Léon Krier was a character. He dressed like an impresario, wrote like a pamphleteer, and drew like an angel. He happily stoked public controversy. His most famous bon mot was “I’m an architect, because I don’t build.” But he did build. The two buildings that I’ve seen of his—his own house and a town hall—have a quality that seems to have eluded most of his traditional-minded contemporaries: originality. He was a classicist, but not a revivalist. He was original, too, in his thinking about town planning, to use an old-fashioned term he would have liked. To Krier, the principles of sound urban design were all known long ago—and didn’t need to be reinvented—the great challenge was how to accommodate the automobile.

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The post LÉON KRIER, ARCHITECT AND TOWN PLANNER (1946-2025) first appeared on Witold Rybczynski.