Lucien Steil is an author, educator, and architect dedicated to the design and building of healthy, durable, and beautiful places and buildings in a world of many and diverse inspiring traditions and cultures. He believes traditional cities and architecture have always been the ideals of harmony and beauty in a destabilized, disrupted world. For him traditional cities and architecture have remained desirable models of cultural identity, home, urbanity, and civilization.
He maintains that the traditional city remains a good and desirable place to live, and that tradition is a good home for modernity and originality. It has proven to be perfectly compatible with modern life, despite an array of pressing challenges, to be considered as opportunities rather than as limitations. For Lucien Steil, ‘this is both a tangible reality, time-tested and perfected, and a realistic, buildable, operational, and necessary project for contemporary civilization’.
Rather than becoming obsolete, the traditional city has suddenly gained a new actuality as a remedy to the ‘inconvenient truth’ of global warming and climate change. Both its morphological and typological components, as well as its socio-economic and convivial patterns and paradigms, etc., seem the ones best adapted to refresh and adjust to the dramatic challenges of a post-pandemic urban civilization and a new ecology of ‘Città Slow’ and ‘Glocalism’.
Traditional architecture and urbanism do indeed empower a strategy of ‘Global Regionalism’ rather than submitting to ‘Regional Globalism’ and foster a sustainable and organic diversity while acknowledging the opportunities of global solidarity.