URBAN SPACES-ROB KRIER "New Urbanism is not utopian and does not impose social master plans. Instead, it allows the infinite variety of human talent and ambition to build harmonious and pleasing environments." Leon Krier
New Town of Broekpolder Broekpolder near Amsterdam, Holland Holland by Rob Rob Krier Krier and Chris Christoph toph Kohl
"The basic approach of our urban design concept in the 'block' formation. This enables the creation of many different spatial configurations of squares and street sequences that give the individual 'places' their indelible character and offer inhabitants the kind of familiar quality found in a typical Berlin neighborhood, or Kiez." Rob Krier and Christoph Kohl
Roof View of New Town of Kirchsteigfeld, Potsdam by Rob Krier and Christoph Kohl
More than just a garden-suburb, Kirchsteigfeld integrates the open flow of space and light which is the 20th century's great contribution to housing, while celebrating the hist oric qualities of place and identity which we have learned once more to value in making urban forms for community ."
View across the Hufeisenplatz, Kirchsteigfeld, Potsdam
Working Model of Hufeisenplatz, Kirchsteigfeld, Potsdam
New Town of Kirchsteigfeld, Potsdam Existing Buildings and Proposed Completion
"Urban Space is created by the built massing and their elevations. Buildings are therefore spaceforming. The designer of a building is consequently responsible for the image that is created and imposed upon the user. Buildings mark their surroundings and must accordingly capture the 'genius loci' and reflect this 'spirit of the place' in which they are located. In this sense buildings 'serve' their context and the people which inhabit them" Rob Krier and Christoph Kohl
Maimi-von-Mirbach Strasse, Kirchsteigfeld, Potsdam
Rob Krier
A Romantic Rationalist, Architect and Urban Planer.
Rob Krier ranks as one of the most influential urban planners and architects of postmodernism. Rob Krier has always taken the historic repertoire seriously. For him, continuity and aestheticism are ways of reviving what he regards as the art of architecture that lost its way in modernism. Though his retrospective viewpoint and, in particular, his increasingly literal adoption of historic forms may have earned him criticism, his urban districts and residential developments are in demand. In recent years, he has enjoyed unprecedented success, especially in the Netherlands. Krier creates urban spaces that are pleasant to live in; places with which the inhabitants can identify. His small and lovingly designed low-density houses ² usually created in collaboration with other architects give people a sense of a recognizable individual lifestyle.
Krier·s urban development plans and reconstructions are deliberately moulded in the tradition of the European city and they owe much to Camillo Sitte·s visions of empty and built urban space. Krier creates clearly defined yet diverse and varied urban spaces whose cohesiveness is achieved by linking them axially.
It was his 1975 manifesto Stadtraum (published in English in 1979 under the title Ur-ban Space) that first brought Rob Krier to the attention of a broader public. From that moment on, urban planning became his domain, although he had initially set out with the dream of designing cathedrals, town halls and other public buildings. And so Rob Krier has become better known as an urban planner than as an architect, draughts-man and sculptor. Rob Krier is one of the most remarkable and talented architectural draughtsmen of the twentieth century. His colourful, detailed drawings are more like vedutas. They are lyrical, opulent and teeming with figures. Rob Krier·s portrayals of architecture are in the tradition of the painterly ´architecture pictureµ. In the work of Rob Krier, the re-iteration and revival of this painterly maniera is the logical consequence of his archi-tectural approach, whose leitmotif is a spatial concept in the tradition of European urbanism.
Visiting Stuttgart, Germany for about a half day ten years ago, I was impressed by the pedestrian nature of the city, probably the most suited to walking of any European city I visited at that time. One could walk across parts of the city without ever encountering automobile traffic, achieved via bridges and viaducts. The pedestrian malls along the way reinforced this apparent importance on walking. The urban condition of Stuttgart, Rob Krier's hometown, is very important to the architect/planner. One of the four chapters ofUrban Space is devoted to the reconstruction of devastated parts of the city center. Although I can't say for sure how much of Krier's exhaustive plan influenced the city's efforts, his plan is intended more as a critique of Modern planning than as a realistically realizable scheme. The first two chapters set up the extreme dialectic between traditional, shaped urban space and the leftover space created by Modern planning and its object-centric approach to architecture. Abundant illustrations - primarily plans and perspective views - are used to get across this message, one that is undeniable while regrettably ignoring the political mechanisms that have allowed Modern planning to take precedence over traditional forms of planning. Now thirty years old, this book no less relevant today, though the author's plans seem just as dated as the ones he feverishly rallied against.
Kriers view of typologies is a bit different than Rossis view. He concentrated on typologies of public space rather building types. Krier believes the physical form of the city is determined by the relationships between the streets and the open spaces, the elevations and sections that enclose them [4] leading to volumetric and 3-D understanding of the city. It is by studying these elements of urban space that a series of typologies may be generated. The typologies originate from three main forms: square, circular, or triangular. Through a diagrammatic process, Krier makes various adjustments to the forms. For example, he says the forms can be independent or work together; they can transform through processes, such as addition, overlapping, and penetrating, etc [15]. Both Rossi and Krier suggest approaches
Following the success of his widely acclaimend Urban Space, a work which looked at the problems of our cities from a historical, theoretical and practical standpoint, Krier now applies his particular, highly influential mode of didactic criticism to contemporary architecture in continuing search for fundamental architectural truths
