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New Urbanists are attentive to the facts.
Douglas Duany
Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by
hitting back. –Piet Hein, poet and scientist
(1905-1996)
They [the Romans] constructed superb chassis, but
they designed deplorable coachwork, rather like the landaus of Luis XIV. -Le
Corbusier
Altogether some 47 million people, one in six
Americans, live in 18 million homes in 230,000 community association and
pay around $35 billion in fees every year. Around 1.25 million people serve
on community association boards. -The Economist September 1 2001
What's the use of living in the suburbs if you
don’t have an affair with the gardener? -Sex and the City
Nothing is more extinct than yesterday's
avant-garde. -Anonymous
It was clear that there needed to be a movement for the
architects of the middle ground, once the elite became inaccessible. -Elizabeth
Plater-Zyberk
Perhaps we can call what needs to be done a war,
like the War on Poverty. We might PR
ourselves into a War on Ugliness. – Philip Johnson
Thank god the architecture didn't affect the food. -Elizabeth
Plater-Zyberk at Charles De Gaulle Airport
Look, I don't do marketing studies. If I do
good-looking architecture that makes a great place, I figure somebody will
buy it. -Developer Nate Bowman
My target market is intelligent people. -Developer
Nate Bowman
The Department of Transportation (DOT) typically
keeps the public at bay by having only two phases for their projects: too
early to tell and too late to stop. -Earnest Fitzgerald.
In the combination of the New Urbanism and the Internet , American society can create on vast scale an
entirely original social structure. What is their common ground? That
together they overcome the tyranny of distance and the curse of isolation.
-Anonymous
The public is a thick-skinned beast and you have to
keep whacking away on its hide to let it know you're there. -Walt
Whitman
We have too much legislation by clamor, by tumult,
and by pressure. -Calvin Coolidge.
The essence of our republic is that it consists as
much of law as of votes. -Anonymous
The American developer's house is built by oafs to
be sold by thieves to mental defectives. -Anonymous
But seek the welfare of the City and pray to the
Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. -Jeremiah
29:7
If you have brains in your head and feet in your
shoes, if the street isn't nice, you'll go where you choose. -Dr. Seuss
When the laws are uncertain we are more in the power
of their administrator. -Adam Smith
There is a specific kind of American dimness: the
cult of expertise, which, by its very nature, blinds the person who
practices it to every form of knowledge save the one that he understands. -David
Denby
Discontent is the first step in the progress of man
or nation. -Oscar Wilde
The atom is the past. The symbol of science for the
next century is the net. The net is the archetype displayed to represent
all circuits all intelligence all interdependence, all things economic,
social and ecological, all communications, all democracy all groups all
large systems. -Kevin Kelly
It is easier to take in a new idea than to get rid
of an old one. -John Maynard Keynes
Harvard? Harvard takes perfectly good plums as
students and turns them into prunes. -Frank Lloyd Wright.
The ideal city? Out the front door, London; out the back
door, Los Angeles. -Colin Rowe
The majority of the sprawl in this country is
produced by those who are fleeing from sprawl. -Alex Krieger
To become unfashionable is fatal for that which is
only a fashion. But for a substantial proposition it is not a depressing
prospect to pass out of fashion. -Jose Ortega y Gasset
One could insist that the designer should proceed
from pre-existing categories just as Mother Nature works with old,
hackneyed hypotheses. -Charles Jencks
The City is organized complexity. -Jane Jacobs
Most modernist architects consider symmetry of
composition to be, if not a characteristic of fascist constraint, at least
a design strategy inevitably resulting in static, retrograde, and
dysfunctional artifacts.
This may be true but for the cars, airplanes,
spacecraft that are always (for some reason) symmetrical. -Andrés Duany
Architecture schools confuse individualism with
creativity. -Andrés Duany
At architecture schools, creativity is based on ignorance.
The students are kept ignorant of the precedent that they are copying. -Andrés
Duany
DECONSTRUCTION
What is all this about fragmentation in
architecture? Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier,
Frank Gehry and Steve Holl
design buildings of the utmost syntactic coherence. This becomes clear in
contrast to the truly syntactically eclectic buildings of Robert Venturi and James Stirling.
The modernism of simplicity is a viable urban
architecture; the modernism of complexity is not. -Andrés Duany
Communities should be designed to serve the cycle of
the day and the cycle of the lifetime. -Andrés Duany
Architecture is pretentious building. -Colin Rowe
Confronting authority with experience.
Architectural codes must give buildings a sense of
place, of climate, of history, and of limits. -Doug Kelbaugh
Planning issues are decided by legislators who do
not feel the responsibility to become expert on the subjects which they must decide upon. -Andrés Duany
The English Department of Transport has concluded
that more roads create more traffic.
