K is for Krier - B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

Léon Krier has spent most of his career attempting to divert the course of the architectural mainstream away from modernity. And yet his ideas, deeply reactionary to some, iconoclastic but fundamentally optimistic to others, have done as much to illuminate those aspects of the modern world that he detests as to provide an alternative to them.

He does not look much like an architect. Most of the species now dress in the dominant, if somewhat dated, all-black Yohji Yamamoto manner. Krier, by contrast, wears a lot of linen, and he has the wire-frame glasses, broad-brimmed headgear and neck stock that are conventionally associated with minor characters in Merchant Ivory cinema adaptations of the classics. He keeps his hair in what might best be described as a bird’s nest and has a vaguely clerical air about him. But despite the mild manner, an architect he is, with a violent edge to his polemics, and one who has had an impact far beyond the few, but growing number, of designs that he has actually built. Krier gives a fundamentalist tone to his theoretical pronouncements that might be seen to suggest both a Marxist past and the passion of a convert. His two greatest enemies are consumerism and modernism, characterized by the generic contemporary city lost in a wasteland of business parks, and endless suburbs punctuated by aggressively exhibitionistic landmarks. He celebrates the humility of the traditional city, a world of robust, handsome, but unpretentious streets, enhanced by the occasional, judiciously placed monument in classical style. He believes with perhaps unjustified optimism that there is nothing to stop us from building places with the qualities of the centres of Oxford, Prague or Ljubljana.

It is a measure of the extent of his skill as a polemicist that he has made his position the official architectural policy of the next king of England, as well as of the mayor of Rome. Robert Stern, once a board member of the Disney Corporation, now Dean of Yale University’s School of Architecture, is the author of the introduction to Krier’s most recent book and the architect of the presidential library of George Bush the Younger in Texas. And Krier has disciples everywhere from Florida to Romania. He is the father of what his American followers like to call the New Urbanism: of which the Prince of Wales’s development project at Poundbury outside Dorchester, is the prime British example. In argument, Krier takes no prisoners, and apparently accepts no compromises.

He certainly has no fear of unfashionable causes. He has written at length of his most dubious architectural hero, Albert Speer, whom he purports to see as the last great hope of classical urbanism. Speer in Krier’s eyes was the tragic victim of Nuremburg, incarcerated in Spandau because he was guilty of a passion for Doric columns. The far more destructive talent of Werner von Braun, author of the flying bomb, was judged useful enough to have him whisked to comfortable exile in the US to oversee a research project that would eventually bring the world the cruise missile and the predator drone.

Speer’s projects continue, not unlike sex for the virgin, to be the object of pseudo-embarrassment for architects … the inability to deal with the problem today in an intelligent manner reveals nothing about National Socialist architecture, but tells us a great deal about the moral depravity of a profession which, on the one hand claims against all odds that modernist architecture is better than it looks, and on the other, that Nazi architecture is profoundly bad, however good it may look.

When he was young, Léon Krier argued that it was the melancholy duty of every architect of principle to give up any idea of building at all. ‘A responsible architect cannot possibly build today … Building can only mean a greater or smaller degree of collaboration in a civilized society’s process of self-destruction.’ To do so, he suggested, would be to take part in the crime of the century, that is to say, the destruction of the traditional European city. ‘I can only make Architecture,’ he said in the 1970s, ‘because I do not build. I do not build because I am an Architect.’

But Krier has decided that the time is now right to engage with the world, and offer a set of prescriptions that, if followed, might indeed offer a solution to all that self-destruction. ‘After years of failed promises and experiments, the critical situation of the suburbs leaves us little choice but to seek practical solutions. These are, in fact, readily available, but it is evident that a modernist bias harbouring ideological and psychological blockages causes traditional solutions to be ignored, discarded, and even discredited.’

This is, then, apparently, not just a Krier who has changed his mind about tactics but also a Krier who is attempting to present a less unremitting fury about the world around him. But Krier, even when he is being conciliatory, flavours his words with invective. His opponents are guilty, he says, of ‘unjustifiable nonsense’. Even if they are concerned with nothing more controversial than street lighting, regulations that Krier takes objection to are ‘insane’. Naturally, ‘the idea of replacing the world’s rich panoply of traditional architecture by a single international style is dangerously insane’, an observation which, given that it would be all but impossible to find anyone who would suggest such a thing, seems a little redundant. However, it is possible to see a certain family resemblance between the languid village hall in Florida designed by Krier and his work on the Italian town of Alexandria.

Krier set out to provide a primer for the New Urbanism. ‘The lack of clarity in the vocabulary, the mixing-up of terms, and the extensive use of meaningless professional jargon stand in the way of clear architectural and environmental thinking … I shall now define some of the main concepts and notions.’ Pay attention at the back: ‘The terms “modern” and “modernist” are regularly confused. The former has a chronological meaning … the latter is an ideological designation,’ he points out, to demonstrate that he is no hopeless reactionary but is perfectly ready to accept fast cars, and to deftly sketch in a silver-hulled, four-turbo prop-engine Super Constellation in the skies over his scheme for the completion of Washington, rendered in the grandest classical manner, a style that President Lindbergh would have warmed to as he took over the country in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.

