Architect and Planner Léon Krier Dies at 79
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Léon Krier, the controversial architect and planner who spearheaded the New Urbanism movement, died this Tuesday in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. He was 79. Suffering from colon cancer, he apparently jumped to his death from the walls of Palma’s cathedral—though they do not name him, local newspapers have reported the suicide of a 79-year-old Luxembourger.
A figure at once radical and reactionary, he will be remembered in the United States for buildings such as the neo-Mediterranean Jorge M. Pérez Architecture Center in Miami (2000–05) and the chapel-like Town Hall in Windsor, Florida (1990–99), as well as for his contributions to the planning and development of Seaside, Florida. The latter includes the 1987 Krier House, an early essay in his design ideas that was scathingly described by the late Joseph Rykwert as “William-and-Adelaide (somewhere between Regency and early Victorian).” Indeed, rather than any of the buildings he completed, Krier’s greatest legacy is his contribution to ideas about town planning, specifically his critique of Modernist zoning and his persuasive championing of a return to walkable streets and squares in a period of wholesale urban clearance. In the United Kingdom, he is best known for his proximity to King Charles III and for the planning of Poundbury, the traditionalist extension to Dorchester launched in 1988 by the then Prince of Wales on his Duchy of Cornwall estate.
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Queen Mother Square, the central hub of Poundbury, Dorset. Photo by Rebeca.ggv, Wikimedia Commons
Born in Luxembourg, the younger brother of the architect and fellow traditionalist Rob Krier (1938–2023), the future polemicist declared war on the postwar orthodoxy very early in his trajectory, abandoning his architecture studies in Stuttgart, Germany, after barely a year. “I left before I felt completely lobotomized,” he later recalled, and instead went to work at James Stirling’s London office in 1968. He would spend over two decades in the British capital, teaching at both the Architectural Association and the Royal College of Art (his students included a young Zaha Hadid), during which time he developed his planning ideas through a series of texts and brilliant, witty drawings that compared what he saw as the alienation of the CIAM city with the community-centric life of the preindustrial town. In light of what he considered Modernism’s cultural amnesia, Krier advocated for the creation of a meaningful public realm rooted in civic responsibility and the human scale.
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The Krier House at Seaside (1) and Windsor Village Hall (2), both in Florida. Photos by Dr. Laurie & Joseph Braga, Wikimedia Commons (1), and watchduck, Wikimedia Commons (2)
In 1985, he courted controversy by authoring Albert Speer: Architecture, 1932–1942, a book championing the design legacy of Hitler’s official architect. “Can a war criminal be a great artist?” he asked in it. Where Rykwert saw “a political innocence verging on insensibility, almost flippancy,” others suspected a more deliberately reactionary affront. Either way, it was a provocation, one that stands as a reminder of the toxic and ultimately sterile style wars that dominated architectural debate at the time. For many years a visiting critic and professor at universities such as Cornell, Harvard, Notre Dame, Princeton, Virginia, and Yale, Krier famously clashed with Peter Eisenman, and in the early 2000s their disagreement became the subject of a symposium, an exhibition, and a book (all under the aegis of Yale).
Ciudad Cayalá, Guatemala City, Guatemala. Photo by Vicente Aguirre, Wikimedia Commons
Today, when the skirmishes of the 1980s have come back to haunt us in the form of presidential executive orders, the urbane and courteous Krier appears to have much in common with the firebrand populists who dominate current political debate—brilliant in opposition, they often fail to deliver once in power. For all their pedestrian civism, the places he contributed to as a designer—Seaside, for example, or the gated community of Cayalá in Guatemala City—rely on the automobile and on industry and a proletariat that are located elsewhere. Only the royal Poundbury has achieved a meaningful mix of social classes and activities thanks to planning policies that go well beyond what hands-off neoliberalism will allow. While politicians and architects wield limited power in the face of unregulated capital, both have enormous influence on public debate, and Krier helped shift the discourse irrevocably.
