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Rebirth of The Community
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11229 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1993 |
1,857 Words |
| Author
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Cynthia Grenier
Cynthia Grenier is contributing editor to the Arts section of
The World & I. |
Working together out of Miami since founding their firm, DPZ Architects, in 1980, architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk have designed over forty new towns. Although the majority of the designs are still on the drawing boards, the couple has been having considerable influence in changing the practice and direction of town planning in this country. Vincent Scully, Sterling Professor of the History of Art at Yale, sees them as coming close to bringing to fruition the most important contemporary movement in architecture. That movement is the revival of the vernacular and classical traditions and their reintegration into the mainstream of modern architecture in its fundamental aspect: the structure of communities, the building of towns.*
This husband-and-wife team offers alternatives to what they perceive as a grand American experiment gone dreadfully wrong: the boom of postwar suburbs with the consequent dependence on the automobile and the virtual destruction of a strong neighborhood identity. As Professor Duany put it in a lecture delivered at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1990, "suburban sprawl is cancerous growth rather than healthy growth, and it is destroying our civic life."
Suburbanites have no trouble listing what is wrong with the places where they live: traffic, commuting time, and the often vast distances from shopping, work, and entertainment. Today's suburb, instead of forming a community, comprises a nondescript collection of houses, shops, and offices linked to one another by cars. The very nature of the suburb tends to limit people to either their homes or their cars. Its structure discourages taking a stroll, or mingling with neighbors. Inevitably it is conducive to alienation--to keeping apart individuals in a community.
Up until World War II, the classic small town was an integral part of American life, a model of development. But postwar developers were guided by a new model emerging out of government economic policy and planning legislation. Encouraged by well-meaning government programs such as Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration mortgages and the construction of interstate highways, people began moving out to the suburbs in large numbers. Supermarkets, department stores, and small shops followed, filling shopping centers and malls. Meanwhile, the poor never joined the suburban migration, thus becoming ever more cut off within the city core and creating the tragic phenomenon of the nineties: urban blight.
This suburban development took place under draconian zoning
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