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Figure 1.8
The ‘Town Wall’ in Civilia, an imaginary
city on reclaimed land in the English midlands, 1971.
Traditional townscape is constructed from modernist
buildings. (
Photo-collage courtesy of The
Architectural Press
)
Figure 1.9
Suburban house designs in the inner city;
Birmingham, UK, 1980s.
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their areas. New fast-track ‘Enterprise Zones’ were set
up in decayed central city areas, such as the London
Docklands, to lure private investment with the guar-
antee of minimal interference from local govern-
ment. The successes and failures of these initiatives
during the 1980s are discussed in more detail in
Chapter 5, but one major reaction to their perceived
American-style imbalance of private power over pub-
lic interest has been the development of much more
proactive local planning and design initiatives in
British cities during the 1990s. During the last
decade of the twentieth century, this reversion of pol-
icy has connected with consciously traditional types
of urban forms and patterns in cities, involving mix-
tures of uses, pedestrian scale and spatial enclosure
(see Figure 1.10).
Similar renewed interest in traditional urban val-
ues, patterns and imagery was evident in America
during the 1980s. Beginning in that decade, the
urban form of the traditional European city enjoyed
a renaissance in American architecture and urbanism,
especially in American academia, through the influ-
ential writings of people like Christopher Alexander
at Berkeley (Alexander, 1977, 1987), and Michael
Dennis and Colin Rowe at Cornell (Rowe and
Koetter, 1978; Dennis, 1981). From that time
onward, the work of Aldo Rossi and the Italian Neo-
Rationalists became better known to students, and
European theorists like Leon Krier began to influence
a new generation of younger architects. Among these
were Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the
two people most often credited with initiating the
movement that became known in America as New
Urbanism.
The volumes of existing material about Seaside, the
Duany and Plater-Zyberk landmark project in the
Florida panhandle, make it unnecessary to add to
that body of literature which has charted the 1982
design’s progress from an affordable alternative com-
munity to a fantasy playground for the consciously
cute upper-middle class (Krieger and Lennertz, 1991;
Mohney and Easterling, 1991; Brooke, 1995;
Sexton, 1995). It is a strange and wonderful place,
but Seaside has been over-hyped to the point that
it has become the victim of its own success. The
alternative urbanism that Seaside offered has spawned
dozens of second- and third-rate imitations as devel-
opers and architects copied superficial details without
understanding the deeper philosophy. Its idiosyncrat-
ically romantic appearance has been parodied in a
myriad of developments to the extent that New
Urbanism itself is often misconstrued in the public’s
mind as comprising merely picket fences and front
porches (see Figure 1.11).
Seaside is such a particular place that it is now of
little use as a precedent for everyday design in more
typical American communities, but there is no
doubt that this small development on Florida’s Gulf
coast struck the important first blow in America’s
battle against conventional suburbia. However, a
more important contribution to reordering the
suburbs was Duany and Plater-Zyberk’s innovative
example of using graphic codes as the primary means
of development control. In the context of ever more
cumbersome American zoning books of dense and
dull verbiage, the crisp and elegant depiction of the
rules regarding building arrangement, street design
and appropriate uses was a revelation. We discuss
this important issue further in Chapter 5.
Seaside started a whole reappraisal of what was possible
to build in America’s suburbs, and began the movement
CHAPTER ONE
●
PARADIGMS LOST AND FOUND