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Excerpt from The
Richard H. Driehaus Prize book 2003
"Why I Practice Classical Architecture and Traditional Urbanism"
Léon Krier
I grew up in an environment which, despite two recent world wars, was unblemished by modernist architecture and planning. Until the mid-1960s, Luxembourg was a miracle of traditional architecture, a small capital city of 70,000 souls, embedded in manicured agricultural and horticultural landscapes and lofty beach forests. We lived on a tree-lined corniche, overlooking a deep valley and one of the most accomplished townscapes in Europe. My father's tailoring workshop occupied the ground floor of the townhouse and for my primary education, I hopped across the street when hearing the school bells chime from our garden. I had most of my secondary education in the baroque abbey of Echternach, a small medieval town, which together with its four-towered Romanesque Basilica had in less than 10 years been beautifully reconstructed in a 100 percent artisan way after a near total destruction during the 1944 Rundstedt offensive.
My mother's piano playing filled the house and during holidays my parents took us four children to Switzerland, France and Italy to visit places of beauty. Neighboring Germany was avoided for obvious reasons and in front of the Jungfrau, the panorama of Florence or the lakefront of Lugano, we all experienced an aesthetic communion of awe and admiration. The family concord shattered with a bang when for once I had chosen a destination and taken my parents in the summer of 1963 to see Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse. Though I didn't realize it immediately, my life's orientation became defined by that visit.
Until then, I had, via my brother, become acquainted with modernism merely through books of Le Corbusier, Giedion and Gropius. The formidable promises expressed there, had swollen my sails. In a Sunday High Mass, our parish priest had spoken of Ronchamp as the "ship of concrete, which had given body to our religion of love and hope," no less.
Le Corbusier had become for me a second messiah and as a result, I imagined modernist architecture to be something superior to all the beautiful buildings I had seen and grown up with so far. I fantasized of white Cubist volumes adorning my favorite places and mile-long inhabited walls, ploughing across Luxembourg's historic city center, bridging its valley and digging into its forested hillsides; radiant visions of an unearthly splendor. Before the ill-fated visit we camped in an uncle's olive grove in the Provence, enjoying perfectly intact beaches, towns, landscapes. The timeless perfection of a nearby Cistercian monastery, the picturesque charm of the surrounding farms and hill towns, and not least our bloated expectations for the impending Marseille visit had indeed ill-prepared us for the tawdry reality of the Cité Radieuse. We were all speechless with shock, wondering at first whether we were at the right address. Nobody, including myself, could quite believe that this was what I had been eulogizing for years.
Next thing, and for weeks and months, trying desperately to overcome my unavowable disappointment, I found myself for the first time in my life justifying to my parents something which I profoundly felt to be socially unacceptable and aesthetically inferior to all we had commonly admired so far. The relentless modernist devastation of Luxembourg, which started in full a few years later, not only alienated me from my cherished birthplace, but more radically from modernism, the intellectual homeland in which I had sought temporary refuge from a provincial upbringing.
It was this double exile, which paradoxically opened my eyes, gave sense and direction to my life. The rape of my beloved childhood places became for me what genocide is for a persecuted people - a life-threatening menace. I took it totally personally and decided to fight back, not clearly knowing who the enemy was.
My resources being very limited, I had to calculate from early on how to spend them. Unable to find a master, a school or a doctrine which could teach me how to stop the holocaust and learn my craft, I felt I had no choice but to learn from buildings, towns and landscapes which I and my family had experienced and loved. I decided to abandon university, not to have kids, not to engage in building, but rather to think, to draw and generally find out what was so wrong with contemporary architecture and urbanism and how to right it ... not because I felt I had a special gift in that direction, but because of an absurd realization that nobody else, not even those I most esteemed, seemed inclined to do what I imperatively felt had to be done.
It soon dawned on me that the critical theory of the Frankfurt School which in its pessimistic and utopian forms so enchanted my generation, offered only consolatory delusions. It was not a cure but part of a near-all engulfing confusion. Instead the incredibly fast and beautiful traditional reconstruction of Luxembourg's war-ravaged small towns, villages and farms, which I had witnessed as a child, became for me, on reflection, a model of civilized and generally-accepted modernity.
Indeed the various brands of post-modernism, which the critical theory of the Frankfurt School continues to inspire, are but futile attempts to escape from the debilitating tenets of modernism itself. Their experimentalism condemns them to very short life spans, to technological and cultural irrelevance, to broad social rejection. Not only have they proved incapable of replacing the technological and artistic heritage of traditional urbanism and classical architecture, but the colossal human cost of these failed experiments seems to me mostly but sterile diversions from an inevitable return to common sense. Furthermore, how can the modernist and post-modernist errant ways be redeemed by a cult and culture of masterworks when the masters themselves lack technical mastery, artistic maturity and more profoundly, philosophy?
