02 July 2008

Brandevoort

I'm on an email list of similarly minded "trad-urb" types, and some people recently submitted these photos of a new town being built in The Netherlands. This is by Leon Krier, from whom I posted an anti-modernism quote a few weeks ago. This is anti-modern. He laid out the town, and designed some of the buildings. The rest were constructed following guidelines he developed.

I'm posting these, not because I think it is necessarily relevant to downtown or to OTR, rather these are more relevant to suburban development. That's because, this is a "greenfield" development, the Netherlands equivalent of a suburban development on farmland. It is walkable, has two schools, and has a train stop:














Some more links on Brandervoort here and here.

Some of the photos on this page show some residents, who almost look like Americans, people washing their cars etc...

Link to a similar development in England: Poundbury.

Typical architect's response: "Rubbish"

A driving tour of Poundbury on Youtube:




Recent awards for similar projects.

4 comments:

Radarman said...

I've seen Poundbury. I know why it makes architects cranky, but I have to say it would be a remarkably fine place to live. Besides being laid out well and built of good materials, it's part of greater Dorchester, one of the nicest cities on earth.
N.B. Poundbury is one of the places going without traffic signals. It's great.

Anonymous said...

Another good post. This is what they should build down at the Banks -- rather than the ugly renderings of sterile, low-cost (read: cheap) attempts at housing that have shown up in the most recent proposal. If Cincinnati "blows" the Banks project after all these years it will be an incredible embarrassment (not to mention a waste of money).

Morris said...

I think that something like this would be much preferable to the designs that have been shown for the Banks.

luciensteil said...

Brandevoort is by Rob Krier, the brother of Leon Krier. Rob has designed and built a impressive number of successful New Towns and New Traditional neigbourhoods in the Netherlands.
www.krierkohl.com