Krier's humane architecture

The reason to move to Dallas is the great people. It's not the climate, and it sure as hell ain't the architecture. This is an ugly city. There are oases of beauty, to be sure, but they only cast into relief what a carbuncular wasteland Modernism has made of this Texas prairie settlement. The thing is, I don't see that Dallas is all that different from most of the US -- that is, parts of the US that were built after, say, 1945. Kunstler has said we have created built environments that aren't worth caring about because they are difficult to love.

I thought about this when reading Roger Scruton's appreciation of the architect Leon Krier. Excerpt:

Krier presents the first principle of architecture as a deduction from Kant's Categorical Imperative, which tells us to act only on that maxim that we can will as a universal law. You must, Krier says, "build in such a way that you and those dear to you will use your buildings, look at them, work in them, spend their holidays in them, and grow old in them with pleasure." Krier suggests that modernists themselves follow this dictum--in private. Modernist vandals like Richard Rogers and Norman Foster--between them, responsible for some of the worst acts of destruction in our European cities--live in elegant old houses in charming locations, where artisanal styles, traditional materials, and humane scales dictate the architectural ambience. Instead of Bernard Mandeville's famous principle of "private vices, public benefits," it seems that they follow the law of private benefits, public vice--the private benefit of a charming location paid for by the public vice of tearing our cities apart.

Regarding modern skyscrapers and their kin, Scruton writes:

Buildings constructed in this way are both expensive to maintain and of uncertain durability; they use materials that no one fully understands, which have a coefficient of expansion so large that all joints loosen within a few years, and which involve massive environmental damage in their production and in their inevitable disposal within a few decades. Modernist buildings are health catastrophes: sealed environments, dependent on a constant input of energy, and subject to the "sick-building syndrome" that arises when nobody can open a window or let in a breath of fresh air. Moreover, such buildings use no architectural vocabulary, so that one cannot "read" them as one does classical buildings. The passerby experiences this as a kind of rudeness. Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification.

And they depend entirely on cheap energy for their existence. Good luck trying to collect office rents in vast glass-curtained towers in which the windows cannot be opened, and it costs a fortune to cool them.

More Scruton, on neighborhood development:

The plan should conform to Krier's "ten-minute rule," meaning that it should be possible for any resident to walk within ten minutes to the places that are the real reason for his living among strangers.

The post-carbon future will require these kinds of neighborhoods.