To me the worst consequences of modernism lie not only in the worldwide degeneration of the general building activity through the loss of traditional building skills, but more tragically in the intellectual corruption of their forms of transmission and theoretical foundations. Modernism's historicization of traditional architectures, i.e. the ideologically-motivated reduction of a timeless building technology to a mere collection of obsolete styles and crafts, has blinded several generations to the continuing modernity and irreplaceable value of classical architecture and traditional practices. That is why I am primarily not interested in the history of traditional architectures and urbanisms but in their technology, in their modern practice.
The question of modernity can therefore no longer be one of period
and style but one of persistent utility and quality. Practicing traditional
architecture today is then not a refuge in past styles or history, but
a return to mature and experienced forms of environment building and
management.
Be it in democratic or totalitarianism countries the reign of modernism has been so complete for the last half century that few people wonder why the great awards have for two score years solely recompensed architects who practice exclusively modernist styles, ranging from Bauhaus to deconstruction, from so-called "high-tech" to "critical regionalism."
The ideological monopoly has extended to architectural teaching, competitions,
publishing, and above all, to public commissions. The creation of The
Richard H. Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture breaks this untenable
sectarian deadlock and announces the long-awaited democratization of
architecture, a sea-change in the official architectural culture of
today.
The futile destiny of many contemporary institutions and organizations is clearly legible in the crude shapes of their buildings. All great human institutions are, to this day, symbolized by classical monuments. In St. Peter's in Rome, in the Capitol in Washington, and in the Westminster Palace in London, institutions and buildings form an indissoluble unity, forever linked as long as men will remember - the dignity of such bodies is made visible in the grandeur of their architecture. On it depends their authority as well as their own self-respect.
The universal principles of traditional architecture - harmony, firmness,
utility - are concordant with the fundamental goals of all significant
human establishments. In all great cultures they have been the chosen
means of wise polity and civilizing action. In the whirlwind of all
things human, they have been the guarantors of social bond stability
and peace, the visible realization of a common moral world.
All worthy architectural cultures make a fundamental difference between sacred and public structures on one hand and private utilitarian structures on the other. The former express the dignity, solemnity and grandeur of collective institutions (res sacra-res publica), the latter the more modest rank of individual activities and zeal (res privata-res economica). All buildings are at once expressive and instrumental for good or for ill.
A monumental compilation of private cells does not make a monumental building but an empty monumental gesture. An endlessly stretching public hall without proportional height does not make it a monumental space.
If factories look like cathedrals, housing blocks like royal palaces, and museums like factories, there is something fundamentally wrong about our values and way of life.
Classical architecture in all cultures and continents is to vernacular building what poetry is to prose. The power and value of classicism is given substance through this contrast in scale, dimension and artistic elaboration. Too much of it is a false luxury and too little a false economy.
The trained eye cannot only distinguish styles and periods but can
pinpoint a work within a few years and miles of its moment and place
of origin. Even the most adept pastiche will not escape intelligent
scrutiny. Thus it is impossible not to express in some measure the spirit
of one's time, and that is precisely what the notion of Zeitgeist describes.
Zeitgeist is as inescapable as body color, but it is no guarantee of
any kind of quality. It can therefore be of no interest to the artist
and craftsman for they naturally long to attain timeless quality, using
the best materials and techniques, which are also those that best resist
the tests of time, accident and changing tastes. Great architecture
does not embody the spirit of our time but the spirit of all time, an
element of eternity.
We do not use the term Classicism as a stylistic classification. In the face of modernism the old polemic between Gothic and classic is largely irrelevant.
Classicism embraces all monumental architecture (of all continents)
of traditional construction and conception, fulfilling the Vitruvian
triad. The work of Henry Bacon and that of Hassan Fathy belongs in that
classification, as do the Eiffel Tower and the Crystal Palace. The latter
are neither anti-historical nor anti-classical or antitraditional structures.
They merely represent new additions to the vast typological and formal
repertoire of the vernacular-classical tradition. When however they
are elevated to the level of paradigm, architecture is diminished.
Classical architecture reaches its highest expression in the classical
orders. A legion of Einsteins and Leonardos could not improve them,
any more than they could improve the human figure or its bone structure.
As Schinkel put it, progress in architecture has been so vast in the
past that only the finest eye can detect an eventual improvement in
the classical orders; progressing the art cannot be the concern of everyday
architectural practice.
