Towns and Town-Making Principles

pub_fac_krieger_towns_and_town-making_principlesThis publication contains essays by Alex Krieger, Leon Krier, William Lennertz, Patrick Pinnell, and Vincent Scully, Jr. The foreword was written by Peter Rowe, Dean of the Faculty of Design, Harvard University. It is one in a series of publications of the GSD and was published in connection with an exhibition of work by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk in the fall of 1990 at the Gund Hall Gallery.

Krieger writes, “The contemporary American suburban landscape is a victim of its own success. We were seeking its advantages long before the automobile materialized to make them conveniently accessible. Hardly an aberrant form of settlement, the leafy suburb between city and country is precisely the form of settlement that the western world has desired since the Enlightenment. . . A pre-eighteenth century mind could hardly have conceived that the forlorn and marginally inhabited zone directly outside of the city walls, which for centuries denoted “a place of inferior, debased and especially licentious habits of life,” would now expand to encompass a territory in which all would reside. By the end of the 19th century, the transformation of the loathsome suburb would be complete as it became the safe haven from the monstrous and even more loathsome industrial city….”

Harvard University and Rizzoli,