Leon Krier Quotes

There is no sadder tale in the annals of architecture than the virtual disappearance of the defining architectural form of the Modern Movement - publicly sponsored housing.

I really love Miami, but I don't think the architecture matches the city. It's a bit too commercial.

The ideas of [ Le Corbusier ] that actually found their way into practice were deeply destructive - for instance, the tower-in-a-park, which mutated into the vertical slums of the late 20th century.

Everything that would be said against the Eixample's heirs, from Le Corbusier's 'ville radieuse' to Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, was already said, with far less justice, about the Eixample itself. And all its critics concurred that the basic mistake was to have left the planning of a city in the hands of a socialist.

In Paris, there has to be a presence. History becomes the most interesting when it's compared to the present. I mean there's a whole group of people that want to build new buildings that look like old buildings.

Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings... based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better.

Downtown Toronto is a very good place to talk about the neutrality of modernist architecture. I'm sure this kind of box-building was interesting in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, but I think it's absolutely ridiculous to build like this in 2013.

In 1964, when we first arrived in New York City, I remember vividly seeing the skyline of Manhattan, and our first proposal of 1964 was to wrap two lower Manhattan buildings. We never got permission.

If a dictator takes up my ideas, the resulting town will survive the political system that commissioned it and stand as a social good. Besides, modernism rather than classicism has dominated the architecture of totalitarian regimes of both the left and right.

In the '60s when I was a student, there was this campaign to destroy 75 percent of the old buildings in Paris, replacing them with modern architecture. I realized this as a dangerous utopia. This modern vision did not understand the richness of the city. Thankfully, such destruction did not happen.

In Brussels, you are able to have a lot of appointments in a day. In Paris, you can have one, two, maybe three, but you spend all your time on the road, in the car or in the suburbs. In Brussels, everything is easy. It's not a very big city, and the people are very quiet and warm.

Paris enjoys a high reputation for the style of its public edifices, and, while there is a very great deal to condemn, compared with other capitals, I think it is entitled to a distinguished place in this particular.

Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 p.m. (or thereabouts), when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite.

Houston is undoubtedly my showcase city. I saved all my best buildings for Houston.

In Boston, I developed my eye from the drawing. In Paris, I was fascinated by what my eye saw in the way that Paris is built, its 'measure.'

Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture, which ranges from the bland to the fancifully bland.

I became a fanatic of the architecture of Le Corbusier and I visited almost all his buildings and read all his books. Only later on did I discover that all the things that impressed me in his books, particular his ideology, he had picked up from Auguste Perret.

If we're talking about the urban landscape as an advanced, forward-thinking art form, there must be some intellectual thinking involved.

Architecture is one of the art forms best able to improve and revitalise cities both artistically and functionally.

We must kill the street. We shall truly enter into modern town planning only after we have accepted this preliminary determination.

Our cities need to change, fast. Tactical Urbanism is a guided tour of solutions created when local people decide they can't wait for politics to catch up before they improve their neighborhoods. This weathervane book deserves a place on any urbanist's bookshelf.

We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.

Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification

Why do people have to build such depressing places? I'm not saying that every nook and cranny of the world has to be beautiful, but does it have to be this ugly?

[Urbanization] is the inevitable outcome of the processes of growth and the processes of modernization.