Andrés Duany is wearing a smart suit and an incongruous round lapel badge bearing a tiger and the data “Class of ’71.” He is short and sharp-witted, and right now this Cuban-born Princeton graduate is pacing the podium with Napoleonic swagger, extolling the virtues of Haussmann’s Paris.
The audience of middle-aged middle-Americans—or so they appear, though their tiger-emblazoned beer jackets and bald patches give them away as elder generations of this Ivy League school, migrated back for reunions—responds appreciatively when he describes a certain developer as “leading a life analogous to a Renaissance prince, laying out streets, knowing all his fellow residents by name, and making lots of money . . .”
He is referring to Robert Davis, patron-speculator of Seaside, the Florida panhandle new town which Duany and his wife-partner Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (Class of ’72) urban- designed between 1978 and 1983. Blonde and demurely elegant in a white sailor suit, Plater-Zyberk adroitly tackles questions from alumni on sewers and streets, picket fences and parking, persuasively arguing the couple’s creed and advocating with firm charm the advantages of the American Small Town.
She explains that, having arrived in the Sunbelt after education in the Northeast, they both wondered why low-density cities such as Miami—where their practice is based—could not enjoy the same amenities as the high-density metropolises of the Boston–Washington corridor. They set about improving America’s sprawling backyard, Suburbia. Their mission—in direct contrast to that of Arquitectonica, of which they were founding partners—is to make and mend the urban fabric, not build yet more monuments.
At first it is hard to believe that they could ever have been associated with the brash Arquitectonica, as their current work and concerns are diametrically opposite. But it soon becomes apparent that the present distance between them and the better-known Miami practice is just part of a process of intellectual development; what Duany and Plater-Zyberk represent is not just superficial rehashing of past formal precedents, but informed and sophisticated application of selected historical typologies.
Their work is a blend of European—especially English— urban models, with Mediterranean classicism, flavoured with Latin tropical culture. Their fervent allegiance to American free-market ideology is probably not unrelated to the fact that Duany arrived from Cuba aged ten in 1960, while Plater-Zyberk was born in the States two years after her parents left Poland in 1948.
Their current work does not have a social commitment in the sense that Kenneth Frampton would presumably advocate, though Duany says they are “trying desperately” to get commissions for low-income housing “by doing the various manoeuvres it takes to get that kind of government job.” What they do do, “over and over again,” is middle-class housing. “Some people criticise us, saying, ‘They’re not in a crisis . . .’ But Florida is the fastest-growing state in the union, where middle-class housing is being built in the tens of thousands of dwelling units. Most architects of any ability have abdicated this bread-and-butter work in favour of doing very small high-art pieces like New York lofts.”
This sector, they suggest, is extremely difficult to satisfy. “This is the one country where there’s housing waiting for people—you have to court them. The middle class can actually afford to exercise their taste and pretensions, and they always have extraordinarily high aspirations and demands in terms of convenience—they must have the bathroom next to the bedroom, for instance.” Below this sector is the class which is “grateful for a bathroom anywhere and a roof over their head.” Above, the upper class can afford to commission monumental one-offs from star-architects like Richard Meier, Robert Stern, or Michael Graves.
Duany and Plater-Zyberk claim no ambitions to join that league: “They’re almost the last generation of hero-architects.” While professing great admiration for the work of James Stirling and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (from which Arquitectonica was a direct descendent), they are convinced that isolated monuments are not the priority in the American Sunbelt in the 1980s. “This doesn’t need masterpieces, it needs fabric.”
They have identified the middle class as a neglected sector, usually catered for by urbanistically illiterate speculators concerned only with the bottom line and oblivious to the amorphous trails with which they litter the American landscape.
Evoking turn-of-the-century ideas of Civic Art and the City Beautiful Movement, they emphasise the traditional principles of Beaux-Arts composition: axes and vistas culminating in landmark public buildings, carefully dimensioned streets and sidewalks, attention to the scale-giving qualities of trees and walls or fences, adherence to building lines to confer overall coherence on separately designed structures, height-to-width ratios to preserve a consistent public realm, and kerbside parking rather than vast, distant lots.
Duany and Plater-Zyberk were still with Arquitectonica when the practice was recommended to Seaside developer Robert Davis (who had inherited the land from his grandfather) by an editor at House Beautiful; they took the job with them when they left. Of the “divorce,” Duany reflects that “at the moment it happened, it seemed to be personality problems. In retrospect, we didn’t get along because we felt very differently about architecture. In the early days, Arquitectonica’s work wasn’t so intensely wilful and arbitrary. But later it became extremely personal, it ceased to be a matter of discussing things; it was ‘I want this.’ Laurinda and Bernardo became the powerful partners—they brought in the work—so it was no longer among equals. We weren’t that far apart at one point but now in terms of architectural syntax and urbanism we stand at entirely different poles.” He contrasts Arquitectonica’s “monumentalism” with their own architecture, which is “so self-effacing we don’t even design the buildings.”
