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…
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