The Traditionalist Architect Who Built for the Future

Leon Krier passed away this week, leaving behind a legacy that fundamentally challenged how we think about cities, communities, and the spaces we inhabit. As a psychotherapist and founder of Discover+Heal+Grow: The Taproot Therapy Collective podcast, I’ve spent years exploring the psychological forces that shape our world. Krier was one of the first thinkers who helped me understand that architecture isn’t just about buildings but about consciousness, politics, and the human condition itself.

Leon Krier’s philosophy uses architecture as a vehicle for cultural and political critique, particularly of modernism, suburban sprawl, and the industrialization of cities. His work became central to the New Urbanism movement and Traditionalist Architecture. The core tenets of his philosophy, often expressed provocatively, centered on a radical idea: architecture is political.

For Krier, architecture was inseparable from political and moral decisions. He believed that the built environment reflects a society’s values and power structures, and that the centralization and alienation of modernist city planning mirrors technocratic, often authoritarian systems. This wasn’t just academic theory but a lived conviction that informed every sketch, every design, every passionate argument he made throughout his career.

His critique of Modernism and functional zoning was particularly fierce. Krier denounced the principles of Modernist architecture, especially those promoted by Le Corbusier and CIAM with their separation of functions: work, life, leisure. He believed this led to soulless cities, loss of community, and environmental degradation. The “towers in the park” and isolated zoning, to him, reflected inhumane utopian ideologies that treated humans as abstract units rather than embodied beings with deep needs for connection and place.

What particularly angered Krier about modernity was how it had stripped the common man of the ability to be an artist through common labor. His style was inherently empowering to labor, and he was somebody who celebrated the blue collar workers who were supposed to build our spaces. He hated that this labor had been offshored and he hated that it had created a brain drain where people couldn’t have pride in their work, where they couldn’t do something that was technical and skilled, and creative for a middle class salary.

He thought the best places to build were places where this collective wisdom had not been lost, where workers still had the ability to create craftsmen-like spaces, where the architect could leave places in the specs for the tradesmen to riff and bring in their own creativity to the job. This was sort of the older European idea where when building castles, tradesmen weren’t just laborers but Master Craftsmen who had studied for years and were allowed to elaborate and create their own patterns and gargoyles. Krier saw that modernity was making us stupid, making us reliant on systems that outsourced all of our labor but also stripped us of our pride, our creativity, and our belief in our ability to be generative, to create new spaces and new worlds, and also to take pride in simple labors and simple lives.

Instead of this alienating system, Krier advocated for human-scale urbanism with walkable, mixed-use, human-scaled towns with clearly defined public and private spaces. He supported compact cities, organized around a center and readable to their inhabitants. Streets and squares, in his vision, should be designed for people, not cars. This wasn’t nostalgia; it was a recognition that certain forms of human settlement have endured because they work at a fundamental psychological and social level.

Early in my career, I was just a writer trying to connect all of the forces that are beneath our culture that manifest through different visual and sociological elements. I did a series on architecture and wrote about Leon Krier. I had no idea why a Luxembourg architect would be emailing me, but Krier saw the piece and reached out because he liked it so much and wanted to talk to me. The recording of that conversation was one of the first times I realized that it was easier to connect with the people who built the modern world, or at least the forces that I saw that were important in it, than I had ever imagined.

I grew up going to Seaside, Florida, and I always felt so empowered as a kid because the community was not designed for cars but was designed for people and bikes. I felt like I was finally in an element that allowed me to have the autonomy of an adult. You were always stumbling upon secret pathways and shortcuts because it was designed for people, and it was so creative and so intuitive to navigate. As a kid who didn’t have a good sense of direction and would get lost, I could always orient myself. I knew where I was. I didn’t know until years later that this was by design.

During the Oil Embargo, when it wasn’t known if oil and energy prices would ever come back down, Seaside was a forward-thinking community that was designed like older communities. It was based on the pre-existing architecture and the setting and place of Florida with old funky Florida fish houses with rusted tin roofs as the original vision. Shopkeepers would live above their stores. The city would be navigable by car but designed for people to walk. It was designed along wind lines for a world that may not have air conditioning. It was designed to be incredibly effective and efficient. It was designed to last because it looked like the past. I tell my patients in therapy that  “the best indicator of future behavior is past behavior”. Certain elements of the past will always resurface inevitably in the future, and Krier made a career finding those inevitable elements in architecture that could not be discarded no matter how much modernists and the modern moment tried to move past them.

