—Andres Duany

Léon Krier was a character. He dressed like an impresario, wrote like a pamphleteer, and drew like an angel. He happily stoked public controversy. His most famous bon mot was, “I’m an architect, because I don’t build.” But he did build. The three buildings that I’ve seen of his—his own house, a town hall, and an auditorium—have a quality that seems to have eluded most of his traditional-minded contemporaries: originality. He was a classicist, but not a revivalist. He was original, too, in his thinking about town planning, to use an old-fashioned term he would have liked. To Krier, the principles of sound urban design were all known long ago and didn’t need to be reinvented; the great challenge was how to accommodate the automobile. His solution was not to banish cars to the periphery, or to separate them from pedestrians, but to pragmatically insinuate them into the plan: under buildings, in buildings, beside buildings, on the street, and in ad-hoc car parks that were really squares. In a Krier plan such as Poundbury, the street plan appears at first picturesque and chaotic, but this is done with a singular purpose. The person on foot is king; the person behind the wheel is the interloper. —From Witold Rybczynski On Culture and Architecture

I never met Léon Krier, but I studied under his brother Rob, who spoke of him often. Back then, I was a young architect deeply committed to modernism, and their devotion to traditional urbanism felt like a step backward. It took me years to understand just how much of the mess we made in our cities after World War II came from the core ideas of modern design. While I still keep some distance from purely nostalgic architecture, I’ve come to appreciate the timeless way of building cities that the Kriers stood for.

Léon wasn’t just a critic—he was a rebel with a vision. At a time when car-centric sprawl was taken for granted, he pushed for something radically more human: walkable neighborhoods, lively public squares, and buildings that felt rooted and real. He forced us to ask hard questions: What kind of places do we want to live in? What kind of society are we building, one street at a time? His writing was sharp but also charming, like a tough mentor who knew how to inspire. And he didn’t just talk, he built. Places like Poundbury and Ciudad Cayalá aren’t flawless, but they’re living proof that another kind of city is possible. —Gerhard W. Mayer

We’re called to mourn and remember Léon Krier (1946–2025), the great architect and urbanist who was “godfather” to the movement for restoring artistry, beauty, and decorum to an everyday world much debased by the idiocies of various modern-isms, and by the fiasco of suburban sprawl. Leo passed away last week at 79. I knew him somewhat, having spent time with him at conferences and in cafes, and corresponding with him over the years. He was a gallant, humorous, and supremely talented fellow who brought much light into an increasingly darkened world.

He is perhaps best-known for designing the project known as Poundbury in Britain, sponsored by Prince Charles (now King Charles III). Poundbury was intended to demonstrate that traditional urban design will produce places worthy of our affection, as opposed to the spiritually annihilating environments of strip malls, “housing developments,” and skyscraper city centers that became the norm after 1950.

Though he worked for King Charles on the Poundbury project, Leo dissociated himself from the “Globalist”/Woke agenda years ago, which he regarded as the political expression of the despotic modern-isms cultivated in the graduate schools and promoted by the money-chasing architectural firms.

The reform movement Leo heralded became the New Urbanism movement in America, a very potent force, since the 1990s, for rectifying the mutilated human habitat all over our country. Alas, in the past decade, the New Urbanists succumbed to Woke idiocy and, even more catastrophically, their model of the “walkable community” has become conflated with the Globalist “Fifteen-Minute City,” based on surveillance and control of the population. I hope they can work that out.

Leo was also beloved for the books he wrote and the wonderfully witty diagrams he drew to graphically communicate ideas about architecture and urban design that are hard to convey with mere words. For instance:

Get the picture(s)? I also highly recommend Leon Krier’s excellent book The Architecture of Community for a compressive study of his work. Though born in Luxembourg, he wrote in English more eloquently (and wittily) than most Anglos.

I leave you with a shot of another marvelous project designed by Leo: the Cayala district outside Guatemala City, a project completed more recently than Poundbury. As always with Leo, the picture says much more than mere words about the man and his art. —James Howard Kuntsler

The publication of Léon Krier’s entry in the Parc de la Villette competition was one of the most important events in my generation’s architectural education. Bernard Tschumi won the competition with a predictably cerebral statement of the Modernist ideology of the time, but when the Archives d’Architecture Moderne published the landmark book Rational Architecture Rationelle, Krier’s sublime design for a beautiful new Parisian neighborhood quickly swept through the design studios in my Master of Architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania. 

That was a time when architects like Michael Graves and Aldo Rossi were selling their drawings in art galleries. Krier’s aerial perspectives for La Villette and other projects were the most remarkable of the architects’ drawings at that time. The number of ideas and the amount of information in the small drawings were astounding. The founding of the CNU was eighteen years away, but the drawings brilliantly foreshadowed New Urbanism. The streets were made for walking, and you could zoom in and see new urban buildings that were simultaneously traditional and inventive. As Mark Hewitt explains in his book Draw In Order To See, sketches can have that power, suggesting complex ideas in a simple drawing.

“I don’t build because I am an architect,” Krier famously said about his drawings, “I can make true architecture because I do not build.” In 1975, the French architectural establishment was never going to pick Krier’s scheme over Tschumi’s, but they could see the brilliance of Krier’s design and drawings. Despite their anti-traditional preferences, the jurors awarded the project second place.

Once the work was published, it helped students understand why they felt uncomfortable with many of the lessons their professors were trying to teach them. “We don’t like Towers-in-Parks, we like city streets like the ones we see every day.” “We like human-scaled, urban buildings more than ‘unprecedented structures’ that express ‘the constituent facts’ of technology and the time.” Seeing a new design for a traditional walkable neighborhood helped give us the confidence to say no to those lessons.

I decided I needed to learn from Krier, so I traveled to Princeton twice a week to take his class at the university’s architecture school. Even though we had never met, Krier let me sit in. Later that year, I went to a party in New York with my former college roommate. He met a wonderful Spanish woman, and within a few months, they married. It turned out that she was great friends with Krier, and so Krier and I became friends in New York. In addition to his tremendous talents, he was a kind, generous, and engaging man.

We went to see Stanford White’s great library at the Bronx campus of the City University of New York, we shared rooms on a short New Urban tour of Florida, and we occasionally corresponded (before email). One day, I received a picture postcard showing a badly damaged Early Renaissance fresco in Italy. Semi-circular gouges marred the faded, dirty stucco. “A view of Padua through a muddy windscreen,” was Léon’s caption. I sent him a postcard of the Old State House in Boston, a lovely Georgian building. Calling out the glass towers in the photo, Léon commented that it looked lonely. I have to admit that I hadn’t even noticed the towers—but he was right. 

Léon liked to send hand-written faxes that were always beautifully composed (he had a simple method for laying out pages). This fax came through one day: “New York 1900 is a great book!” he wrote. “I kept it next to the toilet and read it cover to cover.” —John Massengale

To spend time with Leon Krier was to touch genius and to hope that some of it would rub off on you. Sitting across from him in Knokke, Belgium, co-drawing the plan for the new village of Heulebrug, remains a singular highlight of my career. But my favorite Léon memory is when I showed him a photograph of the (modern) house I had just built in Washington, D.C. He laughed warmly, put his arm around my shoulder, and said, “Good GOD, man, what on EARTH did you do THAT for?”                  —Jeff Speck

Featured image courtesy of the author.