The death of Lucien Kroll, ecological and libertarian architect

Belgian architect Lucien Kroll died in Brussels on August 2. He was 95 years old. He died while walking, tells us his friend, the French architect Thierry Derousseau. A beautiful end for this man who was, among many other things, a great walker. Unclassifiable maverick, anarchist at heart, early ecologist, Lucien Kroll was the subject, lately, of a return to grace.

In his eyes, architecture only made sense insofar as it did good to people, that it allowed to create links, that it reflected the irregularity of the living

The humanist, environmentalist and libertarian concerns which earned him and his wife, Simone, a certain success in the 1960s and 1970s, then a brutal relegation to the dark fringes during the following decades, today join those of part of the youth. In a context marked by climate change and repeated economic crises, which caused schools of architecture to question the teachings of neo and postmodernism, the experimental, collaborative and rebellious approach of the Krolls, both utopian and deeply rooted in material and social reality, has aroused real enthusiasm among students for several years.

The work accomplished by Patrick Bouchain and Patrice Goulet to make their work known, which crystallized in an exhibition in 2013, at the Lieu unique, in Nantes, paved the way for institutional and critical recognition. In 2015, the Cité de l’architecture, in Paris, paid tribute in turn to the couple of architects in an exhibition which was taken over by the Palais des beaux-arts in Brussels.

“incremental” method

It was in Brussels that Lucien Kroll was born on March 13, 1927. His father was an engineer, his mother a nurse. In an interview given in 2018 to the architecture review Clara, he said he hesitated, when he was young, between two paths: medicine and architecture. The spark came from the discovery of the “duty of beauty”, an idea developed by Henry Van de Velde, the Belgian master of Art Nouveau. Lucien Kroll joined the La Cambre school, of which Van de Velde was the founder. He graduated in 1951, convinced that times have changed, that the time is now “duty of participation of the inhabitants”.

From then on, he never ceased to devote himself to it, developing within the studio he created the same year – which would become, after meeting his wife, the architecture and design studio. urbanism Simone and Lucien Kroll – a method he will call “incremental”. Approaching architecture as a living matter that affects all areas of existence, Lucien Kroll maintains that it can only be learned by doing. By making mistakes, in other words, by crossing out, by tinkering… The concept of “vicinity” that he forges to designate “the gentle proximity between the houses” translates a conception of architecture organically integrated into the landscape and the movement of life.

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