Hasta La Ideas

Ah ha! We were right! Just a couple of weeks back, we were talking about Prince Charles‘ right hand man, the architect and fellow modernism hater, Leon Krier, and how we thought maybe his speaking engagement in San Diego might be “the first step toward getting Prince Charles’ over in the US to start messing with our architecture.” At the time, we jokingly assumed that was just our paranoid xenophobia talking, but now we’ve been vindicated. Krier has popped up again in California, moving up the coast to Pasadena, where he gave a talk and then invited people to walk around that city’s city center while he picked apart what was so wrong about it. On his talk, as relayed by reporter Larry Wilson, Krier said this:

“Most avant-garde architects not only live in traditional buildings themselves — they go on vacation in traditional buildings, they send their children to school in traditional buildings. It’s good enough for them, but not for the masses.”

Let’s get things straight. We agree with lots of things Krier says, particularly when it comes to city planning and building efforts, and we generally like the guy, even if he openly despises things that we like. But a statement like this is just absurd. Unlike he and Prince Charles, we’d wager that none of these “avant-garde architects” deal in such absolutes. It does not make someone a hypocrite to live or work in a building that isn’t exactly the same as the kind they’re design. If anything, it’s whatever the opposite of hypocrisy is (honesty?) — it’s an acknowledgment that architecture of all ages can be appreciated. To follow Krier’s logic: if you’re a rock musician, enjoying classical makes you the definition of a hypocrite.

Modern architects don’t want to tear everything down so they don’t have to engage with anything other than “avant-garde architecture.” They want cities and towns to be the living, breathing things they are, not the staid, lifeless, uniform dullness he and Charles would like them to be. Sure there are some bad apples in every city, but they’re as likely to come from 1885 as they are from 2005. And isn’t that what makes a city great?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.