Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Drawing for Architecture

Drawing for Architecture

Kunstler, James Howard
Krier, Leon

Paperback

Series: Writing Architecture

General ArchitectureArchitecture History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0262512939
ISBN13: 9780262512930
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: Jul 10 2009
Pages: 248
Weight: 0.90
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.40 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
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-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.

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