Leon Krier Quotes

One great building does not make a great city.

The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.

I'm completely taken and impressed by the planning authority of Singapore and its Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). It's the most cutting-edge agency in the world. They have very effective guidelines for development, and they review design as it evolves.

Urban design as a discipline barely exists in most American and Canadian cities. In Singapore, there are innovative transportation strategies at work.

I think it's evident that expensive neighborhoods in Seattle are surrounded by natural beauty. That elevates city life. So if we can make cities more attractive in the long run, we can be smarter about issues like development, zoning and economics.

Architecture is a slow business, and city planning even slower.

As architects we are often involved in the concrete-steel-and-glass aspect of it, but cities are social structures, and to be involved in imagining the future of cities and the type of relationships and the types of places that we're making is something that intrigues me very much.

My provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious, scientific theory of cities and scientific theory means quantifiable, relying on underlying generic principles that can be made in a - put into a predictive framework. That's the quest.

If, instead of hiring half-baked revolutionary planners to fill our college undergraduates with ingenious schemes to disperse populations, split up big cities into little ones, go underground or into distant places to escape bombs and congestion, abandon large urban areas in favor of roadside villages, we were to publish reliable, simply written, common-sense information to control the building boom, what a country this would be!

Urban planning should be done with the mindset that we are determining the city's fabric for 100 years to come.

In Manchester, you don't have proper tall buildings. Or in Munich.

Cities are complex and contain just about any thing or concept ever invented by humans. How the city is built, its topography, and how close you live to your work and a grocery store affects your mobility.

I didn't realize Boston was so easy to get around. In my head, I imagined Boston being this really sprawling city.

In city planning, there is no limit to be fixed.

Stockholm is surely an urban planner's dream. Everything works. Everything looks good.

There is little in the architecture of a city that is more beautifully designed than a tree.

In urbanization, you think big because you are thinking decades ahead.

Without land, how can you have development of roads, highways, townships, etc?

The form a city assumes as it evolves over time owes more to large-scale works of civil engineering - what we now call infrastructure - than almost any other factor save topography.

The city is as large as Seville or Cordova; its streets, I speak of the principal ones, are very wide and straight; some of these, and all the inferior ones, are half land and half water, and are navigated by canoes.

I think that there will always be a need for Housing and Urban Development.

London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.

Many of the received models of modern architecture and planning owe their ultimate origin to the building code and public health reform movements of the second half of the 19th century.

Fifty years ago people were talking about Sydney's sprawl, but nobody does anything about it.

I see my buildings as pieces of cities, and in my designs I try to make them into responsible and contributing citizens.