León Krier, Architect Whose Classical Work Won a Royal Ally, Dies at 79

 

León Krier, Architect Whose Classical Work Won a Royal Ally, Dies at 79

 

Although many of his designs remain unbuilt — with a few exceptions, including King Charles’s Poundbury — he was a driving force in the New Urbanism movement.

 

Clay Risen

By Clay Risen

June 25, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/arts/design/leon-krier-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1

 

León Krier, whose city plans, building sketches and ardent manifestoes on behalf of classical architecture and urban planning left a lasting mark on contemporary design, most notably in the form of Poundbury, a British town he created with the support of the future King Charles III, died on June 17 near his vacation home in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. He was 79.

 

His wife, Irene Krier, did not provide a cause but said he had recently been diagnosed with inoperable colorectal cancer.

 

Starting in the mid-1970s, Mr. Krier (pronounced CREE-er) was a leading voice in his generation’s rejection of Modernist architecture and urban planning, attacking it as soulless and given to inhuman gigantism.

 

A skyscraper, he told The New York Times in 2024, “is an immoral act.”

 

Mr. Krier called for a return to classical architecture and traditional ideas of community building: interspersing homes and civic spaces, using local materials and keeping everything low enough and close enough together to avoid reliance on mechanical transportation, whether elevators or automobiles.

 

The overwhelming majority of Mr. Krier’s designs remained on paper, in part because of his unwillingness to compromise, but also because he sometimes seemed indifferent to seeing them built. “I am a good architect because I don’t build,” he often said.

 

Much of his influence came in the form of lectures, debates and hundreds of drawings that, long before the internet, circulated among architects and students as stapled stacks of copies.

 

Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and her partner, Andrés Duany, were architects with the Miami firm Arquitectonica when Mr. Krier came to lecture at their offices in the early 1980s.

 

In an interview, they said he was so passionately convincing — at one point, he started crying — that they left the firm to establish their own company. There, they focused on bringing attention to Mr. Krier’s ideas, a movement that came to be known as New Urbanism.

 

Among the projects they brought with them from Arquitectonica was a design for a new community on the Florida Panhandle to be called Seaside.

 

Ditching the original, more conventional design, they made the project a test bed for Mr. Krier’s ideas, with an emphasis on walkability and mixed-use neighborhoods. In 1987, they invited him to design a home there — one of the few structures Mr. Krier ever built.

 

Around the same time, Mr. Krier began working on another project: Poundbury, an extension of the town of Dorchester, in southwestern England, within the Duchy of Cornwall.

 

The Duke of Cornwall, the future King Charles III, had made the revival of traditional architecture a personal mission. After meeting with Mr. Krier, he asked him to oversee the entire project, a decades-long undertaking to build a community that would eventually be home to some 6,000 people.

 

Poundbury was initially derided by architects, planners and much of the British press for being too conservative and precious, as if a chunk of Disneyworld had been plopped into the English countryside. Over time, though, it proved more popular and successful than its critics predicted.

 

Mr. Krier was at times dismissed as a conservative, even an aesthetic reactionary. And yet his philosophy was quite radical in its rejection of the capitalist forces that undergirded the development of the modern city.

 

“Verticality, innovation and quick profit now destroy Europe’s most beautiful cities and countrysides,” he wrote in an essay accompanying a 1981 exhibit of his drawings at the Max Protetch gallery in New York City. “We can choose not to participate.”

 

León Ernest Krier was born on April 7, 1946, in Luxembourg, the son of Emma (Lanser) Krier, a pianist, and Pierre Krier, a tailor renowned for producing ecclesiastical garments for Roman Catholic bishops.

 

He studied architecture at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, but dropped out after a year, saying that his professors and fellow students did not understand his criticisms of modern design.

 

He moved to London, where he joined the studio of James Stirling, a reputable modernist who was beginning his own conversion to postmodern classicism.

 

Mr. Krier later taught at the Royal College of Art and the Architectural Association, where his students included future design stars like Zaha Hadid.

 

He developed a reputation as a polemicist willing to take up outré positions: In the late 1970s, he befriended Albert Speer, who had been Adolf Hitler’s chief architect, and in 1985 published a retrospective of Speer’s work.

 

Though he conceded that Speer was a war criminal — as Hitler’s armaments minister, Speer had used slave labor to build Nazi weaponry — Mr. Krier argued that great art could be separated from the artists who produced it. That hedge did not shield him from critics, who denounced him as an apologist for fascism.

 

Mr. Krier blamed such criticism for his lack of work, but also recognized that his intransigence played a role: On one occasion, the price tag for his design of a school in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, outside Paris, came in 200 percent over budget; rather than making changes to lower the price, he resigned.

 

“He was obsessed with perfection in an imperfect world,” the architecture critic Paul Goldberger said in an interview. “On one level, that’s admirable, but it also means you will suffer lots of disappointments.”

 

Mr. Krier’s first marriage, to the artist Rita Wolff, ended in divorce.

 

Along with his second wife, he is survived by a sister, Marthy; two stepdaughters, Isabel and Ann Stillman; and two granddaughters. His brother, Rob, also a well-known architect, died in 2023.

 

Despite the eventual success of Poundbury, it did not get easier for Mr. Krier to build in Britain. In the early 2000s, he advised on a New Urbanist extension to the coastal town of Newquay, also in the Duchy of Cornwall, but he left the project in 2006, before it was completed.

 

Another project, a $3.1 billion development for a “Venice of Britain,” saw its funding fall through last year.

 

Mr. Krier designed two more buildings in the United States, both in Florida, and both with the support of Ms. Plater-Zyberk and Mr. Duany: a public hall (1999) in Windsor, a community the couple developed north of Miami; and an academic center (2005) at the architecture school of the University of Miami, where Ms. Plater-Zyberk was dean.

 

Stymied by his adopted home, Mr. Krier looked abroad. He developed a new quarter for Guatemala City, called Cayalá, completed in 2023, using many of the New Urbanist principles he had applied at Poundbury. At the time of his death, he was working on a similar project in Qatar.

 

Mr. Krier looked to the past for inspiration, and he believed that a return to pre-automobile urban design was the only hope for the future of the city.

 

“The blind belief in infinite progress comes at a terrible price,” he said in a 2024 interview with the website Deliberatio, “degrading and destroying in a few generations the values and know-how that, accumulated over the centuries, have succeeded in building houses and cities that embellish nature and the life of everyone.”

 

Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.