Product Information
Drawings, doodles, and ideograms argue with ferocity and wit for traditional urbanism and architecture.Architect Leon Krier's doodles, drawings, and ideograms make arguments in images, without the circumlocutions of prose. Drawn with wit and grace, these clever sketches do not try to please or flatter the architectural establishment. Rather, they make an impassioned argument against what Krier sees as the unquestioned doctrines and unacknowledged absurdities of contemporary architecture. Thus he shows us a building bearing a suspicious resemblance to Norman Foster's famous London gherkin as an example of priapus hubris (threatened by detumescence and priapus nemesis ); he charts Random Uniformity ( fake simplicity ) and Uniform Randomness ( fake complexity ); he draws bloated bulimic and disproportionately scrawny anorexic columns flanking a graceful classical one; and he compares private virtue (modernist architects' homes and offices) to public vice (modernist architects' creations ). Krier wants these witty images to be tools for re-founding traditional urbanism and architecture. He argues for mixed-use cities, of architectural speech rather than architectural stutter, and pointedly plots the man-vehicle-landneed ratio of sub-urban man versus that of a city dweller. In an age of energy crisis, he writes (and his drawings show), we build in the wrong places, in the wrong patterns, materials, densities, and heights, and for the wrong number of dwellers ; a return to traditional architectures and building and settlement techniques can be the means of ecological reconstruction. Each of Krier's provocative and entertaining images is worth more than a thousand words of theoretical abstraction.Product Identifiers
PublisherMIT Press LTD
ISBN-139780262512930
eBay Product ID (ePID)89603259
Product Key Features
Book TitleDrawing for Architecture
AuthorLeon Krier
FormatPaperback
LanguageEnglish
Publication Year2009
Number of Pages248 Pages
Dimensions
Item Height203mm
Item Width137mm
Additional Product Features
Title_AuthorLeon Krier
Series TitleWriting Architecture
Country/Region of ManufactureUnited States