Leon Krier

Léon Krier's House for Colin Rowe is a vignette on the idea of the perfectibility of the classical villa. Cartoonlike, timeless, and without location, it is an architectural fairy tale, yet its delicately drawn double-walled interior and extending ramparts emanate invincibility. This ideal vision of the villa suggests something desirable yet unattainable, and Rowe, a scholar of architecture, has suggested that Krier's work be studied within this utopian context.
Krier, one of the most polemical architects of the 1970s and '80s, has asserted, "I can only make Architecture, because I do not build. I do not build, because I am an Architect." He believes in the perfection of an idea on paper, and his drawing techniques are influenced by the great traditions of Renaissance cartography and by the eighteenth-century architect and printmaker Giambattista Piranesi. Krier exerts a moralistic fervor in denouncing modern architecture and the industrial world, and in promoting a classical language in architecture. He has designed both large-scale cities and small-scale follies, such as this drawing. The clarity of the plan, with its symmetrical arrangement of main facade elements-entrance opening, pediment, and "Palladian" window-recalls sixteenth-century Italian villas by the neoclassical architect Andrea Palladio.
One can interpret Krier's house as a response to Rowe's renowned essay "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa," published in 1947. Comparing Palladio's Villa Foscari (c. 1550) with Le Corbusier's Villa Stein (1927), Rowe asserts that both architects share a mathematical standard that they impose upon these projects. Krier's bunkerlike villa shares with Palladio and LeCorbusier the essential idea of the cubic block, but is closer in spirit to Palladio's study and reconstruction of Roman domestic architecture.