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Drawing for Architecture

AUTHOR Krier, Leon; Krier, Leon; Krier, Lon et al.
PUBLISHER MIT Press (07/10/2009)
PRODUCT TYPE Paperback (Paperback)

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.

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Product Format
Product Details
ISBN-13: 9780262512930
ISBN-10: 0262512939
Binding: Paperback or Softback (Trade Paperback (Us))
Content Language: English
More Product Details
Page Count: 248
Carton Quantity: 24
Product Dimensions: 5.40 x 0.50 x 7.90 inches
Weight: 0.90 pound(s)
Feature Codes: Price on Product, Table of Contents, Illustrated
Country of Origin: US
Subject Information
BISAC Categories
Architecture | Design, Drafting, Drawing & Presentation
Architecture | Criticism
Architecture | History - Contemporary (1945 -)
Grade Level: College Freshman and up
Dewey Decimal: 720.222
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008039055
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
publisher marketing
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.

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Paperback