The most important struggle in architecture today is not between tradition and modernism, but between true and false traditional building construction. Almost everywhere the building industry has abandoned load-bearing construction in favor of a separation of support-structure and external enclosure, and secondly the replacement of natural materials by industrial substitutes. The incongruous mixing of materials and techniques, the reduction of external walls to screens, the tireless differential movements between structure and enclosure, and lastly the substitution of inferior artificial substitutes for natural materials makes even traditional-looking buildings into extremely fragile, vulnerable, high-maintenance structures of extremely limited life expectancy. It also turns most traditionally-styled buildings into authentic fakes, of traditional appearance only, resulting almost unavoidably in "post-modern" kitsch.
Against the mere skin depth of most "post-modernist" buildings,
true vernacular and Classical structures are wall-deep and room-deep.
Authentic traditional construction and predominant use of natural materials
are essential to ensure the integrity of structure, architectural elements
and appearance. A slightly higher initial investment is repaid by a
longer life, by less maintenance, better appearances and generally better
building.
Buildings ought not to be conceived as objects of short-term consumption but of long-term use. The principles which guide their design and construction must therefore transcend fashions and whims. Paraphrasing political theorist Hannah Arendt, without buildings and towns transcending the life-span of its builders, no public realm, no lasting and collective expression as craft or as art, strictly speaking no culture, is possible.
The classical triad of venustat-firmitas-utilitas has meaning in a
long-term perspective only. There is no more short-term beauty than
there is short-term wisdom. Even the most solid and practical structure
has a futile destiny if it lacks beauty. Beauty and harmony, utility
and commodity, solidity and permanence, are unconditionally interdependent
and their links are severed in modernisms. This is the reason why timeless
or traditional principles are in irreconcilable contradiction with timebound
or modernist principles.
To claim that the classical principles were overcome by industrial building technology is no less absurd than to declare bread to be old-fashioned. If the vernacular and classical languages are not free of problems it is but an indication that nothing human can be perfect. If there remain unexplored corners, and unexplained contradictions of an art, they are no concern of the professional architect, planner or committee. They can only be resolved by means of intelligent habit and by secular genius.
This is the true meaning of classicism. It is of course a belief, a
belief proven by experience, and with it man has been able to create
his best landscapes and cities, his grandest places and monuments. Without
it he can but destroy them.
There are several ways in which classical culture and tradition are understood, and misunderstood. These depend largely on our understanding of the universe and of nature; on whether we believe that progress and evolution have a finality or not, whether their goal has been reached in the past or whether it will be reached in the future; and whether classical ideals can belong to the world of matter at all or only to the world of ideas.
There is little doubt that organic nature has, with the creation of humankind, reached its highest possible, its classical, form. As far as man's biological evolution is concerned, progress is thus a matter of the past. The typological order which shapes the organic world will not suffer any change, for its slightest mutation will mean the instant end of mankind itself.
In our unavoidably anthropocentric conception of time, the typological
inventory of organic nature not only seems but is complete. It does
not know innovation, but only tireless duplication and reproduction;
a reconstruction according to a fixed typological inventory of men,
animals, plants, and so on. Typological experiments, genetic idiosyncracies
and crossbreeds cannot reproduce. The principle of life means growth
until maturity, reproduction according to type and species stability.
Classicism assumes the same to be true for artistic creation. Innovation
in form will occur only with the introduction of a new functional type.
This being an extremely rare occurrence, it cannot be of any relevance
for day-to-day artistic practice. To elevate it to a principle of life
as modernism has done can only lead to delusions and categorical confusion.
Modernism's philosophic fallacy is not its principles, materials and technology, but the fact that these are upheld as a new paradigm, apparently revolutionizing, invalidating and replacing all previous architectural traditions and knowledge.
Standardization, prefabrication, the free plan, the curtain wall, strip
window and roof terrace, rolled steel, plate glass and reinforced concrete
are useful for limited purposes. When raised to the level of exclusive
dogmas they lead to the loss of typological order and building hierarchy,
to uniformity and arbitrariness.
Many critics still want to see the competition between classicism and modernism as an ideological struggle to death. This clearly reveals a pre-democratic frame of mind because its eradication from professional education and practice had not and will not eliminate the need for classical architecture. It has, however, ensured that for 40 years classical designers had no chance to gain public commissions. It has also secured for at least two generations the practice of the most debased classicism ever. Futhermore, the brutality of modernism is at its most extreme when and where it reigns supreme. Not by chance did modernism produce its best results when it was a minority exercise in the 1920s. The renewed competition is now improving the products of both recent modernism and classicism.
The question can therefore no longer be tradition versus modernism but democratic competition, a high level of education and professional practice in all disciplines and nonpartisan criticism. The real struggle to death ought solely to be between good and bad design.
