Léon Krier

Léon Krier CVO (born 7 April 1946) is a Luxembourgish architect, architectural theorist, and urban planner, a prominent critic of modernist architecture and advocate of New Classical architecture and New Urbanism.

Krier combines an international architecture and planning practice with writing and teaching.

He is well known for his master plan for Poundbury, in Dorset, England.

He is the younger brother of architect Rob Krier.

Krier abandoned his architectural studies at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 1968, after only one year, to work in the office of architect James Stirling in London, UK.

After four years working for Stirling, interrupted by a two-year association with Josef Paul Kleihues in Berlin, Krier spent 20 years in England practicing and teaching at the Architectural Association and Royal College of Art.

In this period, Krier's statement: “I am an architect, because I don’t build”, became a famous expression of his uncompromising anti-modernist attitude.

Though Krier is well known for his defense of classical architecture and the reconstruction of traditional “European city” models, close scrutiny of his work in fact shows a shift from an early Modernist rationalist approach (project for University of Bielefeld, 1968) towards a vernacular and classical approach both formally and technologically.

Since the late 1970s he has been one of the most influential modern traditional architects and planners.

He is one of the first and most prominent critics of architectural modernism, mainly of its functional zoning and the ensuing suburbanism, campaigning for the renaissance of the traditional grown city model and its growth based on the polycentric city model.

His ideas had a great influence on the New Urbanism movement, both in the US and Europe.

The most complete compilation of them is published in his book The Architecture of Community.

He is best known for his masterplan for, and ongoing oversight of, the development of Poundbury, an urban extension to Dorchester, UK for the Duchy of Cornwall and Charles III; and for his masterplan for Paseo Cayalá, an extension of four new urban quarters for Guatemala City.

From 1976 to 2016 Krier was a visiting professor at the Universities of Princeton, Yale, Virginia, Cornell and Notre Dame.

These include the unrealized schemes for Kingston upon Hull (1977), Rome (1977), Luxembourg (1978) (which was his most comprehensive masterplan focusing on sprawl mitigation and town center repair), West Berlin (1977–83), Bremen (1978–1980), Stockholm (1981), Poing Nord, Munich (1983), a masterplan to be completed in the year 2000 for Washington D.C. (1984) commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art of New York; Atlantis, a neoclassical district for intellectuals and artists on Tenerife (1987); Area Fiat, Novoli (Florence), Italy (1993), Corbeanca, Romania (2007), and the High Malton Masterplan for the Fitzwilliam Estate, Yorkshire, England (2014).

The project that marked a major turning point in his campaigning attitude towards the reconstruction of the traditional European city was his scheme (unrealized) for the 'reconstruction' of his home city of Luxembourg (1978), in response to the modernist redevelopment of the city.

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”.

Amongst his best known realizations are the temporary façade at the 1980 Venice Biennale; the Krier house in the resort village of Seaside, Florida, USA (where he also advised on the masterplan); the Archaeological Museum of São Miguel de Odrinhas, Portugal; the Windsor Village Hall in Florida; the Jorge M. Perez Architecture Center, the University of Miami School of Architecture in Miami, Florida; and the new Neighbourhood Center Città Nuova in Alessandria, Italy.

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 PRIVATA.

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.

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”.

From 1987 to 1990 Krier was the first director of the SOMAI, the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Architectural Institute, in Chicago.

, Krier is designing plans for Poundbury Dorset, U.K. (1988–present); Paseo Cayalá, Guatemala City (2003–present); El Socorro and Nogales, two new urban quarters for Guatemala City (2018–present); and the redevelopment of the closed Fawley Waterside Power Station, Southampton, U.K. (2017–present), which gained outline planning permission in July 2020, with construction beginning in 2022 and the first homes expected to be available by 2024; as well as the masterplan for a new town, Herencia de Allende, near San Miguel de Allende, México (2018–present).

Krier agreed with the viewpoint of the late Heinrich Tessenow that there is a strict relationship between the economic and cultural wealth of a city, on the one hand, and the limitation of its population on the other.

But this is not a matter of mere hypothesis, he argues, but historical fact.

The measurements and geometric organization of a city and of its quarters are not the result of mere chance or accident or simply of economic necessity, but rather represents a civilizing order which is not only aesthetic and technical but also legislative and ethical.

Krier claims, that “the whole of Paris is a pre-industrial city which still works, because it is so adaptable, something the creations of the 20th century will never be.

A city like Milton Keynes cannot survive an economic crisis, or any other kind of crisis, because it is planned as a mathematically determined social and economic project.

Since 1990, Krier has been industrial designer for Valli e Valli - Assa Abloy and Giorgetti, an Italian furniture company.

He later master planned Luxembourg's new Cité Judiciaire that was to be architecturally designed by his brother (1990–2008).

In 1990, of the nine experts invited, he was the only one to support the Dresden citizens' initiative to reconstruct the historic Dresden Frauenkirche and the Historische Neumarkt area and, in 2007, the Frankfurt Altstadt Forum, a citizen initiative which succeeded in reconstructing the historic "Hühnermarkt" area against strong professional and political opposition.

Krier has applied his theories in large-scale, detailed plans for numerous cities in the Western world.

In 2003 Krier became the inaugural Driehaus Architecture Prize laureate.

Krier acts as architectural consultant on his urban planning projects but only designs buildings of his personal choice.

Krier has designed plans commissioned by public administrations, including the redevelopment of Tor Bella Monaca, a degraded suburb of Rome (2010), and a long-term redevelopment policy plan for the municipal area of Cattolica, Rimini, Italy (2017); he was able to apply similar principles to build developments such as Knokke, Heulebrug, Belgium (1998), completed without his direction; and in his masterplan for Newquay growth area (2002–2006), Cornwall, UK, continued after his resignation by Adam Associates.

If that model collapses, the city will collapse with it.” Thus Krier argues not merely against the contemporary modernist city (he in fact argues that places like Los Angeles, US, are not cities), but against a gigantism tendency in urban growth, evident in the exploding scale of urban networks and buildings in European cities throughout the 19th century which was a result of the concentration of economic, political and cultural power.

In response to this, Krier proposed the reconstruction of the European city, based on polycentric settlement models which are dictated not by machine scale but by human scale both horizontally and vertically, of self-sufficient mixed use quarters not exceeding 33 ha (able to be crossed in 10 minutes walk) of building heights of 3 to 5 floors or 100 steps (able to be walked up comfortably) and which are limited not by mere administrative borders but by walkable, ridable, drivable boulevards, tracks, park ways.

Cities then grow by the multiplication of independent urban quarters, not by horizontal or vertical over-extensions of established urban cores.

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.