Krier believes in typology. We know what a church looks like, so we don’t need to invent one every time a new one is built. We are perfectly capable of developing new typologies, as and when required: railway stations, for example, and even, belatedly, airports; Krier approves of Charles de Gaulle airport’s latest departure gates, and César Pelli’s work at Washington.

What Krier hates is innovation for the sake of innovation - although so did Mies van der Rohe, who always wanted to design good buildings rather than interesting ones. ‘In traditional cultures, invention, innovation, and discovery are the means to modernize proven and practical systems of living, thinking, planning, building, representing … They are the means to an end. They aim to conceive, realize, and conserve a solid, durable, practical, beautiful, humane world.’ Krier finds the antithesis in modernist cultures. In them, ‘invention, innovation, and discovery are transcendental ends … For traditional cultures, imitation is a way of producing objects that are similar but unique.’ Krier understands that ‘Traditional architecture comprises two complementary disciplines: vernacular building, on the one hand, classical or monumental architecture, on the other.’

Alongside Krier’s definitions, he has shrewd observations to make: you get more architecture out of low buildings that have high ceilings than you do from high buildings with low ceilings. And he offers firm guidelines on how to achieve the right balance of public and private space in a city. More than 70 per cent public is too much, less than 25 per cent is too little. What makes his prescriptions palatable is that he embellishes them with lacerating, sometimes hauntingly beautiful, drawings. These are occasionally dazzlingly witty - in a manner that recalls the great nineteenth-century champion of the true principles of Pointed or Christian architecture, August Welby Pugin, in his Contrasts phase - rendered with the calligraphic style of Barbar the Elephant, and with a format that owes quite a bit to Le Corbusier in his polemical tract Vers une architecture. Things that Krier/Le Corbusier disapprove of are crossed out with big Xs. When they have something IMPORTANT to say, they burst into capital letters. And indeed this continuing relationship with Le Corbusier suggests that personal psychology may be important to understanding Krier’s career.

Krier, who was born and brought up in Luxembourg, describes an early family visit to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles. As he tells it, the adolescent Krier had fallen in love with images that he had seen of Le Corbusier’s work. But when he finally got to see Marseilles for himself, he was horrified by the streaked concrete madhouse that he found. What was meant to be a transcendent experience turned into a betrayal. Krier calls it a defining moment. Clearly it is the sense of betrayal that has driven his animus for modernism. He even publishes a touching attempt to redeem his fallen Lucifer. Decades after his visit to Marseilles, he set one of his student classes at Yale the task of redesigning Le Corbusier’s gleaming white house, the Villa Savoye, retaining the energy of its plan and composition, but using traditional materials and techniques.

Whatever did or did not happen in Marseilles, it did not stop Krier from going to London in 1968 to work for James Stirling for six years. Often described as the foremost British architect of the twentieth century, Stirling was not somebody who appealed to the Prince of Wales. Indeed the greatest enthusiasts for the prince’s position on architecture at Cambridge did all they could to get the Stirling-designed History Faculty Library demolished. And though Stirling’s development at No. 1 Poultry clearly shares many of Krier’s compositional techniques, the prince denounced it in terms almost as intemperate as those he used for the Mies van der Rohe glass stump for which it was substituted. Krier’s deft pen-and-ink drawings were used to powerful effect while he was with Stirling. In the corner of his perspectives of the Olivetti Training Centre, Krier placed Stirling’s bulky figure in a representation of one of the Thomas Hope chairs that his employer collected. Krier played a significant part in the competition design Stirling submitted for the centre of Derby. They didn’t win, but the project would have included a sweeping semicircular galleria, and advocated retaining the classical façade of the town’s existing assembly rooms, but turning it into a piece of flat stage scenery, and tilting it at a 45-degree angle. Krier also put together a monograph of Stirling’s complete works, in a style closely modelled on Le Corbusier’s own Oeuvre complète. Clearly Krier’s change of heart did not come at once. Indeed, in the 1970s, he even confessed himself to have been moved more than he had expected by a visit to Norman Foster’s intricate steel-and-aluminium aircraft-hangar-cum-Greek-temple that is the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia.

After Krier had left Stirling, he started teaching at the Architectural Association, the private design school in London that during the 1970s served as a kind of unofficial opposition to the lacklustre world of mainstream British architecture. He developed a contempt for his chosen profession, which came close to that of Rem Koolhaas - another architect with a Le Corbusier fixation, who also happened to be teaching at the AA at the time. While Krier came to believe that no respectable architect could build anything with a clear conscience, Koolhaas ridiculed what he took as the sentimentality and impotence of architects whose only response to the tidal wave of business parks and mega-malls overwhelming the globe was to retreat into an autistic obsession with the precision with which doors could be fitted into walls, or the width of the gap between a floorboard and the plaster wall that floated above it. Koolhaas seemed to be busy trashing the very possibility of architecture, on his way towards the exit. Neither he nor Krier seemed much interested in the physical, material possibilities of architecture. The difference between them was that while Krier had acquired the same kind of horror as William Morris for the modern world, Koolhaas innoculated himself from it by embracing the nightmarish vision of what he characterized as ‘junk space’, the soft underbelly of shopping malls, giant sheds and airport terminals.