Regional growth patterns require regional
governance. -Anthony Downs
Well planned cities can compensate for declining
incomes by decreasing the cost of living. -Henry Richmond
Transit gives people the right to find jobs
throughout the region. -Henry Richmond
A Constitution is a declaration of interdependence.
Metropolitan regions without regional plans are states without a
constitution. -Henry Richmond
We must not build housing, we must build
communities. -Mike Burton
Los Angeles from 1970 to 1990 grew 45% in population
and 300% in size. -Chris Leimberger
Transportation consumes 30% of all energy, 80% of
oil, and causes 30% of CO2. -Hal Harvey, The Energy Foundation
If they could, 84% of older households would like to
remain in their houses rather than move to retirement communities. -American
Association of Retired Persons
High density housing offers an inferior lifestyle
only if it is without a community as its setting. –Andrés Duany
Man is nature. -Dan Kiley
We cannot continue to believe that the landscape is
sacred and the city profane. They must both be considered sacred. -Paul
Murrain
An even trade: The loss of a forest or a farm is
justified only if it is replaced by a village, not when it is replaced by a
housing subdivision or a shopping center. -Andrés Duany
The problem with the Global Village is all the
Global Village Idiots. -Wired Magazine
Suburban Codes are about avoiding disorder in
general. TND Codes are about imposing a certain order. -Andrés Duany
It is vain to dream of a wilderness distant from
ourselves.-Henry David Thoreau
People say that they do not want to live near where
they work; but that they would like to work near where they live. -Zev Cohen
Buried by berms, clad in
weathered wood and indeterminate in form, the buildings of Hilton Head are
presented as environmental. In reality they are only apologizing
(quite correctly) for being in nature. Building within
the compact village are the only true architecture of Nature. -Andrés
Duany
It is the absurd premise of marketing (and of G.S.D.
education) to offer buildings of uniqueness, exclusivity and luxury to
everyman. -Andrés Duany
The city of Cartagena is
as comfortable as an old shoe. -From a Colombian poet
How is a village a village? By including young &
old, white & black, rich & poor, churches & shops. -Anonymous
In 1860, the capital city of Washington, with a
population of 60,000, had unlighted streets, open sewers, and pigs roaming
about its principal avenues. This is a condition worse than the worst of
our current cities. There is hope. -Andrés Duany
The beautiful is as useful as the useful.
. . and perhaps more so. -Victor Hugo
What condemns modernism is not its theory, but its
practice. -Douglas Duany
Craftsmen work in a pre-literate world. -Douglas
Duany
This much is evident: aesthetics matter very much to
the middle class. -Douglas Duany
You either have rules or you have anarchy, and the
enforcement rules requires a hierarchy. -John Casbarian
Cities are gentrified by the following types of
people in sequence: first the risk-oblivious, usually artists, then the
risk-aware, the developers, and finally the risk adverse, the dentists from
New Jersey. -Bill Kraus
There is nothing more uncommon than common sense. -Frank
Lloyd Wright
There are two types of environmentalists: those who
understand that the city is part of the environment and those who do not. -Paul
Soglin, Mayor of Madison, Wisconsin
Environmentalists should make good urbanists, since
they understand systems, diversity, connectivity and interdependence. -Caryl Terrell
As we grow more isolated from each other, personal
gripes grow into blanket truths. We have lots of opinions and we shout them
angrily into the wind. -Carol Muske Dukes
Art, in a democracy, should be valued, not by an
elite, but by the marketplace. -Andrés Duany
True modern architecture, as defined by the pioneers
in the '20s, is to serve mass culture and to be shaped by mass production.
Deconstructivism does not share these aims. It is, in fact, produced by
craft technique and appreciated only by a cultural
elite. It is a luddite revival. -Andrés Duany
The deconsclaims of being
a social critique is comically at odds with the expensive houses, and chic ristoranti of its production. Only the neurosis of its
practitioners confirms a modernist currency. -Andrés Duany
Because they know nothing of the codes and practices
that actually shape the modern city, the decons
do not understand that the urbanity they perceive and emulate as an uncontrollable
free-for-all, is actually a highly deterministic set of interlocking
practices controlled by specialists in marketing and engineering, by
municipal codes and by financial practice This system has been evolved and
perfected for half a century; it is as precise as any that has ever guided
form of building. The proof of this is easy: just try to implement the
slightest deviation, aesthetic or typological. If, by some chance, it
survives the gauntlet of funding and permitting, it will not last long in
the democracy of the marketplace. - Andrés Duany
America's public spaces are sized by the
requirements of the biggest fire engine the community can afford to buy. -Andrés
Duany
The problem with planning is that it has been
overtaken by mathematical models--traffic, density, impact assessment,
public costs and so on, discarding common sense and empirical observation.
