Léon Krier obituary

The Guardian

25-06-2025

A colonnade of doric columns flanks the entrance to the neoclassical Waitrose building in Poundbury, Dorchester, in Dorset, facing on to the congested car park of Queen Mother Square. Across the plaza stands a creamy yellow palazzo, crowned with a royal crested-pediment, and a Palladian hotel named the Duchess of Cornwall. A gigantic brick campanile rises above the Royal Pavilion from a triumphal stone arch, looming over the square.
'It was supposed to be the magistrates court,' the town's master-planner, Léon Krier, told me in 2016, on a tour of the then Prince Charles's model village. 'But it ended up as luxury flats. I suppose that's the spirit of our time. After all, the master-planner is not the master of the game.'
Krier, who has died aged 79, was one of the most influential town planners of his generation, but not always in the way he intended. He was a leading figure of the New Urbanism movement, advocating a return to traditional, walkable neighbourhoods and compact, human-scale development, railing against modernism as the 'perpetrator of sprawl'. And yet his work often led to car-reliant dormitory towns, exclusive gated communities, and the very suburban sprawl he despised.
Poundbury is Krier's most substantial built legacy, a project that was widely ridiculed when it began in the 1980s, but which time has vindicated in many ways. Set in 200 hectares of the Duchy of Cornwall in Dorset, the plan was modelled on an 18th-century English village, with narrow, winding streets, lined with traditional terraced homes, leading to public squares, where grander classical buildings would indicate their civic function.
Critics compared it to Marie Antoinette's 'hameau' in Versailles, a pretend rustic hamlet where the haughty queen played at being a peasant. The Observer slammed it as 'fake, heartless, authoritarian and grimly cute,' decrying its 'counterfeit design and cack-handed pastiche.'
Yet unlike so many lifeless developer-built estates, it combined industrial space, stores and small workshops among the housing, now employing 2,600 people in 250 businesses. It has worked: house prices are up to a quarter higher than the surrounding area, while 35% of the homes are affordable, scattered throughout the development, rather than corralled into separate blocks.
Far from being an anachronism, Poundbury's principles of mixed-use, low-rise high-density have been widely taken up, forming the basis of the present government's new towns plan – if, perhaps, without the classical fancy dress.
Krier was born in Luxembourg to Jean, a tailor who specialised in bishops' robes, and his wife, Emma (nee Lanser). As a child he had dreams of becoming a professional pianist, but eventually followed his elder brother, Robert, by studying architecture at the University of Stuttgart, where he developed an enthusiastic interest in the work of Albert Speer, architect of the Nazi regime. He dropped out in 1968, after only a year.
Many years later, in 1985, Krier wrote a book on Speer that brought him notoriety and condemnation, but he always insisted that architecture could be separated from the ideology of the regime it serves. 'You can accuse almost every decent building in the past of being built by a regime which you don't agree with,' he said. 'If your clients are evil people, but they let you build what you think is right, you should do it. These evil people will leave something behind which is going to better serve mankind.'
Having dropped out from his studies, Krier sent his portfolio of drawings to the architect James Stirling in London, who spotted the talent in this confident young draughtsman and hired him.
Together they worked on a project for Olivetti headquarters in Milton Keynes, and a competition for the Siemens headquarters in Munich. Both were unrealised, but Krier's neoclassical proclivities had a great influence on Stirling as he shifted towards postmodernism, incorporating historical motifs and playful touches in his work.
However, after three years with Stirling, Krier decided to move into teaching architecture and urbanism at the Architectural Association from 1974 to 1976, where Zaha Hadid was one of his students, and then at the Royal College of Art in 1977.
Something of a lone voice in the 70s, he saw modernism as an aberration, a 'totalitarian ideology' responsible for the 'garbage culture' of the North American city, which he saw as 'a place of damnation'. He published his fiery proclamations in pithy texts, illustrated by witty cartoons, but his work mostly remained on paper, in the world of hypothetical plans – in part thanks to his stubborn refusal to compromise.
'I can only make architecture,' he said, 'because I do not build.' He thought that 'accepting compromises means losing. I have seen it in all my friends who build.'
That changed when Krier met the then Prince of Wales. Their first encounter, at an exhibition of Krier's unrealised vision for Spitalfields market in 1986, led to several invitations to Highgrove. At one such meeting, two years into sharing their passions for traditional architecture, Charles had a brainwave. 'We were sitting in the garden at the palace,' Krier told me. 'Then HRH banged the table, pointed at me, and said: 'How can I build Krier Town?''.
Though Krier generally approved of the results, he thought some of the first Poundbury buildings were 'ghastly', criticising the architects for getting their columns upside down and chastising the builders for making most of the homes with concrete blocks, not load-bearing stone, as he had wished. As the master-planner he had little control over such things. Begun in 1993, the project is due to be completed by late 2028, when it will be home to around 6,000 people.
Krier might have longed to revive the golden age of European city building, but his most receptive audience was found in Florida. There he master-planned Seaside, a resort community of white picket fences where The Truman Show was filmed, and where he built a house for himself, styled like a Greek temple perched atop a clapboard villa.
His other completed buildings in Florida included a town hall for Windsor, a luxury golf-themed gated community in North Beach, styled like a huge dovecot, and an architecture centre for the University of Miami, crowned with art deco-ish turrets. He also realised an archaeology museum in Portugal, a plan for the city centre of Alessandria in Italy, and an exclusive extension to Guatemala City, called Cayalá, advertised as a place 'where the rich can escape crime'.
Many more elaborate visions came to nought. In 1987 Krier concocted a utopian 'academic village' in Tenerife, called Atlantis, commissioned by a pair of German art gallerists. Inspired by Persian, Greek and Roman architecture, dotted with pyramids, obelisks and conical spires, it was to be a place, said Krier, where 'meritorious individuals who excel in their fields of science, humanities, arts, ecology, crafts, philosophy, farming' would be invited to live. It never left the realm of the evocative renderings painted by his first wife, Rita Wolff.
More recently Britain narrowly missed out on a final Krier confection when his £2.3bn scheme for the site of Fawley power station on the Solent, near Southampton, was abandoned last year, on grounds of viability. He had once hoped to top the power station's defunct 200-metre high chimney with a classical capital, to make it the largest Tuscan column in the world. Sometimes such flights of fancy prove impossible without the patronage of a prince.
Krier is survived by his second wife, Irene Stillman (nee Pérez-Porro), whom he married in 2021. His brother Robert died in 2023.
Léon Ernest Krier, town planner, born 7 April 1946; died 17 June 2025