Inaugural award
Leon Krier
Richard H. Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture
Om March 22nd the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture presented the inaugural Richard H. Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture to architect, theorist and teacher Leon Krier.
Photo: Jonathan Becker
Known for his passionate advocacy of traditional architecture and urbanism, Leon Krier has produced visionary work and changed attitudes about how to create a sustainable built environment in contemporary life.
He designed the master plan for town of Poundbury in Dorset, England, a project sponsored by the Prince of Wales, whom Krier has served as a consultant for since 1988. More than 150 houses have been completed, each building designed by a different architect, with no prevailing style, but rather strict guidelines to make sure of cohesion.
Photo courtesy Leon Krier
Poundbury, Dorset
He developed master plans for Washington, D.C., the town of Atlantis and Pliny's Villa. Krier's theories also form part of the urban development recommendations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the European Union.
The Krier designed Village Hall in Windsor, Florida was completed in 1999.
Painting by Leon Krier
Village Hall, Windsor, Florida
Krier believes architecture should not be left to architects alone. He says the world is paying a high price for abandoning architecture to the whims of experts, forsaking a healthy urban effect through the creation of viable communities in favor of fleeting fashion.
Chosen by a committee of leading architects and educators, Krier will receive a $100,000 prize and a model of the Choregic Monument of Lysikratis in Athens. In panel included: Michael Lykoudis, Chair of the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture; Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture; Jaquelin Robertson, Principal of Cooper Robertson in New York and former Dean of the University of Virginia School of Architecture; Thomas Fisher,
Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota and former editor of Progressive Architecture.
Leon Krier has taught architecture and town planning at the Royal College of Arts, London; Princeton University; the University of Virginia and Yale University. He is a founding trustee of the New School for Traditional Architecture & Urbanism in Charleston, South Carolina. Krier's honors include the Jefferson Memorial Gold Medal; the Berlin Prize for Architecture; the Chicago American Institute of Architects Award; the European Culture Prize and now the inaugural Richard H. Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture.
Richard H. Driehaus, the founder and chairman of Driehaus Capital Management in Chicago, endowed the annual award to honor a major contributor in the field of traditional and classical architecture or historic preservation. He established the prize through Notre Dame's School of Architecture because of its reputation as a national leader in incorporating the ideals of traditional and classical architecture into the task of modern urban development.
The author of several books, Krier's Architecture: Choice or Fate was awarded the Silver Medal of the Acadámie Francaise. A native Luxembourger who lived in London for 20 years, he currently makes his home in southern France.
"The book "Architecture: Choice or Fate" provides a chance to sample Krier's mind and eye. Images and diagrams of schemes, plans and proposals are accompanied by quirkily organized comments from Krier.
Text, pictures and design all mesh and advance a vision; Krier is making a case and exemplifying a method at the same time.
Krier's book is explicitly anti-modernist - and in discussing buildings and towns, he's proposing that the mind itself play a different role than it plays in modernism. Forget the fireworks of abstraction and inwardness: How about using the mind (and buildings and cities) to help us find a place in the world, and in history too? If you enter into the book's method and argument, it can be indescribably moving to turn a page and find a delicate pen-and-ink cartoon of a man on a porch looking past a colonnade toward a plaza: Consciousness and social life, for so long at odds, have opened back up to each other once again."
Excerpt from a review by By Ray Sawhill
Leon Krier
" Choice or Fate"
Andreas Papadakis Publications
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Leon Krier "The Architect's Studio"
Leon Krier arcspace features
March 31, 2003