Drawing for Architecture (Writing Architecture) by Léon Krier

by Léon Krier

Drawings, doodles, and ideograms argue with ferocity and wit for traditional urbanism and architecture.Architect Léon 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-land need 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.

Genres: Architecture, Urbanism, Nonfiction, Design, Art, Cultural, Urban

Paperback

First published September 30, 2009

About the author

Léon Krier was a Luxembourgish architect, architectural theorist, and urban planner, a prominent critic of modernist architecture and advocate of New Classical architecture and New Urbanism. Krier combined an international architecture and planning practice with writing and teaching. He was well known for his master plan for Poundbury, in Dorset, England. He was the younger brother of architect Rob Krier.

Reviews

[Jack Orlleans · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling read about the nature of modern and historical cities advocating for a more lindy style.
In his numerous aesthetic doodles he attacks issues with modern architecture, architects, and urban planning. It provides some fun respite from reading while visually exemplifying the crux of his ideas.
However it's repetitive, you understand the strong majority of his arguments having finished a third of the book.

[Petr · Rating 4 out of 5]

The drawings from Mr Krier sometimes lacked too much context to be understandable in my view. However, most of them transmit great imagery and represent the comic/drawing version of an argument. I am not sure if they could convince someone about Mr Krier's views, but I enjoyed their poetry nevertheless.

[Caitlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this book, thinking it was a manual for landscape drawing, and got a comic about urban planning and architecture instead. What a huge surprise, albeit not a bad one. I love comics of this style and still learned a bit. Someone in the field would definitely enjoy it more, though.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Visually compelling arguments (sometimes with haphazard lettering) in favor of a return to classical elements against the deluge of modernism. A fine primer for learning more about contemporary architectural theory!

[Devin]

Simon sarris rec: “For great examples of honest and dishonest design, read the books by Marianne Cusato (Get Your House Right) and Leon Krier (Drawing for Architecture) that I mentioned earlier in the Research post.”

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great graphic essay on the horrors of modernism and it’s effect on cities. Some of the drawings were easier to understand than others but overall it was a clear argument.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Krier's views on the perils of urbanization, neatly wrapped into a book full of drawings. Amazing

[Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scrappy polemic sketching condenses hours of theorists' molasses-thick language into simple easy to grasp visual juxtapositions.

Krier adroitly walks the fine line between condensing the complex while retaining meaning and con-fusing ideas through oversimplification. While more than a few of his arguments go back to the heady days of Venturi and Rossi, Mo Vs PoMo, and early Gehry, remember it's the way he thinks through and portrays theoretical ideas as simple drawings that is important, rather than his theories themselves.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining visual sketches illustrating an argument against modern oil/high-energy-based (post)industrial urban design and for human-scaled clusters of liveable diverse communities.

[Sachi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clever, witty, crisp and brilliant.
Several theoretical ideas of that time congealed into one book with beautiful illustrations.

[Mark Einselen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leon Krier's drawing style inspires me to sketch more. This book has an agenda, but one I can get behind.