The most enduring of all love affairs I have had with places is that with Luxembourg City, my home town, where I lived until the age of 20. My first conscious memory is sitting on my father’s shoulders, terrified by the fireworks exploding above the pinnacled skyline and raining down from the fortification walls and viaducts on the Grand Duchess’s birthday.

We lived on a tree-lined corniche across the valley from the Old Town. The colossal battlements and bridges were strikingly lit at night, turning the whole affair into a playful diorama. Our Christmas tree would naturally be planted above paper rocks and abysses spanned by numerous stone bridges spreading across the living room.

The city was so impressive and beautiful that even Paris turned out to be a disappointment, not to mention London. The planned grand vistas, taking advantage of the spectacular landforms, contrasted dramatically with comfortable urbanity and gentle stone buildings. There was a high presence of national and international institutions housed in elegant landmark buildings. For me this was perfectly normal, just as it seemed normal to take music exams in a glazed conservatory overhanging a sheer 50-metre fortification wall. Virtually every undertaking in and about town could be accomplished within minutes of a beautiful level walk. Public transport was used in bad weather or for eyeing the girls.

The city was in perfect working order and knew no slums to speak of. When the newspaper announced that the double row of trees on our boulevard was to be sacrificed to a road-widening we all looked keenly forward to the event. Better traffic, better views, better everything was in the air. When I woke up on that fateful Monday morning, the panorama cleared and the tree-branches burning in a dozen smoking pyres, for the first time in my life I had the feeling that something had gone horribly wrong. The ensuing state visit of the French President René Coty led to pervasive tree slaying and excessive neon lighting. Much worse was in store.

Over the next years the town underwent sweeping redevelopments for which there was no explicable need. Inbuilt resistances were broken down by the desire to be trendy or the fear of not being sufficiently cool. Expo ‘58 had set ablaze not only Brussels. Treasured places that had escaped wartime devastation now fell without serious resistance to an unstoppable purge.

When I started living abroad I kept myself informed by the weekly national press. Invariably the front pages depicted a beautiful tree, a much loved villa, a precious town block doomed to demolition. In 1972 the headline Park or Parking?, debating the replacement of the city park by a massive parking structure, set my systems into panic mode. Not knowing whom to invoke to stop the madness, I published my first critical article against functional zoning, advocating multiple town extensions rather than redevelopment. The 1901 Stübben Plan for Plateau Bourbon had masterfully demonstrated this thesis through the ex-novo development of the Quartier de la Gare. From 1902-10 over five thousand Italian masons built a complete new town. Its triumphal Avenue de la Liberté focused on the baroque clock tower of the new railway station and bridged theatrically to the Old Town over the largest stone arch in the world. The many open plateaus around the town were just waiting for a move of that nature.

Pierre Vago, author of the zoning plan, deigned to answer my proposal with a bemusing jargon about modernity. The European Union institutions continued to be built on the Kirchberg Plateau in a scattered manner following the principles of the Athens Charter. When, in 1976, the government presented Roger Taillebert’s design for the new European Parliament, a storm of protest broke out in the media. The building was fittingly derided in the local patois as ‘the prick’. Patronising responses from international experts invariably countered the criticisms about the scale and practicality of the 160-metre-high leaning monstrosity. I used the occasion to demonstrate how Luxembourg could be developed into a polycentric metropolis, a family of independent small cities, modelled on the size, scale and character of the historic centre. Through a series of polemical sketches and scale comparisons I corroborated the soundness of the broad opposition. Taillebert’s folly was cancelled but Luxembourg went into a modernist hyperdrive nevertheless.

In 1990 my brother Rob and I were appointed by the minister of public works, Robert Goebbels, without competition, to design the new City of Justice on the Plateau du St Esprit. The rocky promontory faced the corniche where our home and garden once stood. The administration, media and cultural elite were unanimously opposed to our project and philosophy. The deputy state architect, who had persistently bullied me 33 years earlier at boarding school, subjected us to full-scale institutional harassment. I resigned after seven years of fighting lost battles. To realise the seven buildings, Rob endured a further 13 years of regular humiliations.

Coolness has meanwhile turned into a global obsession. My sister was recently stopped in the street by an acquaintance asking her ‘Marianne, tell me, why can’t your brothers be modern?’.

Looking back I realise that all my theoretical work and teaching aim essentially at safeguarding the ideas that had shaped the vanishing beloved city of my youth.

Léon Krier is an urban theorist, planner and campaigner for the reconstruction of cities based on traditional models and construction methods.

First published in AT223, November 2011