Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

About a week ago, we ran a Guest Posting by Laurence Aurbach about the great New Classicist architect and thinker Leon Krier. Not for the first time, Krier had been called a Nazi by a self-righteous modernist.

Today we run a Guest Posting by Leon Krier himself. Thanks are due to Laurence Aurbach, who has been in touch with Krier, and who has obtained permission for us to run a brief statement.

A brief bit of background: classical architecture -- the basic language of much Western building and town-making for a couple of thousand years -- has been reviled by many Modernists since the Second World War as complicit in Naziism. The thinking is that what a couple of thousand years of Western Civ led to were the horrors of WWII. Thus, everything associated with those couple of thousand years of Western Civ, including its architecture, needed to be thrown out. We needed to begin again from a blank slate. (Hence, in part anyway, the blankness of much Modernist architecture.) Classical architecture, from this point of view, was at the very least an enabler of Naziism, if not a straightforward expression of it.

It sounds absurd, but this is how it was (and, by some, still is) seen: the good Modernist demonstrates his opposition to Naziism by thwarting Classical architecture. Sigh: this is the kind of thing that passes in the arts worlds for deep political thinking ...

Much of Leon Krier's life has been devoted to rehabilitating Western Classical architecture as a living tradition and practice. Beautiful and humane buildings, neighborhoods, and towns ... Doesn't it make infinitely more sense to understand them as among the flowers of Western civ -- and to understand Naziism as an outbreak of barbarism, not civilization? Civilization is what's to be cherished; Classical architecture and Classical (and traditional) towns represent some of what's best in civilization. Besides, look at the havoc Modernists have inflicted on our cities, towns, and homes. Which is the truly destructive force: Classicism or Modernism?

To rehabilitate Classicism, Krier and Maurice Culot wrote a book investigating the notorious Nazi architect Albert Speer, who designed many overblown Classical fantasias, and even built some. This was a courageous move on Krier and Culot's part, because Speer is the man Modernists love to point at: See! A Nazi! Who loved Classicism! See!

Krier and Culot's book was clearly intended to pry apart the association between Classical building and Naziism. After all, the Nazis built in other styles too, and totalitarian regimes haven't exactly been shy about using Modernism. Given thiese facts, why pick on Classicism? Can a bad person choose a good style to work in? Answer: of course, it happens all the time, and it means nothing whatsoever about whether that style itself is good or bad, let alone whether it's being well or foolishly used.

But aggressive and antagonistic idiots (who often don't seem to have looked at the book) like to believe that Krier and Culot's intention wasn't to rehabilitate Classical architecture or to discuss what greatness in architecture -- let alone to help us all recover much of what was great about our past -- but was instead to make a case for Speer and for Naziism. Leon Krier: not a man who makes a moving and convincing case for a poetic and humane Classicism, but a Nazi sympathizer.

Recently, Anthony Vidler, the Dean of Architecture at New York's Cooper Union, accused Krier of harboring Nazi sympathies. Laurence Aurbach's Guest Posting was about this outrage. Here's Krier's own response:

Maurice Culot's ... reluctance to grab the Speer problem by the neck can be better understood in the light of what we both had to go through after publishing the book (Speer Monograph). What we wanted to reasses, and what many people still refuse to even discuss now, was not Speer's guilt but the question whether a monstrous criminal can be a great architect; conversely, whether a great architect's moral guilt necessarily reduces the quality of his architecture?

It is generally accepted that a pathological criminal can be a great general, scientist, engineer, industrialist, or musician. Why not a great architect? All criminal totalitarian regimes of the XX C have equally used classical and modernist architecture for their perverse political purposes. Why should classical architecture alone be found guilty in that association?

Revealingly, modernism, industrial technology and design, communication and armament systems, which were equally used by criminal regimes, are valued as morally neutral, so to speak, "unpollutable," and hence available for unrestricted use and development.

The monstrous arrogance, the imperial ruthlessness and repressiveness of some of Speer's buildings lie not, we thought, in their classical style, but in their size, scale and ideological program. Whether Speer, Corbusier or Mies designed Hitler's parade grounds, party monuments and death camps, would not change the fundamental criminality of their social and political purpose.

Indeed many modernist projects and realisations are arguably more totalitarian
than Speer's visions. Hilmerseimer turned the whole of the Friedrichstadt into an architectural gulag. If a criminal architect does not necessarily design criminal buildings, an innocent mind does in turn not automatically produce innocent architecture.

-- Léon Krier

Krier also writes: "Tony Vidler, recirculating the old venom, has forgotten
that he chose me to replace him at Princeton for his sabbatical in 1977. Wonder how he would explain that to his students. He also introduced "Rational Architecture," a volume I edited for AAM in Bruxelles, etc, etc."

Laurence has also obtained permission for us to run a handful of Leon Krier's cartoons. I'm thrilled: Krier is a first-class cartoonist in the gentle/barbed, rueful/poetic Euro mode of someone like Sempe. He's also brilliant at using his drawings to present his didactic and architectural points in amazingly succinct ways.

A couple cartoons on the intolerance and arrogance of Modernism:

Krier argues that the skyscraper has been a disaster as a building type. Nikos Salingaros talked with Krier about skyscrapers in this 2001 interview. Here's one of the reasons why Krier thinks that the building of skyscrapers should be abandoned:

More links to explore, thanks to Laurence. Here's a well-done press release from Yale on the occasion of an exhibition featuring Krier and Peter Eisenman. And here's an essay Roger Kimball adapted from his introductory remarks at that event. Leon Krier's great book, "Architecture: Choice or Fate?" can be bought here. James Kunstler's brilliant and appreciative review of the book is also a first-class introduction to Krier's significance and work. Kunstler will forgive me if I cut-and-paste a terrific passage:

Krier lays out his case and issues a challenge: The 20th Century belief system called Modernism, and its cultish offshoots, have failed to produce buildings and cities worth caring about, or even capable of supporting the continued enterprise of civilization, and it is time to replace them with something better, namely, traditional principles and methods of building consistent with the real needs of the human spirit. Much of the knowledge necessary to achieve this restoration of civilization's dwelling place already exists in the very history from which Modernism sought to divorce itself.

Hard to imagine a more down-to-earth, commonsensical, respectful-of-the-rest-of-us argument. Yet this is the man some Modernists love calling a Nazi. What does their eagerness to throw around such accusations -- and to use terms like "Nazi" so freely -- say about these Modernists?

Many thanks once again to Laurence Aurbach. Laurence's own very-fun-toexplore website is here.

Best,

Michael