Leon Krier’s tale of post-carbuncle London

Architecture Here and There

The dome of St. Paul's Cathedral takes center stage in this effort to imagine what London must have been like centuries ago. The dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral takes center stage in this effort to imagine what London must have been like centuries ago.

Here is Leon Krier’s piece, “Sustainable Architecture and the Legible City,” just published in Britain’s Architectural Review. Krier recalls the atmosphere in London architectural circles after Prince Charles’s speech denouncing an addition to the National Gallery as “a carbuncle on the face of a beloved friend.” This caught the design community by surprise. A surprise to me was that the reaction was not entirely negative, and in its wake Krier received a number of masterplanning offers, including, at last, an official, nay, a royal invitation to assess a recent competition for, and then to offer an alternative masterplan for, Paternoster Square, next to Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, which had been surrounded by plain modernist buildings after World War II.

What happened to Krier after the invitation is a…

View original post 334 more words

About David Brussat

This blog was begun in 2009 as a feature of the Providence Journal, where I was on the editorial board and wrote a weekly column of architecture criticism for three decades. Architecture Here and There fights the style wars for classical architecture and against modern architecture, no holds barred. History Press asked me to write and in August 2017 published my first book, "Lost Providence." I am now writing my second book. My freelance writing on architecture and other topics addresses issues of design and culture locally and globally. I am a member of the board of the New England chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, which bestowed an Arthur Ross Award on me in 2002. I work from Providence, R.I., where I live with my wife Victoria, my son Billy and our cat Gato. If you would like to employ my writing and editing to improve your work, please email me at my consultancy, dbrussat@gmail.com, or call 401.351.0457. Testimonial: "Your work is so wonderful - you now enter my mind and write what I would have written." - Nikos Salingaros, mathematician at the University of Texas, architectural theorist and author of many books.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.