Leon Krier, RIP.

Cover of my copy of Leon Krier: Drawings, a mongrapgh by Maurice Culot published in January1981 just as I started my architectural career with the Percy Thomas Partnership in Bristol

I was saddened to discover that Leon Krier, the architect and urbanist, famous for his work with King Charles III at Poundbury on the edge of Dorchester in Dorset and for his quote “I can only make architecture, because I do not build. I do not build, because I am an architect," died on July 17th in Palma, Spain.

As a student I was acutely aware of Krier’s drawings and his urbanist philosophies; these were entirely consistent with the post-modern and contextualist approaches to art, design and architecture emerging at the time and seen through the work of, for example,Richard Meier, Robert Venturi with Denise Scott Brown and Aldo Rossi, where every object is seen as part of a continuous and interrelated system, countering the stale simplicity and bombast that had become modernism, where the only thing that matters is the object for example in just about anything that Richard Rogers or Norman Foster were designing.

Krier’s analytical drawing style was a huge influence on my work; instilling an awareness that without an artist/poetic basis to the work at the sketch stage and captured in the sketch, the number of compromises required to get anything built would render the final work intellectually barren.

As an architect I always wanted to build, to be at the sharp end, where a client gets to live with your vision, however, many projects (probably 80%) remain unrealised, paper architecture. These projects were of immense value in that they retained a purity free from the compromises induced by explaining that vision and the protracted processes of construction. I became acutely aware how direct involvement in output limits how much can be produced; there are only so many hours in a day. So, Architects have always worked with others to realise their creations, as do product designers, graphic designers, fabric designers, car designers, furniture makers, accepting the reality that that very assistance induces change to the original vision.

Many contemporary artists such as Damian Hirst or Jeff Koons or Zhang Xiaogang have also accepted that in order to satisfy demand, (this is a self-promoted demand intent on enhancing market share), they engage a team of paid assistants but this effectively creates a brand served by a factory. How many steel balloon dogs has Koons produced or Hirst produced of his spot or flower paintings?  The first few might be touched by the artist but Hirst has readily admitted that the others he left many to a coterie of assistants, who could make them ad infinitum.

However, while many great artists have successfully managed their creativity by accepting the physical and intellectual limitation of time e.g. Picasso, Bacon, Constable and Freud, Krier realised that producing architecture barely touched by the designer was a compromise too far, so he let his drawings stand; He published monographs, lectured,  promoted a vision of the ‘Architect’ as an intellectual and while Poundbury falls into the po-mo wallpaper trap and is a shallow reflection of what could have been he was a huge influence on a generation of architects and designers and will be missed.

photos from my copy of Leon Krier : Drawings. All beautifully rendered and loaded with meaning

An early sketch of one of my paintings : That which binds us #3