BY ALEX MARSHALL
FOR OCTOBER 1997 ISSUE
METROPOLIS MAGAZINE
Every July for the past few years, architect Andres Duany had taught a three-day workshop at Harvard on New Urbanism, the urban design philosophy he helped mold and promote. A group of architects, developers and other professionals were given the basics of neo-traditional design, while Duany and the New Urban movement got the imprint of Harvard’s esteemed name.
No longer. Before this summer, (1997) Duany fired off a letter saying he could “no longer associate his name with a school that is not fertile ground for urbanism,” said Alex Krieger, an architect and director of the urban designprogram at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
Why the withdrawal? According to Krieger, Duany spurned the school after the school had spurned his efforts to expand the course to regular students at the Graduate School of Design. As it was, the course had been part of the school’s summer series of professional development courses.
“Andres has tried very hard to convince the world that Harvard is teaching New Urbanism, but that is not happening,” said Krieger, who has worked with Duany on projects dating back to Kentlands in the late 1980s.
“I still consider Andres a friend, but the relationship between Harvard and New Urbanism is strained. . . .They (the New Urbanists) wanted to win us over, or at least use our names, and they have been rebuffed.”
The dustup is an example of the tentative and often uncordial dance between the New Urbanists and the traditional architectural establishment in academia. The New Urbanists are making inroads, but slowly and in the face of much skepticism.
To those ignorant of the term, New Urbanism is the loose design philosophy that advocates reviving many of the building principles of traditional towns and cities. That means everything from pushing homes up to the streets, to mixing, or attempting to mix, businesses in with homes. It also is part of a debate about how to achieve a greater community and public life in this country, and whether design has anything to do with that.
Design professionals in universities are debating whether New Urbanism offers a coherent theory of design, and the validity of New Urbanism’s criticism of the traditional architectural education as overly centered on creating the architect as artist who creates unique, sculptural forms.
So far, New Urbanism is popping up in a few schools around the country, mostly because of a few professors who have embraced its ideals. An exception to this is the architecture school at The University of Miami, led by Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, which has the New Urban theory as its spiritual core.
Beside Miami, schools frequently mentioned by New Urbanists are the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Berkeley has long offered a joint degree in architecture and city and regional planning, but has recently begun a small master’s program that combines architecture and New-Urban style town planning. Several of the architects in the office of Peter Calthorpe, a leading New Urbanist, are graduates of the program or school, said Daniel Solomon, a professor at Berkeley.
Solomon said the school was more fertile territory for New Urbanism because it had long integrated urban design with architecture. Since the early 1960s, regional planning and architecture have been housed in Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Design, Solomon said.
At the University of Washington, Douglas Kelbaugh has led efforts to teach New Urbanism. Working with students, Kelbaugh has led about 10 charrettes in the Seattle area working with New Urbanism principles.
“New Urbanism is not a formal component of the education there,” Kelbaugh said. “It’s something I and a couple of other faculty members push.”
At the University of Southern California, Stefanos Polyzoides, one of the founders of the Congress of the New Urbanism, has integrated much of the philosophy into his course.
Other professors and schools mentioned by New Urbanists are Mark Schimmenti at the University of Tennessee and Ellen Dunham-Jones at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The most cohesive and complete program is at the University of Miami, which has about 280 undergraduate students and 50 at the graduate level. There, the idea of architect as city, or at least place, builder is integrated into the curriculum from the beginning.
Plater-Zyberk, dean of the school and New Urbanist leader, said students begin their education with a course in the “history of settlement,” and then work their way down, narrowing the lens, until they arrive at the individual building.
“We do it in reverse,” Plater-Zyberk said. “Instead of starting with the smallest increment and growing, we start with the urban contextual environment first.”
The school was recently awarded funding for the Henry R. Luce Professorship in Family and Community by the foundation named for the founder of Time and Life magazine. The professor, who has yet to be selected, will lead an unusual joint program between the architecture school and the school of medicine. Using resources from both schools, Plater-Zyberk says the program will focus on repairing and rejuvenating East Little Havana, home to many of the new immigrants in the Miami area.
The program in East Little Havana is an example of how New Urbanists are trying to shift architectural education away from the Howard-Roark ideal of architect as lone artist, to someone who uses his or her facility with space to create a better context for both buildings and people.
That’s a big jump, say New Urbanists.
“New Urbanists are challenging some of the core values of the traditional architectural establishment,” said Shelley Poticha, executive director of the Congress of New Urbanism in San Francisco. “That single buildings aren’t the most thing to focus on. That the place and the fabric are important, and that the architecture should contribute to the place.”
Polyzoides, echoing many others, said there aren’t that many jobs for solitary artists, which he said most architectural schools train students to aspire to. The myriad tasks that should be available to architects – from construction manager to laying out the insides of a K-Mart – are not because architects are not trained to be practical managers of space.
“Architecture schools are in deep denial,” Polyzoides said. “They support an architecture system based around star performers. But the chance of becoming a builder like Frank Gehry is equal to the chance of being a teammate of Michael Jordan.”
Polyzoides said he would like to reform the studio system that is the core of most architectural education. Having students design alone and compete with other students re-inforces the hyper-indivualistic and competitive tendencies of architecture. Instead, Polyzoides said he has his students work together to solve tasks like fitting streets and buildings into an oddly shaped parcel of land.
The larger problem, said Solomon and others, is ending the division between planning and architecture. Some universities even house city or regional planning in separate schools.
“The idea of bringing together the architecture school and the planning school is at the crux of New Urbanism,” Poticha said.
Some of the hostility towards New Urbanism comes from New Urbanists attempting to claim credit for all good urban design over the last two decades, said Krieger.
“It’s galling what is attributed to New Urbanism,” Krieger said. “All of a sudden, everything that is being done in Boston, like the gentrification of South Boston, are all examples of New Urbanism. They have co-opted urbanism. Anything having to do with cities in any shape or form is New Urbanism, even though the majority of their product remains out on the periphery.”
“We don’t teach New Urbanism,” said Krieger of Harvard. ” There are courses on good urbanism.”
Krieger suggests half-seriously that perhaps urbanists should “co-opt” the term New Urbanism, since the name seems to be selling well.
“If the name helps people get involved in cities, let’s use it even more,” Krieger said. “That’s the cynical side of me speaking.”