I am very saddened to learn of Léon Krier’s death. He is probably the most consequential urban and architectural thinker of our era. Only Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander can compete with his significance. As an architect, urban designer, theorist, and planner, his career was foundational for the sustainable, human-scale and traditional place-making renaissance that is now, thank heavens, underway.
Léon Krier’s commitment to city-making as an art, to walkability as a mechanism and to beauty as a pattern of place-making, marked an intellectual rupture with post-war traffic-modernism. Refusing the single-use zoning and sprawling suburbs of ‘CIAM’ orthodoxy, he insisted that real cities must grow from walkable, mixed-use quarters, no larger than a ten minute walk, what he memorably called ‘a city within the city.’ His work endowed New Urbanism and New Classical architecture with moral and aesthetic depth, championing civic life, architectural legibility, and embodied beauty.
Probably no project better expresses Léon Kier’s influence than Poundbury. Commissioned by the now King Charles III when he was Prince of Wales, Poundbury has grown from a living laboratory to an unarguable success, an unapologetically traditional, pedestrian-centred extension to Dorchester, with real mixed-use streets, homes, shops and civic buildings, all structured in human-scale blocks. Poundbury’s influence has rippled far beyond Dorset, demonstrating that sustainable development is inseparable from architectural and urban quality.
Léon Krier courted controversy, sometime provocatively. I believe it was integral to his nature. At Create Streets, his influence is inescapably woven through our work to create healthier and happier streets and squares. Léon Krier taught us all that sustainability is not just energy-efficiency but deeper questions of resilience, durability and human connection.
Ultimately, Léon Krier leaves far more than his own master-plans and designs. He leaves a transformed intellectual terrain where traffic modernism has been discredited. The tide of regenerative placemaking, of relearning from traditional wisdom, is worldwide and rising strongly. From all continents come stories of communities and landowners, wise planners and frustrated architects seeking to reject the worst of the twentieth century’s mess.
This is in no small part thanks to the books Léon Krier wrote, the drawings he drew and the towns he planned. That is his legacy.
Nicholas Boys Smith