At Seaside, indeed, they leave them to other architects entirely. Believing that one practice could not, by itself, produce the diversity which they recognised as a key factor in their favourite small towns, Duany and Plater-Zyberk dedicated several years to developing an urban code which would generate “controlled heterogeneity” without their direct intervention. They produced a succinct document including a zoning code distilled into a single page of easy-to-follow graphics, so as to avoid deterring would-be buyers. So far some sixty buildings are complete, and the code’s authors take pride in the fact that only two variances have been requested in three years, and above all, that many of the buildings have been put up by interior designers and drafting services without detriment to the public realm.
The zoning code designates eight building types: three mixed-use, four residential, and one for light industrial workshops. It specifies the dimensions for yards, porches, out-buildings, and parking, and mandates maximum roof and porch heights to maintain consistent proportions. A certain minimum percentage of lot frontage must be built on, to conserve street lines, and towers of two-hundred-square-foot footprints are encouraged for sea views even from the most landlocked site. A supplementary building code stipulates such minutiae as hidden hinges and porcelain fixtures on kitchen cabinets—the kind of tender-loving-care extras which self-building buyers might not be expected to adopt. But they do.
The master plan allows for some 350 dwellings, 100 to 200 lodging units, a retail centre, conference facility, and recreation complex, to be built over ten to fifteen years depending on the economic climate. Following the example of the many Southern towns which Duany and Plater-Zyberk researched, Seaside is organised formally around a central square on the shorefront; a concentric pattern of streets evolves around this tight geometric core and dissolves toward the periphery in response to natural topography and landscape—two large gorges, high ground, and woods.
Apart from the post office, which recently opened in a mini-temple designed by the developer, most of the public buildings are to be designed by “name” architects known for their sympathetic aesthetic. “We help the client develop a taste for certain kinds of things; he selects the architects from periodicals, people who are comfortable with the ideology.”
Steven Holl’s commercial block was due for completion this summer; Walter Chatham, another young New York architect, is doing a lodging house; Robert Stern is designing a hotel. Other architects involved are John Massengale, Stuart Cohen, and Deborah Berke, who has done several houses and the cabanas for the summer outdoor crafts market run by Davis’s wife, Daryl. So far, the best-represented firm, with some dozen units, is the New Haven practice Orr & Taylor, whose Victoriana Rose Walk cottage estate is now Seaside’s dominant idiom.
Duany & Plater-Zyberk admit that their interpretation of what constitutes a typical American small town is purely intuitive. They were paid in Seaside real estate for the four years spent researching, developing, and testing the code. (Duany is wistful about having sold their land in the meantime: land in Seaside is now selling for at least twice the price per square foot of property in Seagrove, the adjacent town. “Our draughtsmen who kept theirs are becoming millionaires, as far as I can tell!”)
Davis and his wife toured the South in a red convertible for two years, pinning down worthy prototypes; the architects were equally empirical: “We would drive up to a street or square and say, ‘We like this’ and measure it,” says Duany. They were particularly inspired by Key West in Florida, certain “beautiful small towns in Texas,” and Jackson Square in New Orleans. Only the latter will Duany concede as being miniaturised Europeanism. “The others are too large by European standards. Léon [Krier] thinks American streets are too wide, but he doesn’t count on trees. Building-to-building dimensions and height-to-width ratios can be wider than a European street because the vegetation maintains it.”
This is the situation Duany & Plater-Zyberk seek to remedy. Though they have only a few built demonstrations—Seaside and Charleston Place in Boca Raton, principally—the elements of their urban design philosophy are already clearly articulated. It is an avowedly classicist approach, strongly tinged by Léon Krier’s attitude, stressing morphological rather than numerical issues, aesthetics not statistics.
So far, they acknowledge two “failings” in the real thing: first, that it is “excessively pretty—nobody allows anything to age with dignity. They’re always painting things over. We’re constantly fighting off the Disney World syndrome.” The other problem is that the development’s economic success has made prices prohibitive, especially for younger purchasers. As a result, Seaside doesn’t have the kind of sociological mix that Duany & Plater-Zyberk fondly anticipated. They admit that their vision of the town is essentially nostalgic, and that—as a vacation resort without a primary productive economic base—it is “very privileged,” idealist if not exactly utopian (the latter being more applicable to plans with an explicitly socially reforming motive). “There was a society which existed throughout this country, which achieved some kind of normative form at the end of the nineteenth century and was intact until around 1940: the American Small Town.”
Duany & Plater-Zyberk juxtapose their vision of Main Street, USA, against that of Robert Venturi, who argued in Learning from Las Vegas for an appreciation of just that commercial kitsch from which architects had hitherto kept their gaze averted. Venturi’s Main Street is “ugly, ordinary . . . and messy,” according to Duany, who adds: “Ours is plain, but dignified and rather pretty.”
Duany talks in apostolic tones of their declared mentor. “You have to consider us within Léon Krier’s bunch of people. We’re part of the Rationalist movement. We’ve never had any problems with Krier. He has never led us astray, either in his personal advice or in his writings. He has never been proved wrong. How can there be any anachronism? Nothing sells for more per square foot than the projects we do! It’s awfully nice when the critics like our work, but the real test is the market. Ours is an entirely different ambition: to build America.”