Architecture: Choice or Fate By Leon Krier Andreas Papadakis, 224 pages, $39

Anybody who is distressed by the "fiasco of suburbia" that has become the everyday setting of American life will find illumination in Leon Krier's compelling polemic on the current state of Western architecture and urbanism. Krier's message is heroically redemptive: We can choose to live in better surroundings than the universal automobile slum of our time. We don't have to remain captive victims to failed ideologies. There are enduring values in the art of building that are our natural legacy as human beings, and we are free to reclaim them.

Krier may be best known to Americans as the architect behind the Prince of Wales's new town of Poundbury in Dorset, England, and as the intellectual godfather of the New Urbanism movement in America, a campaign to rescue the landscape, townscape, and civic life of our nation from the failed experiment of a drive-in utopia. Few public intellectuals in any field use the English language to more powerful effect than Krier, a Luxembourgois who lived in London for 20 years and now makes his home in southern France. He brings an exhilarating clarity to issues of place-making and architecture that have been otherwise subject to a remorseless obscurantism by a colorful cast of self-promoting avant-gardist charlatans ranging from Le...