ABSTRACT
On this point they have been vigorously seconded by more recent neotraditional architects and critics, such as Leon Krier, whose wickedly sharp cartoons continue the tradition of starkly dualistic – ‘this versus that’ – graphic polemics (Figure 9.1) initiated by Pugin’s Contrasts of 1836, and continued most brilliantly and simplistically by Krier’s chosen avant-garde antagonist, Le Corbusier.2 And just like Pugin, Krier is inclined to see the physical form of the city as a more or less transparent window to its social and political soul. So moving right along from Pugin’s condemnation of the aesthetic and moral degradation of the industrial city, Krier would label the open, non-hierarchical and anarchic spatial field of the American city as “a place of damnation”: the antithesis of the bounded, centered and organically ordered traditional European city, which is “a place of privileges, civic rights, and liberties” (although Krier neglects to say for whom).
