Leon Krier is a self-confessed extremist. He is waging a crusade against the modern city - against the automobile; the sprawling suburb; the business district, busy by day, deserted at night; and against the architects and planners who, he believes, have prostituted their callings by aiding and abetting its creation.
A cult figure on the world's architectural scene for almost decade, Krier has recently assumed a far more substantial presence in Britain thorough his role as an advisor to the Prince of Wales - now, beyond dispute, Britain's most influential architectural critic.
Prince Charles' interest in architecture is not simply aesthetic in origin, though he deplores the unrelieved concrete, steel, and glass elevations of the 1960s and 1970s and years for a revival of Classicism. London's St. Paul's Cathedral has become for him a symbol of civilized design. Prince Charles - a committed churchman - deplores the fact that the Cathedral is now eclipsed by a ring of faceless office towers, all built since World War II. This he sees as a symbol of spiritual, as much aesthetic, blindness: God giving way to Mammon.
Architecture is just one of the many subjects on which Prince Charles has made controversial pronouncements. But if there is one theme which seems to recur constantly it is that of man's relationship with the natural world. Modern architecture, he believes, is, on the whole, a symptom of our lack of respect for nature.
This is exactly Krier's view and, though Prince Charles is an independent thinker, there can be no doubt that Krier has helped crystallize his royal patron's convictions in this matter.
Convinced Modernist
Born in Luxembourg in 1946, Leon Krier studied architecture at the University of Stuttgart, where his brother Robert had also studied. (The latter is now a successful architect in Vienna.) In his student years Leon was a convinced Modernist, but the spell broke. He began to be fascinated not by visions of high-rise cities - Le Corbusier's image of the future - but by the existing historic cities of Europe, especially those of Italy. They combined the grader of formal piazzas, dominated by palaces and churches, with humane intimacy of humbler residential streets. Was there any good reason, he asked, why thousands of years of architectural development had been abruptly terminated by Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and their followers in favor of a new architecture abased on the dominance of "function?"
Krier has always loved all old buildings, but he believes that one system of design - Classicism - is the basis of civilized architecture. As a student in Germany, he had to contend with the consensual view that Classicism was "fascist." Had not Albert Speer, Hitler's master architect, planned a triumphantly Classical Berlin as the capital of a reich destined to last a thousand years? Ignoring the fact that Mies was among the many Modernists perfectly prepared to design for Hitler (had the latter not rejected them), his latter-day followers promoted the view that Modern architecture was a "progressive" cause.
Krier's considered response came a few years ago with the publication of a major study of
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