Design First Walters fm qxd 2/26/04 7: 50 pm page I

Figure 3.6
A page from the
original 1973 version of the
Essex ‘Design Guide for
Residential Areas.’ These
drawings illustrate the precept
of using modest buildings to
create coherent, spatially
enclosed public space.
(
Illustration courtesy of Essex
County Council
)
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applicability to other sites in America. However,
Poundbury is notable for Krier’s use of picturesque
composition, marking a move away from his previ-
ously strong rationalist roots. More important in the
development of urban villages has been the general
acceptance in the UK of this type of development at
higher densities as the best approach to inner city
regeneration, witnessed by new projects in
Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol
(Baker, 2003).
In mainland Europe since the mid-1970s, Leon
Krier’s brother Rob Krier has been steadily amassing
a series of collaborative projects and built works
that in their spatial language are indistinguishable
from New Urbanism, and which are based largely on
re-establishing continuity with the traditional form
of the European city. This work is exemplified by
the master plan by Krier–Kohl Architects for the new
city district of Kirchsteigfeld, in Potsdam, Germany,
a typological essay in streets, squares and perimeter
blocks designed between 1992 and 1997 and par-
tially complete in 2003 (Krier, R., 2003: pp. 84–99).
What sets this and other European developments
apart from spatially similar developments in America
is the complete lack of historicist architecture in the
build-out of the plan, accomplished by over thirty
separate architectural firms. Instead of cornice
mouldings and classical columns, the buildings at
Kirchsteigfeld match crisp, contemporary aesthetics
with traditional urban forms (see Figure 3.9).
This European neorationalist approach to city
design displayed in the work of the Krier brothers,
Aldo Rossi and others, and the neotraditional pic-
turesque townscape popular in Britain, both empha-
size the art of contextual relationships between
buildings, and the importance of well-defined public
space. This view of the human-scaled city found its
American counterpart in the work of Paul Goodman,
CHAPTER THREE
●
TRADITIONAL URBANISM