Seaside would later kick off the New Urbanism movement, a design philosophy that prioritizes walkable neighborhoods containing a diverse range of housing and job types. New Urbanism promotes increased density, traditional neighborhood structure, and sustainable development. There are many other places like it now, but there weren’t in the early 1990s when I was a kid. It was one of the only holy places I had ever been because it was such an intuitive connection that I felt walking around and being able to just navigate it. This was a place built for me, a person.We forget how new, and frankly historically anomalous,  all of these things that we have done to the world are. All these algorithmic, technocratic, consumerist, disposable, terrible, inhuman things really are not that old. To make a better future Krier wanted to take us back to the past.

New Urbanism is about building for people, not for cars, not for profit, not for oil, not for corporations, not for real estate private equity, and definitely not for authoritarian control, but a place to re-empower the individual as the center of the universe. You know, like a community. Those things we used to have. I felt that as a kid in Seaside, and all of Krier’s designs have something that you feel. They connect you to something bigger and older than yourself. They connect you to what all of architecture and the greater Art was supposed to point us back too.  When I grew up, I wanted to understand these movements and the people responsible for them, which is what led me to learning about Leon Krier.

Krier’s rejection of industrial building typologies was absolute. He opposed the standardization and mechanization of building design and construction. Prefabrication and international styles, he argued, alienate people from place and history. Instead, Krier supported vernacular, craft-based traditions that reflect local climates and cultures.

This commitment to tradition and continuity wasn’t about nostalgia. Krier championed traditional architecture as a timeless language. He argued that classical and vernacular forms contain centuries of wisdom about proportion, symbolism, and function. Modern architecture, in contrast, often imposes newness for its own sake, disregarding continuity and memory.

His city-town-village model proposed a hierarchical model of human settlements, from cities to towns to villages, each with appropriate density and civic life. This model promotes decentralization, autonomy, and subsidiarity in governance. It mirrors Aristotle’s idea of the polis as a moral and political unit.

For Krier, designing a building or city was a moral act. Urbanism should foster community, sustainability, and dignity. In this sense, the built environment is not neutral as it can liberate or oppress. He believed architects should serve the community, not corporations or abstract artistic ideals or myopic self expression through weird shapes. Architects work must be legible, beautiful, and enduring. The alienation caused by many modernist works was, for Krier, a betrayal of the architect’s social duty.

I thought it was very odd that a Luxembourg architect who worked for the prince, now King, of England would be emailing a social worker in Alabama writing on a psychotherapy blog, but I was really happy to have anybody pay attention to anything that I wrote, let alone the person I was writing about who was famous. So I emailed Krier and he wanted to talk. The recordings of those were some of the beginnings of the podcast and this idea that I could do through conversation what I was trying to do through writing: connect everything back to psychology and psychology back to the study of consciousness, the study of archetypes, the study of the primal forces that we’re communing with when we make art.

Krier’s design philosophy was incredibly political. He saw architecture as a kind of politics, and that’s why he was so angry about it. He was kind of a difficult guy. He was irascible, he was frustrating, and he was also deeply wounded and sensitive.

I would trade authors with him a lot, and he would give me book reviews and criticisms if he felt like I was reading something that was too modern, but modern to him was sometimes 100 years old. He got mad at me for sending him a book that included something that Martin Heidegger had written. One time when I emailed him poetry, I got this back as a response:

“I don’t read poetry at all now. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Bourget, Cros, Hoelderlin, Pushkin, were my preferred authors when adolescent and when for 16 happy years I accompanied on the piano my french singer friend. When she didn’t move with me to the house I had built for her, poetry left my life. Just reading or replaying those pieces opens floods of tears.”

Krier was a very interesting man, and I enjoyed having him as a pen-pal for a long time. I found in the Ghostbusters special features that the actor who plays Egon Spengler, Harold Ramis, had modeled his performance and appearance off of Leon Krier’s talks and let him know. “Makes sense” was all he said.

He told me about private conversations with Margaret Thatcher, debating what the aesthetic of the future should be. He also told me about his deep respect for all cultures that was apolitical. He saw design as a way to prevent and heal fascism. He saw all forms of design that were authentic and beautiful as being an expression of that culture’s way of being and their need for structures to reflect their modes of existence.

