new urbanism

Leon Krier's lesson in architecture

Mathieu Helie — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:36:02 +0000

Defining a new traditional urbanism

Mathieu Helie — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 01:55:26 +0000

Sometime last year this website attracted the attention of several members of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism, an organization sponsored by the Prince of Wales Foundation in order to support and renew traditions of construction. While this organization does great work to preserve the techniques of traditional building cultures, they have yet to define what the traditional urbanism of their name really implies. The importance of such a definition I believe to be primordial.

Poundbury in China

Mathieu Helie — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 18:40:19 +0000

Thames Town in Songjiang New City, Shanghai.

Review of Radiant City

Mathieu Helie — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:14:07 +0000

There is a scene early in the 2006 mockumentary Radiant City that provides the key explanation to the morphology of suburban sprawl. Our favorite writer James Howard Kunstler sits on a bench in a community bike trail that is enclosed in two rows of chain link fence in order to, I presume, secure it from the high-capacity arterial road that runs alongside it. The experience is vaguely what it must have been like to patrol the Berlin Wall, had it been encircled by an expressway.

A cuter form of sprawl

Mathieu Helie — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 02:19:14 +0000

The National Post reports about the failures of Canada's most famous New Urbanist experience, Cornell in the Toronto Suburbs.

More evidence that New Urbanism is really dense sprawl

Mathieu Helie — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 05:12:02 +0000

From The New Geography magazine.

Creating the emergent dimension, or learning from Wikipedia

Mathieu Helie — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 02:29:40 +0000

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.

The emergent dimension, or why New Urbanism is not urbanism

Mathieu Helie — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 01:22:25 +0000

There are two methods for producing fractal geometry. The first method, the decomposition, is the most easily understood. In a decomposition we apply an algorithm that breaks up the geometry of some starting point into several parts. We then re-apply this algorithm to the smaller parts created, obtain many more, even smaller parts, and continue this reiteration until we have reached the complexity limit at the smallest scale of object we can possibly make. This is how an architectural design proceeds because it reflects the way that building proceeds.

The emergence of a sense of place

Mathieu Helie — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 02:14:00 +0000

Modern urbanism has given us a landscape that many consider to be soulless. Everything looks the same. Nothing creates a sense of place. New Urbanism has attempted to reverse this by returning to traditional architecture and town planning forms. This was done in European new towns, under the advice of well-meaning men like the Krier brothers, in the late 1970's, and did not succeed.