by horizontal or vertical over-extensions of established urban cores. On the development of the city Krier has written a number of essays − many first published in the journal Architectural Design, against modernist town planning and its principle of dividing up the city into a system of single use zones (housing, shopping, industry, leisure, etc.), as well as the resultant suburbia, commuting, etc. Indeed, Krier sees the modernist planner as a tyrannical figure that imposes detrimental megastructural scale more dictated by ideology than necessity. Krier summons up his criticisms and pinpoints concepts in the form of series of drawings and didactic annotated diagrams, often in his own handwriting, eventually collected in his book Drawings for Architecture, like the concept of Urban in his 1983 diagram of a truly urban town= RES PUBLICA+RES PRIVATE. There he conceives the basic urban fabric, made of private buildings and uses, as an object of vernacular local design and the exceptional public and institutional buildings as objects of classical architecture and located in privileged sites, on squares and in the focus of major vistas. On architecture and the city The principle behind Krier’s writings has been to explain the rational foundations of architecture and the city, stating that “In the language of symbols, there can exist no misunderstanding”. That is to say, for Krier, buildings have a rational order and type: a house, a palace, a temple, a campanile, a church; but also a roof, a column, a window, etc., what he terms “nameable objects”. As projects get bigger, he goes on to argue, the buildings should not get bigger, but divide up; thus, for instance, in his unrealized scheme for a school in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (1978), France, the school became a “city in miniature”. Krier proposes functional programs greatly varied within each block and plot. For him the building’s design should always be typologically or tectonically justified and the variety of building types and volumes should reflect this functional variety in an evident and natural way; in short all gratuitous uniformity or gratuitous variety should be avoided designing neighboring building lots of dimensional, functional and thus formal variety and in such a way as to generate networks of public spaces consisting of public streets, squares, avenues, boulevards, parks. For Krier it is essential to compose at once the harmony of the urban blocks and of the inseparable public spaces generated between them. In searching for