Queen Mother Square, the central hub of Poundbury, Dorset. Photo by Rebeca.ggv, Wikimedia Commons

Born in Luxembourg, the younger brother of the architect and fellow traditionalist Rob Krier (1938–2023), the future polemicist declared war on the postwar orthodoxy very early in his trajectory, abandoning his architecture studies in Stuttgart, Germany, after barely a year. “I left before I felt completely lobotomized,” he later recalled, and instead went to work at James Stirling’s London office in 1968. He would spend over two decades in the British capital, teaching at both the Architectural Association and the Royal College of Art (his students included a young Zaha Hadid), during which time he developed his planning ideas through a series of texts and brilliant, witty drawings that compared what he saw as the alienation of the CIAM city with the community-centric life of the preindustrial town. In light of what he considered Modernism’s cultural amnesia, Krier advocated for the creation of a meaningful public realm rooted in civic responsibility and the human scale.

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The Krier House at Seaside (1) and Windsor Village Hall (2), both in Florida. Photos by Dr. Laurie & Joseph Braga, Wikimedia Commons (1), and watchduck, Wikimedia Commons (2)

In 1985, he courted controversy by authoring Albert Speer: Architecture, 1932–1942, a book championing the design legacy of Hitler’s official architect. “Can a war criminal be a great artist?” he asked in it. Where Rykwert saw “a political innocence verging on insensibility, almost flippancy,” others suspected a more deliberately reactionary affront. Either way, it was a provocation, one that stands as a reminder of the toxic and ultimately sterile style wars that dominated architectural debate at the time. For many years a visiting critic and professor at universities such as Cornell, Harvard, Notre Dame, Princeton, Virginia, and Yale, Krier famously clashed with Peter Eisenman, and in the early 2000s their disagreement became the subject of a symposium, an exhibition, and a book (all under the aegis of Yale).

Ciudad Cayalá, Guatemala City, Guatemala. Photo by Vicente Aguirre, Wikimedia Commons

Today, when the skirmishes of the 1980s have come back to haunt us in the form of presidential executive orders, the urbane and courteous Krier appears to have much in common with the firebrand populists who dominate current political debate—brilliant in opposition, they often fail to deliver once in power. For all their pedestrian civism, the places he contributed to as a designer—Seaside, for example, or the gated community of Cayalá in Guatemala City—rely on the automobile and on industry and a proletariat that are located elsewhere. Only the royal Poundbury has achieved a meaningful mix of social classes and activities thanks to planning policies that go well beyond what hands-off neoliberalism will allow. While politicians and architects wield limited power in the face of unregulated capital, both have enormous influence on public debate, and Krier helped shift the discourse irrevocably.