He told me I reminded him of a Jungian analyst that he had met at Zurich once, James Hillman. This wasn’t quite a compliment because I have long been afraid that many of James Hillman’s own demons and worst angels are some of my own, and I use Hillman’s hubris in many places to check myself. Krier told me that James Hillman had told him that European architecture draws the eye upward to seek heaven as all the lines in European architecture draw the eye towards the ceiling, but that American architecture puts in a drop ceiling and fluorescent lighting because it wants workers to stare downward into hell.

Krier worked in many styles, something like Poundbury in England or work in Guatemala are very different. But they are in communion with a place and they mirror the history and the styles of the place, trying to recenter it on what makes it unique and what makes the people there special. In this way, I think that Krier was similar to some of the architects that he hated, more similar than he would like to know. Even though his results were very different, a lot of his working process and the axes that he sought to grind were similar to someone like Frank Lloyd Wright, even though Krier hated Wright.

He showed me the diagrams that he had made of a house that Frank Lloyd Wright had drawn as a concept for Ayn Rand’s studio. Krier corrected the sketch and drew his own design of what the “right” version would have been of Wright’s drawing. It was these kind of quirks that I always found so endearing.

Seaside Florida was designed in the style of postmodern classicism. But Krier worked and handled many styles of architecture. What was essential to him was the archetype, the unborn form of how society had evolved space to use. So most of his designs echo more ornate styles with their detail stripped down to the archetypal functions of the structure.

I would send him pictures of my kids enjoying Seaside at the same age that I was when I found it, and he would send me pictures from the hometown that inspired his designs, touched up and recolored grainy film footage of a man feeding a horse a sugar cube while it pulled a cart.

Krier hated oil, he hated modernism, and he hated cheap consumption-driven culture that went along with it, like cars, things designed not to be permanent. He saw the best architecture as something that sprung from a natural need that was timeless, that would always be there. He saw the changes that had happened to the world in his lifetime as something that was very bad. I would probably agree with him there, although I don’t agree with him on everything.

Krier worked under the assumption that form and structure are inseparable from function, but his style wasn’t purely functional. He developed an aesthetic around the interplay of how people used space and how you built the space. He didn’t like modern building techniques. He didn’t really like anything derived from oil (which is almost everything we use to build now) at all and thought that that  cursed cheap energy source was one of the biggest problems facing our world that had driven it to ego and empire.

He was a kind man and interesting, and we can learn a lot from the things that he thought. He was a huge fan of Hannah Arendt, (who funnily enough once had an affair with Heidegger) and I think that was because Hannah Arendt saw echoes and reflections between politics and the cultural and aesthetic expressions around it.

What specifically appealed to Krier about Arendt’s “The Human Condition” was her threefold distinction between labor, work, and action. Krier saw “work” and “action” as the domains of architecture and urbanism. He believed Modernism had reduced architecture to mere “labor” or technical problem-solving, ignoring its role in facilitating meaningful public action and enduring civic life.

Arendt idealized the Greek polis as a structured, bounded public space where free individuals could appear before one another in speech and deed. Krier viewed the traditional city as a modern analogue to the polis. The square, the street, and the civic building were arenas for action including public life, dialogue, and shared identity. Modern urban planning, in his view, destroyed these spaces, replacing them with highways, parking lots, strip malls and anonymous zoning.

Arendt warned of the rise of systems that reduce humans to cogs, governed not by politics but by “the social” and administration. Krier saw modern architecture as complicit in this trend, serving centralized bureaucracies, not communities. He felt that large-scale housing blocks, sterile planning, and the international style were the spatial expressions of totalitarian or technocratic ideologies, a view that parallels Arendt’s critique of 20th-century politics.

Arendt saw how people feel designs that they don’t necessarily understand consciously, and Leon Krier was a sort of a “depth” architect because he was working in communion with history and a depth psychology of using history, not trying to understand the future. This is why his buildings are so future-forward, and he was so angry at anyone who was building just for today, just for a dollar. He believed that spaces should be able to be disassembled and moved, that they should be a part of us, that we should be in conversation with them.

