Leon Krier

Between 1967 and 1974, while pursuing urban projects, Krier also produced numerous drawings of architectural follies, including this work. He pictured the structures in his drawings—inspired by vernacular architecture or structural engineering—in remote locations, such as mountains, deserts, and Mediterranean islands. These visionary projects, inspired by both real circumstance and the architect’s dreams, were conceived for specific individuals, such as friends or people whom Krier admired from a distance. In these personal projects, he sought an escape from the formal and social principals of the modern masters and a rediscovery of essential methods of construction. He used fictional motifs to both reinvent architecture and shift its role as a definer of existing social and spatial structures. Krier continued to pursue an architecture that rejected modernism and contemporary technology, laying the political foundation for so-called New Urbanism, a movement that reclaimed the civic pedestrian townscape from an increasingly automotive urban society.