The Architectural Tuning of Settlements (and) The Place of Dwelling

By Leon Krier

The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, 2008, 42 pp., £17.00

By Ray Gindroz

The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, 2008, 46 pp., £17.00

To Leon Krier, sprawl and the modern city of skyscrapers are equal abominations — they are cancerous growth fueled by economic and political forces that are not attuned to beauty and the good life. The ideal city, he writes in The Architectural Tuning of Settlements, is akin to tuning a musical instrument. We all walk — and drive — amidst buildings that are as badly tuned as a piano that has been neglected for 40 years.

Through a witty set of polemical drawings, Krier takes us through an intuitive listening process. Good architecture, like good music, can be made when the component parts are understood. Each building has architecture and is located in an urban context, Krier explains. Both the architecture and urban context can be either classical (formal) or vernacular (informal). Or, there can be a mix of vernacular and classical. With these three “tunings,” Krier creates a matrix of nine possible character-types of cities and towns. Some are good to excellent — the best, he explains, arises when both the architecture and urban design display a mix of vernacular and classical characteristics. Some are bad — the worst, he says, is monoform vernacular architecture superimposed on a rigid grid: the design of concentration camps.

Perhaps better than any other architectural polemicist, Krier also explains other characteristics of buildings and urban design. Like music, there is more to a note than its pitch. There are duration and intensity and feeling. Buildings have uses (civic, private, and commercial), scale, and proportion. Krier shows in drawings and words how to think about these qualities and tune them correctly. Even a city with the ideal mix of vernacular and classical design becomes dissonant if scale and/or proportion are off. One can argue with some of Krier’s positions — a formal grid, according to his matrix, is capable of satisfactory urbanism at most — but one cannot fail to learn a great deal by understanding his aesthetic views.

Krier’s pithy little book is one of a series commissioned by Prince Charles and authored by senior fellows in the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment. What the prince calls “essays” — they could be described as booklets — are intended “to help build a common body of knowledge for the Foundation’s teaching programme.”

The Place of Dwelling, by Pittsburgh urbanist Ray Gindroz, is another in the series. Here Gindroz describes his methods, which have been highly influential in reforming US public housing and city revitalization. Diggs Town in Norfolk, Virginia — an example that Gindroz uses — makes an interesting case study, because its buildings were not torn down and the families were not relocated. Instead, the building facades and street layout were redesigned by Gindroz’s firm, Urban Design Associates — to transform the troubled housing project into something closer to a neighborhood. As has been reported in New Urban News, this change resulted in a significant drop in crime. Gindroz also reports that children’s school test scores rose. “Teachers say that poor performance in the past was, in part, because these ‘children of the project’ suffered from low self-esteem. Now they are ‘children in the neighborhood’ — and that has made an enormous difference in their self-confidence and enthusiasm for learning.”

My home, myself
The failures of modernist public housing to live up to promises made by architects caused many to dismiss the value of architecture in improving social conditions. But that may have been the result of bad design instead. In this booklet, Gindroz contends that how one feels about a home partly determines how one feels about oneself. “Pride in place of dwelling creates tangible and profound societal value,” he argues.

Gindroz tells the story of how residents demanded front porches, as he quotes a resident, “‘not because we need another space (although that would be nice) but to come out of our houses, see each other, so we can come together and deal with our problems.’ What an extraordinarily clear definition of social capital!” The creation of distinct yards in Diggs Town led to the tending of gardens. According to Norfolk’s police chief, Gindroz writes, the flowers tell the gangs and drug dealers that the residents are in control and this is not a good place to do business. “The first focus of an urbanist is to understand the way in which design and placement of buildings can support residents in the creation of social capital,” Gindroz says.

Gindroz’s booklet is about the nuts and bolts of creating good houses, streets, and neighborhoods. He uses the pattern-book method, which analyzes houses and neighborhoods in terms of their parts and how they fit together. Although cultural conventions and reason place boundaries on design — the porch and the stoop are located on the front of the house, for example — the variations of good neighborhoods are infinite. Pattern books were a 19th Century method of communicating house design principles. Technologies and development methods have changed dramatically in the 21st Century, Gindroz says, but the method still suits. “The principal of working with standardized elements and then providing ways of using individual parts to create a collection of highly individualized buildings is more easily implemented with current technology than it was in the past,” he concludes.