cover photo



blog archive

main site

artwork

bio






Schwarz



View current page
...more recent posts

The idea that New Urbanists such as Duany and Calthorpe may be helping to write plans for the new Gulf Coast has horrified many architects and left-leaning cultural critics — revealing, in the process, quite a bit about the ambitions and anxieties that mark contemporary architectural practice in this country.

"Among the New Urbanists, Calthorpe is on the progressive and thoughtful side," says Reed Kroloff, the dean of the architecture school at Tulane University and former editor of Architecture magazine. But he termed Calthorpe's Louisiana appointment "very, very disappointing" and "a sign that the whole region has been handed over to the CNU."

The response from other architects and critics was, to put it mildly, less measured. Eric Owen Moss, director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, told the Washington Post in October that New Urbanists were finding a foothold in the Gulf Coast because their agenda appeals "to a kind of anachronistic Mississippi that yearns for the good old days of the Old South as slow and balanced and breezy, and each person knew his or her own role."

Next came comments from Mike Davis, a writer who can throw gasoline on a fire with the best of them. Calling the New Urbanists an "architectural cult," he reported to readers of Mother Jones that during the Mississippi Renewal Forum, "Duany whipped up a revivalistic fervor that must have been pleasing to Barbour and other descendants of the slave masters."

The New Urbanists weren't shy about firing back. In a letter to Moss, Stefanos Polyzoides, a Pasadena architect and another CNU founder (there seem to be dozens of them), called Moss' statements "outrageous in their prejudice…. Your understanding of the CNU is superficial at best. And your comments sound remarkably hollow for a director of a school of architecture."

[link] [add a comment]