Léon Krier, a pioneer of New Urbanism and traditional architecture, died at age 79 this week in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. His passing was confirmed by a news outlet in Luxembourg, where the late architect was born in 1946. Architect Rob Krier, Léon’s older brother, died in 2023.
Léon Krier will be remembered for his teaching at the Architectural Association, Royal College of Art, Notre Dame, and elsewhere; and his collaborations with King Charles III, namely the Poundbury masterplan. Krier also designed Ciudad Cayala, an extension to Guatemala City.
In Seaside, Florida, Léon Krier designed a home, the Krier House, as part of the famous New Urbanist masterplan for the town, which served as backdrop for the 1998 film, The Truman Show, directed by Peter Weir, starring Jim Carrey. The Krier House is down the road from Florida politician Matt Gaetz’s childhood home, designed by Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andrés Duany, the Truman House.
A student of James Stirling, Krier’s first book, Rational Architecture, was published in 1979, followed by works like his Albert Speer monograph. In that book, Krier called Speer, Hitler’s architect of the Third Reich, a “great artist,” an unsettling sentiment his colleague Peter Eisenman was in agreement with.
German art critic Paul Schultze-Naumburg, writing in the 1920s, associated Cubism with “human maladies”—an idea about bodies, and modernism more broadly, later championed by Krier. In 1998, Krier produced a drawing, dubbed Pluralism, in his book, Architecture • Choice of Fate, that many have called racist.
In Drawing for Architecture, Krier later defended his questionable “ideograms.” He said in 2009: “Raw and without circumlocution, these ideograms are means not to console or please but to reveal scandalous elements of architectural practices and ideology; they outline conceptual tools for refounding traditional urbanism and architecture.”
Krier was awarded the Driehaus Prize in architecture in 2003, and the Athena Medal from Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) in 2006. He spent his last years teaching at Princeton, Yale, University of Virginia, Cornell, and Notre Dame.
“The work of the New Urbanist movement is grounded in the understandings of architecture, urbanism, modernity, and community that Léon contributed to this world,” Mallory Baches, president of CNU, said in a statement after Krier’s death. “We are indebted to his intellectual courage, and we remain champions of both the beauty and the rationality he saw to be so desperately needed in the built environment.”
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