Controversial urbanists win top architecture award

by Blair Kamin |  Tribune architecture critic
Chicago Tribune

Miami architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the controversial husband and wife team who lead the traditional town planning movement called the New Urbanism, were named the winners Tuesday of next year’s Richard H. Driehaus Prize, which goes annually to a tradition-minded designer and now comes with $200,000 in prize money.

Duany and Plater-Zyberk are by far the best-known winners of the award, which was established in 2003 by Chicago investor Richard Driehaus as a kind of alternative to the better-known Pritzker Architecture Prize, which is endowed by the billionaire Pritzker family of Chicago and typically goes to a leading modernist. They are also the first team to win it while Plater-Zyberk is the first female winner.

The two have designed scores of towns, neighborhoods and regional plans, including Seaside, the Florida panhandle resort community that formed the backdrop for the movie “The Truman Show.” In 2005, Duany led a weeklong state-sponsored brainstorming session, or “charrette,” to redesign 11 cities and towns in Mississippi that had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

“The Richard H. Driehaus Prize was created to celebrate classicism in the contemporary world. As champions of the New Urbanism movement, Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk have promoted the value system that defines classical architecture. Their body of work emphasizes community and context, which are the underpinnings of classical design,” said Driehaus, founder and chairman of Driehaus Capital Managemen.

Duany and Plater-Zyberk will receive the award on March 29 in Chicago. Previously, the award was accompanied by a grant of $100,000, the same as the Pritzker Prize. But Driehaus recently doubled the amount, in part to attract attention to his prize.

Duany and Plater-Zyberk should draw plenty of attention by themselves, however.

They are among the nation’s leading critics of suburban sprawl, arguing that car-dominated settlement patterns have victimized everyone from commuters stuck in traffic jams to inner-city residents who lack access to jobs and services that have spread to the suburban fringe.

Beginning with Seaside, which opened in the early 1980s, they have revived traditional town planning principles, bringing back street grids, front porches, town squares and other elements of pedestrian-friendly town planning that suburban planners had largely abandoned in favor of subdivisions and cul-de-sacs.

Some architects, critics and academics regard their efforts as nostalgic or arrogant, saying that sprawl is here to stay and that it offers middle-class people the mobility, privacy and choice once enjoyed solely by the rich.

But Duany and Plater-Zyberk have persisted, and many communities have adopted their principles — or watered-down versions of them. In their book, “Suburban Nation,” published in 2000, they write: “[We] believe more strongly than ever in the power of good design to overcome the ills created by bad design, or, more accurately, by design’s conspicuous absence.”

Previous winners of the Driehaus Prize include architect Allan Greenberg and urban planner Jaquelin Robertson. Duany and Plater-Zyberk were selected by a jury that included Driehaus and Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic of The New Yorker. The University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, a bastion of traditional design, administers the Driehaus Prize.