Studied architecture and urbanism in Paris and Vincennes and graduated as an Architecte DPLG in 1980. He worked at the Archives d’Architecture Moderne in Brussels with Maurice Culot and Leon Krier until 1982. Between 1982 and 1986 he was practising in Luxembourg mostly on commissions for the Ministry of Public Works. A Visiting Critic at Oregon School of Design in Portland (USA) from 1986 to 1988 he returned set up a practice in Luxembourg until 1997 with Irish architect Colum Mulhern. The practice produced a wide range of projects in sustainable traditional urbanism and traditional architecture and won various awards in national and international urban competitions.
From 1997 to 2007 Lucien Steil taught as a visiting professor at: - Prince of Wales’s Urban Design Task Force in Potsdam and Berlin, and with universities in the US: (Oregon School of Design, Portland/ Oregon, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Politechnical University of Puerto-Rico , and in Europe: Italy (University of Bologna), Portugal (Universidade Catolica Portuguesa), and Luxembourg (Universite de Luxembourg), etc. He joined the Prince’s Foundation in 2007 where he worked on research and projects of sustainable, traditional urbanism and architecture until 2008.
Since 2007 he has been lecturing on ecological planning and architecture with the Istituto Nazionale di Bioarchitettura (INBAR) in Italy and has been appointed as Scientific Director of the INBAR’s Frosinone (Southern Lazio) section. He has been teaching in Rome as a Visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame from 2008 to 2010. Since Fall 2010 he joined the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.
Lucien Steil has been very actively involved in the cause of a humane and sustainable, ecological and traditional urbanism and architecture for which he has both argued in newspapers, essays and lectures, and which has become very central to his teaching and design practice. He has been instrumental to the creation of CEU (Council for European Urbanism) and has been relentlessly networking between USA and European professionals engaged in New Urbanism and Traditional Architecture. Since 2001 he has developed several websites and weblogs, and has created an international non-profit organization to teach, implement and promote New Traditional Architecture and Ecological Urbanism (Katarxis Urban Workshops ASBL). Together with Alireza Sagharchi, Lucien Steil has co-edited “New Palladians, Sustainability and Modernity in Architecture of the 21st Century” published in March 2010 at Artmedia, London, and “Traditional Architecture, Timeless Building in the 21st Century” to be published by Rizzoli International in October 2013. He also edited the upcoming “The Architectural Capriccio, Memory, Fantasy & Invention” to be published in October 2013 by Ashgate, London.
