Let's have a look what happened to our cities in the 20h century. Massive metastatic disease of inferior urbanism spread around old city cores irreversibly destroying the space. The effect was so big that 90-80% of urban area is occupied by inferior urbanism. While designing them man was reduced to a number, car got the advantage over pedestrians, bureaucratic space zoning was widely used and many unsustainable suburbs where created. Such a shortsigthed worldview. There has not been a place on earth untouched by this approach. Everybody knows it was a bad thing except the architectural elite. They call it revolutionary.

Here are four examples from the four sides of Europe. They all used to be lovely towns.

Indigo color represents the old core, regulated by organic intuition, strong hierarchy, adapted to the pedestrian, compact area with a charm.

Yellow mostly represents the 20th century, regulated but inferior urbanism, no hierarchy, advantage of car over pedestrian.

Orange represents highly unregulated space or illegal construction.

London, Great Britain

A big city. The core is surrounded whit endless terraced housing. They follow the contour of the streets, but they have no hierarchy. It's an endless sprawl.
UK is the place where tradition and modernity mix sometimes very well. Traditional urbanism is practiced there which is so rare in Europe today. Together Prince Charles and architect Leon Krier also launched the construcition of the famous Poundbury. The result? Even if their designs are often accepted by the locals the Prince is being mocked every day for what he is and Leon Krier is ignored completely by the profession.

Lisabon, Portugal

The Mediterranean. New parts of the town are scattered all around the landscape. You must use the car. It is opposite of the traditional dense Mediterranean city.
Portugal was the host of the New School of Architecture and Urbanism in Viseu, which was a part of Catholic University of Portugal and which promoted traditional urbanism. The school lasted from 2001 until 2004 when it's program was violently interrupted by the totalitarian modernist clicque. They could not stand the different point of view on architecture. I wonder what happened to their eyes?

Zagreb, Croatia

Once a lovely and multicultural Central European town (Agram) it has become an urbanist failure of the 20th century. The people here decided to completely forget their Slavic and Austria-Hungary roots and embraced an universal modernist approach mixed with illegal construction. This is how they consciously created the unmistakable flavour of ugliness that characterizes the new parts of the city.
The perspective? While the architects give awards to each other on an annual basis the government has decided to legalize the illegal construction. How stupid can a man become.

Dresden, Germany

Used to be a beautiful city on the Elbe river until WWII reduced it to rubble. It was reconstructed in the spirit of the 20th century but evidently from the map all those workers' settlements don't have the intuition to build the city the right way. But there is some hope - today the city core is unexpectedly being rebuilt in the old style though Germany is the homeland of Bauhaus school. Several blocks and Frauenkirche are already finished and hopefully much more. Who knows how far will they go, but at least there is some hope for the Continent.

drawing by Joaquin Lorda

I have stumbled upon this wonderful website of the University of Navarra which contains some lessons on classical architecture written for Spanish students. It covers the main principles, lots of building types and some famous treatises on architecture. The literature has also been specified so you can explore beyond the website. 

What I liked the most are those drawings in the first chapter, lesson 5. 3. Level two: the outlines. Here you can see a great idea in which each part of the image contains the entire picture. It is definitely not just about  the design, it represents a certain worldview represented by many traditional teachings and contemporary scientists like David Bohm and Benoit Mandelbrot.

Wikipedia Creative Commons

I'd like to start our review of traditional European architecture with affordable housing. Very often today it becomes a sterile and brutal place were poor are supposed to live while the authorities think they've done their best they can to help them. It has not always been so.

In 16th century Augsburg, Germany, a merchant called Jakob Fugger the Rich founded this social housing enclave to help the needy citezens. A noble idea - and it is still in use today! While the urban plan is organic but quite schematic the main value of this settlement except being cheap is that it actually has quite some charm. It makes a life more humane - it goes beyond function. Small number of floors and urban density mixed with picturesque roofs and gables makes it a pedestrian friendly place and even a model for social housing today. If you build it beautifully you will love it after 500 years. Not the case with modern social housing.

A map

A typical unit

Hi! I'd like to post some examples of traditional european architecture both urban and rural on this blog. By "traditional" I mean that of all social classes. Before I do that we must have a look at this map of cultural landscape in Europe which I will always refer to so that we see how the influences mix together. There are different opinions and criteria and not everything can be shown in one map but this is a general overview (a mixture of climate, geography and culture/architecture) of a cultural landscape that mostly influenced architecture during the past 2000 years in Europe. Finally you must know that this is an amateur map so if you have some suggestions of how to improve it and you think your part of the world has been neglected be free to write some comments.