"If we consider the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant, 'Act only according to the maxim of a kind that you may want its principle to become a universal law," the architect may ask himself the question:
'What would be the consequences if the maxim on which my project is based became a general principle of architecture and urbanism?'
Build therefore in such a way that you and those who are dear to you will use your buildings, look at them, live in them, work in them, spend their holidays in them and grow old in them with pleasure."
Léon Krier, in "Architecture: Choice and Fate" Andreas Papadakis Publisher, Windsor 1998)
New Architecture and New Urbanism
Of The Necessary Harmonious Integration of Architectural Scales in the Moral and Civic, Material and Practical, Artistical and Cultural, Reconstruction of Cities and Landscapes
KATARXIS 02/1 is dedicated to the integration of architecture and urbanism in a variety of scales and relationships. It shows contemporary projects and buildings acknowledging the originality of traditional cultures, their sensitivity to man and community, to natural and cultivated environments, and which continue and enrich a historical culture of architecture and city-building within modern practice and modern thinking.
One of the primordial objectives of this edition of KATARXIS consists in the reassessment of architecture within the realm of dwelling from the scale of the house to that of the city. The issue of New Urbanism is presented in this context as an essential alternative, and as a coherent and realistic proposal to address the reconstruction of suburbs and town centers, the development of new neighbourhoods and particularly to rebuild again the civic ideals and the highly sophisticated sense of civility and culture of traditional cities.
Katarxis is an international web-magazine dedicated exclusively to the study, the practice and the promotion of traditional architecture and urbanism.
Katarxis considers New Traditional Architecture and Urbanism to be philosophically and politically essential, and culturally and artistically, socially and economically supportive of highly operational and reliable choices to build better places and buildings in the contemporary world.
Katarxis documents and reflects upon contemporary theory and practice of traditional architecture and urbanism.
Katarxis promotes artistical, architectural and urbanistic works and projects as well as educational and academic efforts contributing to a comprehensive project of a New Contemporary Humanism and to the reconstruction of a modern building culture supporting excellence, conviviality, citizenship in a context of continuity, identity and permanence.