The depth of Krier’s influence on contemporary urbanism cannot be overstated. Andrés Duany, another New Urbanist urban planner and architect, was another person that we interviewed on our podcast, and like all of the people in this movement, he spoke of how Krier inspired many people to look beyond a world where energy was free and where labor was something that was a cheap commodity that could be offshored.

Krier’s unseen influence ripples through countless contemporary projects and movements. His students and followers have gone on to design communities across the world that prioritize human scale and traditional craft. Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, co-founder of DPZ with Duany, credits Krier with opening her eyes to the political dimensions of design. Stefanos Polyzoides, another leading New Urbanist, describes Krier as the philosophical backbone of the movement, the one who gave them the language to articulate what was wrong with modernist planning.

But his influence extends far beyond the New Urbanist circle. Architects like Robert A.M. Stern, though working in different contexts, have acknowledged Krier’s impact on their thinking about tradition and continuity. Even architects who disagreed with him found themselves having to grapple with his critiques. The Charter for the New Urbanism, adopted in 1996, reads like a practical application of Krier’s theoretical work.

His influence on the peak oil movement went beyond theory. He showed that traditional urbanism wasn’t just nostalgic but anticipatory, that the old ways of building would become the new ways once the oil age ended. For the peak oil community, Krier provided both a critique of the present and a workable vision of the future, demonstrating that the end of cheap oil didn’t have to mean the end of civilization but could instead mean a return to more humane, sustainable ways of living together.

What’s remarkable is how many young architects, futurists, and planners discovered Krier’s work and found in it a vocabulary for their own dissatisfaction with the status quo. They saw in his drawings not just beautiful buildings but a comprehensive critique of how we’ve organized our society. His influence can be seen in the growing movement toward traditional building techniques, in the revival of classical architecture education, and in the increasing skepticism toward top-down, technocratic planning.

The principles Krier championed have found their way into zoning reforms across the country, into the form-based codes that are slowly replacing the segregated use zoning he so despised. When cities today talk about “missing middle” housing or “gentle density,” they’re using concepts that Krier helped articulate decades ago. When developers build walkable mixed-use neighborhoods, whether they know it or not, they’re following patterns that Krier spent his life promoting.

Perhaps most importantly, Krier inspired a generation to think about architecture as more than aesthetics or function. He taught them to see it as fundamentally about human dignity and political freedom. This perspective has influenced not just how buildings are designed but how we think about public space, community engagement, and the right to the city.

As we face climate change, social isolation, and the continued dominance of car-centric planning, Krier’s ideas feel more relevant than ever. His vision of walkable communities, local materials, and human-scaled development offers a path forward that addresses both environmental and psychological needs.

The pandemic showed us how crucial our immediate environments are to our wellbeing. Krier understood this decades ago, that the spaces we inhabit shape our consciousness, our relationships, and our possibilities for meaningful action in the world.

Leon Krier once summarized his ethos: “Architecture is a political act. It either serves the community or the system. Neutrality is a myth.” This understanding that our built environment is never neutral, that it always embodies values and shapes behavior, is his greatest gift to us.

As psychotherapists, we understand that environment shapes psyche. As citizens, we must understand that architecture shapes politics. Krier showed us that these are not separate realms but interconnected aspects of the human condition.

His passing marks the end of an era, but his ideas live on in every walkable neighborhood, every human-scaled development, every architect who chooses community over profit. In remembering Leon Krier, we remember that another world is possible, one built for humans, not machines; for community, not isolation; for permanence, not profit.

The conversations I had with him, which became part of the foundation for our podcast, taught me that the people shaping our world are often more accessible than we think. More importantly, they taught me that the intersection of psychology, politics, and place is where the real work of building a more human world begins.

Krier’s vision wasn’t perfect, and he could be difficult, dogmatic even. But he was also deeply human, wounded by the destruction he saw around him and passionate about the possibility of repair. In that, he offers us not just an architectural philosophy but a way of being in the world, attentive to beauty, committed to community, and uncompromising in the belief that we deserve spaces that honor our full humanity.

In Krier’s view both structure and function could not be separated and the beauty of form grew from that fusion not the other way around. Krier’s politics were not mine but he points us back at something universal beneath politics. His politics was the extension of the apolitical nature of archetype and we could fight with them or embrace them but they spoke to us always. He speaks to us through the life and work he left behind still.

The answer, as Krier knew, is always political. And it starts with the next building, the next street, the next choice we make about how we want to live together.