They both taught Zaha Hadid while they were at the AA. Rather than build, Krier conducted a two-decade-long guerilla war against modern planning and architecture. He tried to create the basis for cities that had their roots in the traditions of the past.

Both Koolhaas and Krier have changed their stance since then. Koolhaas met Miuccia Prada, and the director of the Chinese state television company, while Krier joined the court of the Prince of Wales. The world, Krier thinks, is ready to listen to him now. Clearly he believes that he has succeeded in turning the tide. Krier suggests that with one more heave it will all be over. He claims he has won the argument on city planning. All that is left is to banish plate-glass skyscrapers, and the exhibitionism of the current crop of architectural stars.

Modernism represents the negation of all that makes architecture useful: no roofs, no load-bearing walls, no columns, no arches, no vertical windows, no streets, no squares, no privacy, no grandeur, no decoration, no craftsmen, no history, no tradition. Surely the next step must be to negate these negations.

In fact for several years now neo-modernists have had to admit that there is no true substitute for the traditional fabric of streets and squares. Nevertheless, they continue to reject traditional architecture with the same obsolete arguments that yesterday compelled them to reject traditional urbanism.

Krier takes no prisoners in his assault on modernists, but there is surprisingly little to choose between his idea of lively streets and animated public spaces, and those of Richard Rogers, with his passionate championing of pavement cafés and galleria.

Krier has found himself working for a range of clients: for the developers of Seaside, the utopian holiday resort on the coast of Florida; for the Prince of Wales, for whom he prepared a master plan for the new township of Poundbury. He planned new towns in Italy and Romania; worked for Lord Rothschild; and for Sir Stuart Lipton, who commissioned him to replan Spitalfields Market. And even, to declare an interest, for me. In a previous incarnation as editor at Blueprint magazine, contributing editor Dan Cruikshank and I asked Krier to replan London’s South Bank. He suggested concealing the National Theatre behind a swathe of palladian façades - and was the first planner to use the word ‘quarter’, a term that has subsequently become a developer’s favourite.

Part of Krier’s obsession with the work of Speer could be seen as provocation, but demonstrating that there is no necessary connection between classicism and authoritarian regimes is one thing. Campaigning to save Speer’s street lights from what Krier called the brutal demolition of the only substantial part of Speer’s scheme to build Germania is quite another.

To draw attention to his sympathy for Nazi architecture, which Krier now minimizes, cannot, of course, discredit all his prescriptions. As he points out, Mies van der Rohe did everything that he could to secure the commission to build the new Reichsbank for Hitler, and produced a design for a Brussels pavilion, in the same reduced glass-and-steel manner of its Barcelona predecessor except for the eagle and swastika insignia that he proposed to put on its flat roof. Yet nobody would rationally claim that Mies was a Nazi, or that the Seagram tower is an example of Nazi architecture.

But Krier’s enthusiasm for Speer’s vile plan to transform Berlin, for Hitler, with vast triumphal boulevards and a monstrous great hall is perhaps evidence of a certain naivety or unworldliness, which persists in his attitudes. On page 18 of Krier’s The Architecture of Community, there is a drawing by him of three heads, supposedly displaying the idealized and harmonious racial characteristics of a European, an African and an Asian, separate but equal over the legend ‘TRUE PLURALISM’. It shares the page with another image, of a face made up of a violent blend of all three racial characteristics, and the message ‘FALSE PLURALISM’. Can such a sophisticated polemicist really be unaware of the possible dubious misreadings that are inherent in these images?

The Prince of Wales has attracted a whole cloud of architectural advisers. Most of them have been discarded as inconveniently interested in self-publicity, one after the other. Krier is no lightweight, and, far from being dumped, the word is that he had to be pressurized not to resign from the Poundbury project in despair at the watering-down of his guiding principles.

Krier’s designs are vigorous and inventive. He is light years ahead of the feeble neo-Palladianism of Quinlan Terry, let alone the heavy-handed Robert Adam, or John Simpson, or even his own brother, Rob Krier, also an architect.

His designs take traditional elements and reassemble them in new and unfamiliar ways. Their impact comes not from the fact that they evoke something that they are not. It is in the vigour and energy of what they are, in the quality of the physical experiences that they offer and the intelligence which comes from his imaginative manipulation of the elements of architecture.

Seaside, the holiday resort in Florida, was planned by two of Krier’s disciples: Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. It was, as the setting for The Truman Show, a gift to those who see it as a whimsical exercise in nostalgia, which is of no relevance to the world as it really is.

Though you would never guess it from Krier, the way that our cities look and work is hardly the exclusive result of decisions made by architects. They are the product of economic and political systems, of population growth, of wealth and poverty, of transport systems and highway engineers. These are rarely the targets of Krier or his patrons. It is a narrow view that serves to reinforce the architect’s own sense of self-importance, which appears to underlie the psychological make-up of all architects, not just the modernists. The militant humility of Krier is perhaps no humility at all.