-Andrés Duany
Streets, which were the pubic realms of America are now barriers
to community life. -Andrés Duany
Modernism is predicated on ignorance of the past. -Douglas
Duany
The most important task of the urbanist is
controlling size. -David Mohney
On the failure of the planning as process: when the
job seems too difficult, the tools are probably wrong. -Andrés Duany
In the suburbs you have backyard decks in towns you
have porches on the street. -Andrés Duany
Crime does not follow poverty, it follows
concentrations of poverty. -Reuben Greenberg, Police chief, Charleston
SC
California grows at the rate of one Pasadena every
month and a Massachusetts every decade. -Nelson Reising
Environmentalists should not be so holy. Nature also
pollutes: a goose crapping his body weight every month, degrades the
nitrogen level of the water incomparably more than any of my houses. -Joe
Alfandre
Historically, amateurs have always played an
important part in planning and they usually made great places. It is the
professionals of recent decades that have ruined our cities and our
landscapes. Planning is simpler than they will allow. -Andrés Duany
If what you market is privacy and exclusivity, then
every new house is a degradation of the amenity. If what you market is
community, then every new house is an enhancement of the asset. -Vince
Graham
Hilton Head island has 30 thousand acres and is
choking on one million tourists a year. Charleston has one thousand acres
while gracefully absorbing 5.5 million tourists a year. -Vince Graham
The rigid, isolated object is of no use whatsoever.
It must be inserted into the context of living social relations. -Walter
Benjamin
The facile delusions which conceal from us our true
situation all amount to this: that we are, or can be, wiser than the wisest
men of the past. -Leo Strauss
The desire for community is a constant of human
nature. -Steven Price
The technology of the automobile, coupled with the
telephone, radio and rural electrification, could foster a new settlement
pattern of rural dispersion which could give to the whole continent that
stable, well balanced, settled, cultivated life which grew out of its provincial
settlements. -Lewis Mumford
The house itself is of minor importance. Its
relation to the community is the thing that really counts. A small house
must depend on its grouping with other houses for its beauty, and for the
preservation of light air and the maximum of surrounding open space. -Clarence
Stein
The pseudoscience of planning seems almost neurotic
in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.
-Jane Jacobs
To allow for future street widening, traffic
engineers promoted the big front setback and tried to eliminate the
sidewalk. -Anne Vernez Moudon
Cars moving through neighborhoods are only borrowing
the street space which belongs to the enfronting
buildings. -Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk
The subdivisions of suburban sprawl are conceived
primarily as a shopping centers for housing and
only later, if at all, as communities. -Andrés Duany
The chaos of the city of today can be opposed only
by attempts at theoretical systematization, having the purpose of enucleataing from actual situations - in a totally
abstract way - the fundamental principles of urban planning, thereby
arriving at the formulation of general forms that then permit the solution
of determined concrete problems. Only the abstraction of the specific case
enables us, in fact, to demonstrate how the disparate elements that make up
a large city can be placed, in an orderly way, in relationship to the
whole. -Ludwig Hilbesheimer
Like every discipline, architecture too, is
confronted with the pressing need to define its fundamental principles and
the means at its disposition. The exactness of the definitions require formal clarity and imposes order on chaos, in
the most concrete ways. -Ludwig Hilbersheimer
There is no community, only a collection of people
who are strangers to one another and whose numbers are growing. -Francois
Gaspard
"Reculer pour mieux sauter": To step
back in order to take a better jump. -Anonymous
A street is a spatial entity and not the residue
between buildings. -Anonymous
The role of the street is as much social as
utilitarian. -Andrés Duany
As individuals we are weak & foolish, as a race
we are wise and powerful. -Edmund Burke
Affordable housing has been inadvertently eliminated
by suburban codes. -Andrés Duany.
Modern architects recognize their 300 masterpieces
but ignore the other 30 million buildings that have ruined the world. -Andrés
Duany
The only radical act remaining to Peter Eisenman; the only thing that will astound us,
accustomed to anything is to build a classical building. -Andrés Duany
The Decons love cinematic
illusion but denigrate its masterpiece: Williamsburg. -Andrés Duany
Deconstructivism is the urban style. It attempts to
compress the complexity that is the purview of an entire street into the
syntax of a single budding. The main street of Disneyworld is more
authentic than that. -Andrés Duany
The disaster has not been the bad architecture. The
disaster has been the loss of the vernacular, upon which Architecture
rises. -Douglas Duany
In America, quantity is quality.-Aldo Rossi
Typology is a source of efficiency in design and the
prime reason for a certainty of the outcome.
