Architect Léon Krier's doodles, drawings, and ideograms make arguments inimages, without the circumlocutions of prose. Drawn with wit and grace, theseclever sketches do not try to please or flatter the architectural establishment.Rather, they make an impassioned argument against what Krier sees as theunquestioned doctrines and unacknowledged absurdities of contemporary architecture. Thus he shows us a building bearing a suspicious resemblance toNorman Foster's famous London 'gherkin' as an example of 'priapus hubris'(threatened by detumescence and 'priapus nemesis'); he charts 'RandomUniformity' ('fake simplicity') and 'Uniform Randomness' ('fake complexity');he draws bloated 'bulimic' and disproportionately scrawny 'anorexic' columnsflanking a graceful 'classical' one; and he compares 'private virtue' (modernistarchitects' homes and offices) to 'public vice' (modernist architects' 'creations').Krier wants these witty images to be tools for re-foundingtraditional urbanism and architecture. He argues for mixed-usecities, of'architectural speech' rather than 'architectural stut-ter,' and pointedly plots the man-vehicle-landneed ratio of'sub-urban man' versus that of a city dweller. In an age ofenergy crisis, he writes (and his drawings show), we 'build inthe wrong places, in the wrong patterns, materials, densities,and heights, and for the wrong number of dwellers'; a return totraditional architectures and building and settlement techniquescan be the means of ecological reconstruction. Each of Krier'sprovocative and entertaining images is worth more than athousand words of theoretical abstraction.
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