Drawing for 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 toplease or flatter the architectural establishment. Rather, they make an impassioned argument againstwhat Krier sees as the unquestioned doctrines and unacknowledged absurdities of contemporaryarchitecture. Thus he shows us a building bearing a suspicious resemblance to Norman Foster's famousLondon "gherkin" as an example of "priapus hubris" (threatened by detumescenceand "priapus nemesis"); he charts "Random Uniformity" ("fakesimplicity") 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' homesand offices) to "public vice" (modernist architects' "creations"). Krier wantsthese witty images to be tools for re-founding traditional urbanism and architecture. He argues formixed-use cities, of "architectural speech" rather than "architectural stutter,"and pointedly plots the man-vehicle-landneed ratio of "sub-urban man" versus that of acity dweller. In an age of energy crisis, he writes (and his drawings show), we "build in thewrong places, in the wrong patterns, materials, densities, and heights, and for the wrong number ofdwellers"; a return to traditional architectures and building and settlement techniques can bethe means of ecological reconstruction. Each of Krier's provocative and entertaining images is worthmore than a thousand words of theoretical abstraction.

Architect and urbanist Leon Krier has taught at the Architectural Association, the Royal College of Arts, the University of Virginia, and Princeton and Yale Universities and has been an architectural consultant to the Prince of Wales since 1988. He is the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture and Jefferson Memorial Gold Medal. He is the author of the award-winning Architecture: Choice or Fate and other books.