Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [105]
4. In the contemporary metropolis, development must adequately accommodate automobiles. It should do so in ways that respect the pedestrian and the form of public space.
5. Streets and squares should be safe, comfortable, and interesting to the pedestrian. Properly configured, they encourage walking and enable neighbors to know each other and protect their communities.
6. Architecture and landscape design should grow from local climate, topography, history, and building practice.
7. Civic buildings and public gathering places require important sites to reinforce community identity and the culture of democracy. They deserve distinctive form, because their role is different from that of other buildings and places that constitute the fabric of the city.
8. All buildings should provide their inhabitants with a clear sense of location, weather, and time. Natural methods of heating and cooling can be more resource-efficient than mechanical systems.
9. Preservation and renewal of historic buildings, districts, and landscapes affirm the continuity and evolution of urban society.
For CNU membership information, please contact:
The Congress for the New Urbanism
The Hearst Building
5 Third Street, Suite 725
San Francisco, CA 94103
415-495-2255
www.cnu.org
For more information about the Traditional Neighborhood Development
Ordinance (TND), please contact:
Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co.
1023 SW 25th Avenue
Miami, FL 33135
305-644-1023
www.dpz.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people contributed to the creation of this book, offering both inspiration and assistance. Its intellectual underpinnings can be found in the turn-of-the-(twentieth-)century writings of Ebenezer Howard, Raymond Unwin, Camillo Sitte, Hermann Josef Stübben, and the other wonderfully unspecialized planners and designers of the progressive era. They understood that the physical creation of community was the work of generalists, to be undertaken by artists and scholars rather than by single-minded engineers and technocrats. Their legacy, the sparkling downtowns of the City Beautiful movement and the elegant suburbs of the teens and twenties, appropriately redefined town planning as Civic Art.dx
Indeed, we are equally indebted to the places that these planners created, many of which were brought to our attention by Robert A. M. Stern and John Massengale’s early 1980s book and exhibition, The Anglo-American Suburb. Our excitement upon first discovering these neglected masterpieces is difficult to imagine now, but at the time it was quite palpable, as many of them had been discredited or simply ignored by the dominant modernist ethos. During our education, Ken Frampton, Robert Venturi, and Allan Greenberg also bucked convention by including in their lectures the historic models that continue to inspire our work. We are also deeply indebted to our professor Vincent Scully, who, more than anyone, encouraged us to look admiringly at history during the apex of modernist architectural production.
We have been inspired in both our writing and our practice by our friend and colleague Leon Krier. His words and sketches, which we at first found shocking and scandalous, ultimately formed the foundation for our work. His brilliant cartoon synopsis of sprawl remains, even after two decades, the most elegant and convincing document on the subject.
A number of writers on cities have influenced our work, most notably William Whyte, Christopher Alexander, Kevin Lynch, Herbert Gans, and, of course, Jane Jacobs, whose Death and Life of Great American Cities, published almost forty years ago, is required reading for all who care about the built environment. We still refer to our dog-eared copy whenever we feel the need for some sage advice.
In the recent intensification of the war against sprawl, a number of journalists and authors have worked continually to keep the subject prominent in the public discourse. These include