Leon Krier, Artist for the Peak Oil Era

Leon Krier is an architectural traditionalist, no doubt. At the beginning of his recent book, The Architecture of Community (Island Press), he essentially asks readers to make a choice: Which would you rather see torn down — all of the “historic” structures, or all of the “modern” ones?

For Mr. Krier, the preference for traditional structures is as much about aesthetics as it is about pragmatism, as you can see from his illustration at left. He contends — and you can argue with him on this point — that traditional buildings were better built and more suited to the energy challeneges of the future than would modern structures. Mr. Krier is a proponent of peak oil, the theory that oil supplies will reach a production peak and then begin a steep decline — with disastrous consequences. The forward to his latest book — Drawing for Architecture (MIT Press), a collection of his drawings and cartoons that skewer bad design and bad planning — was written by none other than James Howard Kunstler, the peak-oil community’s most prominent voice.

“The Peak Oil situation was significant for Krier because it presented compelling new support for his campaign to restore traditional practices in architecture and urbanism — namely, that continuation of the broad modern(ist) program would soon be a practical impossibility,” Mr. Kunstler writes. “The generalized urban hypertrophy that characterized the 20th century had been underwritten by oil and methane (natural) gas. Everything from the skyscraper to the American happy motoring suburb stood to lose value and utility in the aftermath of an oil supply crash.”

Mr. Kunster is often accused of being a cheerleader of disaster, and Mr. Krier could be there alongside him. But the point here is a good one, and is applicable to colleges as well: Places built on the assumption of copious energy supplies, like those of the past, are precarious. The hypertrophy of the campus parallels the hypertrophy of the city described above, as Mr. Kunstler himself has pointed out in our own pages. Mr. Krier is concerned with creating places that are accessible to walking or bike-riding, very efficient transportation systems. And he is interested in places that are aesthetically resilient, too — that way you don’t have to tear them down every 30 years, which is what we are doing to Brutalist buildings today.