundred percent influenced by engineering design, by the design of bridges and particularly of ships and vehicles and so on. Totally influenced. And you know, the inspiration you have on being on transatlantic liner, where you had this modernist from 1880s onwards, you had liners or you know, the boats on the Mississippi, which were like modernist manifestos. They had nothing to do with traditional architecture. There were real manifestos of openness and transparency. All the things, all the ideas which were promoted 20 years, 30 years later by modernism, you had already on those boats or in transatlantic liners, you know, the language, the spirit, the high building, the opening types and so on, or tolls and so on. So I'm now also proving that modernism was doubly guilty because not only it didn't was unable to build cities, but even the language one could have built a beautiful city with modernists, the limited minimalist language, which it permits you, but then there's a limit because no, the Bauhaus aesthetics or the Corbusier aesthetics of the 20s and 30s is voluntarily limited and you wonder why, because modern, what they call modern materials, which are basically synthetic materials, which come from very wasteful processes, industrial processes like concrete and steel and glass, they don't dictate a shape. You can do any shape with glass or any shape with concrete or any shape with steel, so the idea that it needs to be boring and terribly repetitive is complete lie, because you know, there is no reason why to limit yourself artistically to what modernism did, what Bauhaus did, like now on the line, the present of our European Union presents now the new Bauhaus, like that was a new vision. It was a vision which was so limited that you couldn't even build a proper historically what the Bauhaus realized was nice lamps or chairs, but there was not a single, a single urban experiment of modernism, famous, no, which is really worth repeating, because Leon, sorry, sorry to interrupt you, the maybe, you know, clearly the architecture of community embedded in it, your most recent book, I would say, certainly has the critique of the kind of legacy of modernists planning, right, and I would argue that your idea is the ideas that you set forth in the architecture of community that I would be interested in seeing if you could distill them, not into the five points, let's say, but maybe some critical points that you could share with our listeners, those that might not be familiar with your work, and I think those ideas you put into practice in my mind in the creation, for instance, of Poundbury on the western outskirts of Dorchester, England, and that development is led by the Duchy of Cornwall with the endorsement of King Charles III. You began that work in 1988, I believe, even the city is perhaps due to be completed shortly, I think in 2025, and it's expected to house a population of approximately 6,000 people. So Leon, for those in the audience that are not familiar with your work, can you briefly state what the main kind of the driving ideas for Poundbury are, and how they are essentially a physical critique of what you're discussing now in terms of the legacy of modernist urban planning? Yeah, you know, the misunderstanding about modernism is that there would be something like a modernist urbanism. Modernist urbanism is a sub-urbanism. It's not urbanism. It doesn't build towns. It builds zones of offices, zones of houses, zones of educational zones of industry and so on. And that's a fundamental mistake. And we are the first generation, there are many people who criticize this kind of zoning of single functions, in large concentration of single functions, large geographic areas, which oblige the users to be voluntary wasteers of fossil fuel and energies which should be spent better, you know. And what we do is to very systematically not build suburbs, but also not build gated communities because gated communities are no communities. As zones of generally limited to certain income and so on. So where the idea of town is that the large town is a family of small towns, those are the single ideas everyone can grasp. And that the town should never be more than even Aristotle writes this very detail, should not be bigger than what a voice can shout, a good voice, you know, which is an area which is when you walk across about maximum 10 minutes. Now when you then organize a large urban area in 10 minute areas, you get an area of independent urban quarters where you not only live, but you work, you go to school, you go to church, you go to shop, you go to the factory, you store things there, you do everything that a normal life of a week, of a day, or a week, or even a month allows you. It's very famous in French literature, you know, that people who lived in Paris read Balzac, that there are people who never left where they grew up, the quarter they grew up in Paris. They had no clue what is across the sand because they are like micro cities. Now, so a micro city is really, that does not mean that you must stay there, but you can stay there. The misunderstanding when we promote it is, oh, you want to lock up people. No, when you have the choice to live in one area of Paris, you can travel across Paris to do anything you want, but you don't have to buy your bread or go to school or go to church or you have 100 churches and you have 100 everything. So, it's to add the choice to urbanism. So, our project is a real new town at the gates outside Dorchester in Dorset. It's not one town, but it's four quarters, which are each by itself a small town with its own central square, its own shopping street and so on. Now, within a mentality, which is used to suburban, not only planning, suburban finance, suburban construction, suburban everything, behavior, it's very difficult to do something which doesn't correspond to this suburban mentality because it's universal. No, it's a completely reactionary and retarded degradation of what urbanism used to be about. So, it's instead of having evolution towards better things, we have an evolution towards disaster. Worldwide disaster. I mean, the sub-riminalization of the world, not only of the United States, but it's the same in China, or in Moscow, or in Kiev, or in, it's across all ideologies. You add this destruction, deconstruction of cities into mass organizations. We live in societies which tend to organize mass education, mass shopping, mass everything, and in the end, mass destruction. Well, I think you're, you know, certainly that's very, very clear, and you're almost at the end of the construction of Poundbury, but like Lake Oruzia, you are also executing your ideas in Latin America, specifically for the new city of Kayala in Guatemala. This project was commissioned by El Grupo Kayala, it's led by Ektor Leal, and interestingly enough, this may be your largest and most influential project to date, and it also embodies many of the ideas that you are describing in the case of Poundbury, but arguably at a larger scale. However, your ideas go beyond just mere zoning ideas, right? You spoke about the critique of zoning, and we're coming to the last couple of minutes of the interview, and I want to make sure I get to my last question, which I'm asking, all my guess, which is what is your favorite city and why? But I think in the case of the Latin American example, it's now being executed at a much larger scale. You have many more of these concentric or polycentric nodes, correct? Yes, of course, this polycentricity is not yet about density, because density is numbers, whereas polycentricity or mixedity of uses is what should be secured, even when there is very low density. Now, many villages in the past where you could do everything, you know, they were not villages like just outlying and without any connection, but because they have a certain autonomy, and that is what in the future will become again important, is that you should have your food or your energy or whatever you need for daily lives, you should not be carried across the oceans and the earth. That has nothing to do with green politics today, which are usually BS, you know. So Leon, I'm sorry, we're coming to the last three minutes, and I want to make sure I can give you at least 30 seconds to answer this. What is your favorite city and why, Leon? Leon, I have so many favorite cities that, you know, because there were good cities everywhere, and unfortunately, the best cities were cities of the past, which are now basically being degraded if not in total. I mean, I live in a formidable city, but which is being degraded by horrible lampposts. You know, so the traditional cities worldwide were incredibly beautiful and attractive. That's why people traveled, because you know, the exoticism, the Persia, America, and that is what we will recapture by reconstructing traditional crafts, which are geared on local production and local, local skills that individuals should be again engaged in doing their own dam towns and learning a skill rather than just ideas, know, which are fantastic, but useless to survive. So the cities to come that you will create. Thank you, Leon, for always a provocative conversation and for your independent mind and your steadfast commitment to traditional principles of urban design and the making of more sustainable urban futures. I look forward to seeing you soon. And next week, I'm going to be speaking with David Gamble, the author of Ideas City, how to make Boston more livable, equitable, and resilient. Don't miss the conversation. You can find all previous episodes of on cities wherever you listen to podcasts. And please follow us on Instagram at the on cities podcast. Thank you again, Leon, and thank you for all of you to tune in. I look forward to connecting again next Friday. Hope you have a wonderful week. Thank you, Kerry. Thanks for listening to on cities with Kerry Panabon. We hope today's episode has given you some insight into how the design of the built environment shapes the quality of our lives. Please join us again next week.