I have found one constant across climates, cultures,
and economies: that modernist architects are swine. I do not deny that some
of them are talented, or that others are personally cultured and charming,
I am merely asserting that when they engage in the design of buildings
within cities, they become swinish in their manners. For an explanation,
look around. -Andrés Duany
Road: a strip of ground over which one walks. A
highway differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for
vehicles, but also because it is merely a line which connects one point to
another. A highway has no meaning in itself. Its meaning derives entirely
from the two points which it connects. A road is attribute
to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to
stop. A highway is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it
has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time.
-Milan Kundera
A defensive environmentalism based on the biological
protection of nature is less politically effective than an aggressive
environmentalism based on the aesthetic need of man for nature. -Andrés
Duany
The habitat that man makes for himself must be as
fitting as that which nature provides its creatures. If not, the natural
balance that preserves genetic quality wills make a killing ground of our
communities. -Andrés Duany
We cannot hang the New Urbanism on a single
catchphrase or even two: That of transit and the urban boundary.-Andrés
Duany
The big advantage of the TND is in the sum small
things that make a difference to how people live daily. -Mike Watkins
The CNU must not become an advocacy group for simplistic
cure-alls like the "urban boundary", "transit", and
"water quality". The environmental issues threaten to distract us
from the comprehensive social issues that we know how to solve and which
are the source of our power. The other issues are already under the care of
a myriad of environmental groups. The CNU knows how to make a city: the
habitat of the human species; no one else does as well. -Andrés Duany
Modernist architects as justification for their
continued rampage, point out their three hundred masterpieces and ask us to
forget their 30 million other buildings that, even they admit, degrade the
world -Andrés Duany
The greatest art is to shape the quality of the day.
-Thoreau
Suburbia is a collection of private benefits and
public nuisances.
As growth becomes denser, highway costs rise while
transit costs decline.
Motorways must not be allowed to infringe on the
city. -Norman Bel Gueddes
The definition of sustainability is the insuring of
the viability of growth. -Joe Molinaro NAHB
The ultimate foundation of a free society is the
binding tie of cohesive sentiment. Such sentiment is fostered by all those
agencies of the mind and spirit which may serve to gather up the traditions
of a people, transmit them from generation to generation and thereby create
the continuity of a treasured common life which constitutes civilization.
There is nothing in the Constitution to prevent a state or locality from
evoking that unifying sentiment. -Justice Felix Frankfurter
In Canada there is debate about the proper size for
a community, but unlike the United States, we do not acknowledge the
community of one. -Peter Gabor
To achieve excellence should be a struggle. -Mayor
Riley of Charleston
Civil courage in an ecological age means not only
demanding social justice, but also aesthetic justice and the will to make
judgments of taste, to stand for beauty in the public arena and speak out
about it. -James Hillman and Michael Ventura
Democracy, in any active sense, begins and ends in
communities small enough for their members to meet face to face. -Lewis
Mumford.
In a neighborhood, everything that is needed is
there and everything that is there is needed.
Let us set up principles, as against the medley of
silly little reforms with which we are constantly deceiving ourselves. -Le
Corbusier
The streetspace belongs to
the enfronting building. The passing car only
borrows it. -Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk
The schools do not teach the technique of
traditional architecture, nor a sympathy for it, nor even a methodology
that would permit the subsequently learning the technique. The majority of
architects, finding that their livelihood demands the practice of
traditional architecture, therefore practice it abysmally to the
condemnation of the schools. -Andrés Duany
Architecture without sensibility to its context is
like sex without love: entertaining perhaps, but not the source of lasting
joy. -Mark Wilson Jones
Architects should favor the norm more often than the
exception. -Sergio Frau
We require an urbanism that better controls the
prophetic-individualist-artistic tendency of the typical architect. -Sergio
Frau
Architects should be obliged to acknowledge the
environmental disasters that in the name of architectural creativity they
have perpetrated in the decades since the war. -Sergio Frau
Becoming obese is a normal response to the American
environment as it encourages high intake and low activity. -James Hill
(co-author of a U of Colorado study that determined that 54% of Americans
are overweight)
Postmodern architecture is derived from modernist
architecture and yet the modernists tag the traditional architects with its
absurdities. -Leon Krier
It is the first obligation of all building to place
itself in relationship to the city. -Voltaire 1827.
What is wanted is not to restore a vanished, or
revise a vanishing culture under modern conditions, but to grow a
contemporary culture from the old roots. -T.S.Eliot
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