Leon Krier is one of the best-known—and most provocative—architects and urban theoreticians in the world. Until now, however, his ideas have circulated mostly among a professional audience of architects, city planners, and academics. In The Architecture of Community, Krier has reconsidered and expanded writing from his 1998 book Architecture: Choice or Fate. Here he refines and updates his thinking on the making of sustainable, humane, and attractive villages, towns, and cities. The book includes drawings, diagrams, and photographs of his built works, which have not been widely seen until now. With three new chapters, The Architecture of Community provides a contemporary road map for designing or completing today’s fragmented communities. Illustrated throughout with Krier’s original drawings, The Architecture of Community explains his theories on classical and vernacular urbanism and architecture, while providing practical design guidelines for creating livable towns. The book contains descriptions and images of the author’s built and unbuilt projects, including the Krier House and Tower in Seaside, Florida, as well as the town of Poundbury in England. Commissioned by the Prince of Wales in 1988, Krier’s design for Poundbury in Dorset has become a reference model for ecological planning and building that can meet contemporary needs.

In architecture, as in food, local is an idea whose time has come. Of course, the idea of an architecture that responds to site; draws on local building traditions, materials, and crafts; and strives to create a sense of community is not recent. Yet, the way it has evolved in the past few years in the hands of some of the world's most accomplished architects is indeed defining a new movement. From the rammed-earth houses of Rick Joy and Pacific Northwest timber houses of Tom Kundig, to the community-built structures of Rural Studio and Francis Kéré, designers everywhere are championing an architecture that exists from, in, and for a specific place. The stunning projects, presented here in the first book to examine this global shift, were featured at the thirteenth and final Ghost conference held in 2011, organized by Nova Scotia architect, educator, and local practitioner Brian MacKay-Lyons. The result is the most complete collection of contemporary regionalist architecture available, with essays by early proponents of the movement, including Kenneth Frampton, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Pritzker Prize–winning architect Glenn Murcutt.

The move to liveable communities--ideal ``small towns'' and neighborhoods where people work, live, play, and walk from place to place--is on. Profit from what a visionary group of architects leading this movement has learned about designing new ``small towns'' in Peter Katz's The New Urbanism. You'll discover the amazing potential for this kind of work as well as case studies, site plans, project analyses, and 180 beautiful photographs. This unique reference also tackles--and answers--the critical issues of crime, health, traffic, environmental degradation, and economic vitality and opens a startling window on the look and feel of future communities. Every designer can profit from this guide to building the utopias of tomorrow--today!

Drawings, doodles, and ideograms argue with ferocity and wit for traditional urbanism and architecture. Architect Léon Krier's doodles, drawings, and ideograms make arguments in images, without the circumlocutions of prose. Drawn with wit and grace, these clever sketches do not try to please or flatter the architectural establishment. Rather, they make an impassioned argument against what Krier sees as the unquestioned doctrines and unacknowledged absurdities of contemporary architecture. Thus he shows us a building bearing a suspicious resemblance to Norman Foster's famous London “gherkin” as an example of “priapus hubris” (threatened by detumescence and “priapus nemesis”); he charts “Random Uniformity” (“fake simplicity”) and “Uniform Randomness” (“fake complexity”); he draws bloated “bulimic” and disproportionately scrawny “anorexic” columns flanking a graceful “classical” one; and he compares “private virtue” (modernist architects' homes and offices) to “public vice” (modernist architects' “creations”). Krier wants these witty images to be tools for re-founding traditional urbanism and architecture. He argues for mixed-use cities, of “architectural speech” rather than “architectural stutter,” and pointedly plots the man-vehicle-landneed ratio of “sub-urban man” versus that of a city dweller. In an age of energy crisis, he writes (and his drawings show), we “build in the wrong places, in the wrong patterns, materials, densities, and heights, and for the wrong number of dwellers”; a return to traditional architectures and building and settlement techniques can be the means of ecological reconstruction. Each of Krier's provocative and entertaining images is worth more than a thousand words of theoretical abstraction.

This polemic is essential reading for anyone converned with the state and direction of architecture and urban planning today and will provake wide-ranging discussion.

This in-depth book offers critical essays and profiles of work by architects and designers in Muslim nations, as recognized by the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. 270 illustrations, 100 in color.

Result of a collaboration between CITIES and ARCAM, the Amsterdam Center of Architecture, in order to show the results of a joint investigation into the development of bottom-up initiatives and their relationships with the history of the city, brought to life in Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Moscow, New York and Taipei.