June 2025 — In Memoriam: Leon Krier

This Month we put aside the eyesore motif to remember Leon Krier (1946-2025), the great architect and urbanist who was “godfather” to the movement for restoring artistry, beauty, and decorum in an everyday world much debased by the idiocies of various Modern-isms, and by the fiasco of suburban sprawl.

Leo passed away this 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, the world of eyesores this website features.

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, 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 put over with mere words. For instance:

City of Charm versus City of Production

True city of Integrated Private and Public Realms

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.