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Figure 3.1
Office buildings, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Ryder and Yates, architects, 1970. Many buildings from the
1970s were quite sophisticated structures, The office building on the left, for example, is designed as a giant
beam from which the floors are suspended by cables enclosed in stainless steel cruciform mouldings,
creating large open-plan floor areas. Despite such cleverness, buildings often demonstrated a crushing
insensitivity to their context and the urban scale of the city. Other buildings of the late modernist period were
far less clever. The example in the photograph on the right is just terrible. The new slab has no redeeming
features whatsoever. It is a testament to the aesthetic power of the adjacent Victorian building that it even
holds its own against this monstrous intrusion into the city fabric. Such design outrages are particularly
poignant in Newcastle, which has a marvellous early Victorian urban structure and architectural legacy.
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interpretations of traditional domestic building types
and a pattern of streets and public spaces actively rem-
iniscent of traditional American towns and suburbs
from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Beneath its quirky aesthetics, the design provided a
radical critique of contemporary suburban planning,
with its emphasis on well-defined public spaces and a
vision based primarily on the visual character of build-
ings and spaces rather than their uses. The plan of
Seaside featured a range of traditional urban forms,
designed as a series of grids overlaid with diagonal axes
focusing on the town center, and providing key loca-
tions for monumental buildings. The streets were
designed as narrow pedestrian ‘rooms’ along which cars
could move at slow speed, and which often terminated
at a public building or public space. Garages were
accessed from the rear, by means of narrow alleyways.
The effect of Seaside was dramatic; for the first time
in several decades, a suburban development was con-
structed with some sense by being a unified place, like
a traditional neighborhood or town in miniature. But
the modest development by these two architects was so
far beyond conventional thinking in the early 1980s,
that it took another decade, until the mid-1990s
before American planners tentatively embraced ‘neo-
traditional development.’ Almost another decade fol-
lowed before the development community, through
their ‘think-tank’ the Urban Land Institute (ULI),
embraced these same architectural and planning princi-
ples. By this time, neo-traditional development had
morphed into New Urbanism and the ULI began to
hold workshops and conferences on the topic in the late
1990s. By the time of writing in 2003, the Institute had
produced several publications explaining how their
members could create traditional towns in line with
New Urbanist principles (ULI, 1998; Eppli and Tu,
1999; O’Neill, 1999; Booth et al., 2002; Bohl, 2002).
This conscious process of morphing Traditional
Neighborhood Development with Transit-oriented
Development to create New Urbanism in the mid-
1990s brought together the two most radical strands
of avant-garde urbanism in America. Traditional
Neighborhood Development had its roots in histori-
cal examples of American urbanism such as the ‘pre-
automobile’ neighborhoods of streetcar suburbs and
commuter rail suburbs that were built around many
cities in the late 1800s and the early decades of the
twentieth century. At a reduced scale, American small
towns of the same period provided similar useful
precedent. Duany and Plater-Zyberk realized that the
planning concepts and physical attributes of such
places, with their human scale and lively mix of uses,
were as appropriate to postmodern America as when
they were originally developed, sixty to one hundred
years ago. The authors’ neighborhood of Dilworth, in
Charlotte, for example, with its network of pedes-
trian-friendly streets, restaurants, offices and stores is
as lively, attractive and relevant now as it was when it
was first laid out one hundred years ago as Charlotte’s
first streetcar suburb. In 1903, the level of car owner-
ship was miniscule. Now in our neighborhood auto-
mobiles number at least two, often three per family.
For a system of streets, spaces and buildings to con-
tinue to function very well given this major techno-
logical change speaks highly of its robust and flexible
design principles. History presents us with a model
that suggests neighborhoods like ours will be as valid
in the future as they were in the past. Thus, the radi-
calism of Traditional Neighborhood Development
was predominantly a conservative ethos; this con-
trasts with the compatible but more environmentally
progressive spirit of Transit-oriented Development.