Léon Krier was a character. He dressed like an impresario, wrote like a pamphleteer, and drew like an angel. He happily stoked public controversy. His most famous bon mot was “I’m an architect, because I don’t build.” But he did build. The three buildings that I’ve seen of his—his own house, a town hall, and a university audiitorium—have a quality that seems to have eluded most of his traditional-minded contemporaries: originality. He was a classicist, but not a revivalist. He was original, too, in his thinking about town planning, to use an old-fashioned term he would have liked. To Krier, the principles of sound urban design were all known long ago—and didn’t need to be reinvented—the great challenge was how to accommodate the automobile. His solution was not to banish cars to the periphery, or to separate them from pedestrians, but to pragmatically insinuate them into the plan—under buildings, in buildings, beside buildings, on the street, and in ad-hoc car parks that were really squares. In a Krier plan such as Poundbury, the street plan appears at first picturesque and chaotic, but this is done with a singular purpose. The person on foot is king, the person behind the wheel is the interloper.

I was saddened to learn of the death of David Childs (1941-2025). He was the chair when I joined the Commission of Fine Arts, and an intelligent architect and a charming man. Reading the obituaries put me in mind of something I came across while writing The Biography of a Building, about the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, a very early Norman Foster design. Sir Hugh Casson, the dean of postwar British architects, had written a letter of recommendation for the young Foster, who was being considered for the job: “As you have already met him [Foster], you need not be told that he is a man of great energy, drive and enthusiasm, with enough granite beneath the charm to ensure consistency in any project to which he lays his hand.” Charm is a professional requirement for an architect; granite is a rarer attribute.