Leon Krier Quotes

A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.

A city can only be reconstructed in the form of urban quarters. A large or a small city can only be reorganized as a large or a small number of urban quarters; as a federation of autonomous quarters. Each quarter must have its own center, periphery and limit. Each quarter must be a city within a city.

All buildings, large or small, public or private, have a public face, a facade; they therefore, without exception, have a positive or negative effect on the quality of the public realm, enriching or impoverishing it in a lasting and radical manner. The architecture of the city and public space is a matter of common concern to the same degree as laws and language—they are the foundation of civility and civilisation.

Cities and landscapes are illustrations of our spiritual and material worth. They not only express our values but give them a tangible reality. They determine the way in which we use or squander our energy, time, and land resources.

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.

Horizontal and vertical sprawl... are the dinosaurs of an ending fossil-fuel age of synthetic culture.

For architecture, nature provides only indications and analogies, not models to imitate.

I don't build because I am an architect. I can make true architecture because I do not build.

In fact, the public will accept any city plan and skyline provided that its architecture is traditional.

Authentic architecture is not the incarnation of the spirit of the age but of the spirit, full stop.

The problem was Le Corbusier was a genius and an enormous artist, but he tried to resolve problems to which there is no solution. So the idea to demolish the centre of Paris in order to adapt it to the car - he drew it! - is something not even the most bloody dictators conceived.

The rigidity of a bottle's form does not affect the fluidity of the liquid it contains.

You need a prince to make a town in an intellectual sense. Developers want to make money. If they cared about architecture, they'd become architects. I've had so many projects that never came off because they had no sponsor, and not because they were utopian. I just want to build a town that's normal.

Viewed from a certain distance and under good light, even an ugly city can look like the promised land.

Human intelligence is a limited resource. It cannot solve problems caused by ignoring fundamentals of existence.

As is the case with all good things in life - love, good manners, language, cooking - personal creativity is required only rarely.

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.

Lots of English people say exactly the opposite of what they mean.