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Drawing for Architecture
Contributor(s): Krier, Leon (Author), Kunstler, James Howard (Foreword by)
ISBN: 0262512939     ISBN-13: 9780262512930
Publisher: MIT Press
OUR PRICE:   $28.76  
Product Type: Paperback
Published: July 2009
Qty:
Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Annotation: Drawings, doodles, and ideograms argue with ferocity and wit for traditional urbanism and architecture.
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Architecture | Design, Drafting, Drawing & Presentation
- Architecture | Criticism
- Architecture | History - Contemporary (1945 -)
Dewey: 720.222
LCCN: 2008039055
Series: Writing Architecture
Physical Information: 0.5" H x 5.4" W x 7.9" (0.90 lbs) 248 pages
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
Drawings, doodles, and ideograms argue with ferocity and wit for traditional urbanism and architecture.

Architect L on 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.


Contributor Bio(s): Krier, Leon: - Architect and urbanist Léon 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.