Port Mirabay, Tampa, Florida
by Cooper, Johnson, Smith

The French architect Jean Castec ( Ecole d'Architecture Versailles ) once mentioned the often refered to torments and pains of the modern artists and said: " I myself on the contrary do not suffer. My work as an architect is a pleasure and delight. "

Now looking to the numerous presented projects in Katarxis, no single one is celebrating the anxieties of artistical creation or the spleen of contemporaneity!

Even, if as we can imagine, the process from first sketches to the completion of a construction presents numerous difficulties and pressures, the objective of architecture has never been to document the struggle of design and construction, but to produce good designs and buildings as naturally and lightly as nature does in its works. " It is only in the mediocre artist's work that the main expression consists of the artist's exhibition of himself ", says the German poet Friedrich Schiller.( " Uber das Schoene und die Kunst " )

Hall Church by Duncan McCallum McRoberts, Seattle

The New and Contemporary traditional architects and urbanists are not missionaries of some hypothetical modernity, nor tragical and and misunderstood heroes of an anachronic avantguard, but craftsmen and artists, citizen above all, who design and build places and buildings of durable qualities of beauty, utility and solidity to allow people of our time to live in comfort, peace, harmony, enlightenment and pleasure.

This pleasure and delight which begifts the work process of traditional architects and urbanists is a natural anticipation of the well-being the inhabitants will permanently enjoy in the places and buildings designed for the emulation of the "Good Life".

Millebach, Mixed-Use Urban Development, Luxembourg
The project is located on an ancien idustrial site and integrates existing park areas, pathways, walls, ruins and buildings into a new ensemble grouped around a terraced piazza.

Mulhern & Steil, Luxembourg (1989)

Millebach, Luxembourg, Existing Situation ( 1987 )

Millebach, A Mixed-Use Urban Development in Luxembourg
by Mulhern & Steil, Luxembourg (1989)

If man " dwells as a poet " (Martin Heidegger /Hoelderlin ), the new traditional architects and urbanists can be said to design and build a world where poetry still makes sense!