THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, October 11, 1994 TAG: 9410110297
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B01 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ALEX MARSHALL, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 101 lines
They are not soft-spoken. Nor do they shun controversy. Or fame.
These are the folks who called Virginia Beach ``a perfect negative example'' and ``a laboratory of failure for the East Coast.''
These are the folks Time magazine gave its ``Best of the Decade'' award for design and charged with the task of effectively revitalizing American civilization.
These are the folks whom Prince Charles of England, who has made reforming contemporary architecture his personal crusade, has praised as providing a model for proper development.
The Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority has hired Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, a husband and wife team, to redevelop East Ocean View. They are perhaps the hottest pair of architects in the country, known more for their ideas and developments than for specific buildings.
``They are among the most important architects and planners working in the world right now,'' said James Howard Kunstler, author of the antisuburban diatribe, ``The Geography of Nowhere.'' ``Any town should be honored to have them design a project there.''
They are also a pair with very specific ideas about how a neighborhood or city should be built.
They are leaders of a movement called variously ``Neo-Traditionalism'' or ``the New Urbanism.'' It basically advocates building neighborhoods in the form of traditional towns and cities.
You know Ghent? Or Olde Towne in Portsmouth? Either is a perfect example of what Duany and Plater-Zyberk advocate. Houses and apartments are close to the street. Small stores and offices are nearby. Apartments, mansions, and modest homes are all mixed together.
Building neighborhoods in this older style will help restore the country's flabby ``public life'' - the network of relationships among friends, neighbors, acquaintances, merchants and public officials that advocates believe makes life more worth living and helps propel a community forward.
With this message, Duany and Plater-Zyberk have managed to offend both your average suburban developer and the leading lights in the rarefied world of contemporary architecture.
The conventional suburban development is the object of their scorn for several reasons. Basically, it is too isolated and too private, they say. The post office, the church, the restaurant, the bar and the hardware store should be inside a neighborhood not excluded from it. People of different incomes should be able to live on the same street, not in separate subdivisions.
At the same time, they have offended high-end architects by saying the profession's future does not lie with weird, glitzy, avant-garde, individual buildings that call attention to themselves. It lies with looking at how buildings fit together to make a whole community. It lies in valuing principles built up over centuries about how a neighborhood or city functions. To a profession that worships newness and pizazz, this is radical stuff.
In the redevelopment project in Ocean View, they are prepared to design a community that will be built after the city clears away an existing neighborhood of some 1,500 homes. Most of the residents there now are working-class, lower-income people.
In an interview, Duany said it did give him pause that a neighborhood would be razed to make way for his new development. He cautioned that he was not yet familiar with the background of East Ocean View or the specifics of Norfolk's clearance plan. But in general, Duany said, people who live in an area to be cleared should be found a place to live, preferably a spot in the new neighborhood if they wish. At the same time, he said, redevelopment is sometimes necessary for a city to improve itself.
``One has to remember cities need a tax base,'' Duany said. ``Cities have to provide housing for the poor. But they also have to provide houses for the middle classes that are attractive enough to have them move into cities and pay their share of taxes.
``I would hope in this area there would be a range of incomes. Can we get the truly wealthy to move in? Can we get subsidized housing in the same neighborhood? I'd love it.''
Duany said he hopes to create a vital city neighborhood. ``We don't want an inner-city suburb,'' he said. ``We hope it has the edge that a real city has.''
Duany met his wife, Plater-Zyberk, in college at Princeton. Their ideas got off the ground in the early 1980s, when they attracted the attention of a landowner who had the money and inclination to follow their ideas. The beachfront community they designed, Seaside, on 80 acres in western Florida, has been extraordinarily successful.
The couple now have scores of projects in various stages of development. Some, like Seaside or Mashpee Commons in Massachusetts, are built or well under way. Another, Kentlands, outside Baltimore, is still under development but has been hampered by financial difficulties. Others are still on the drawing board. They range in size from 40 acres to a planned urban city of 20,000 people on an abandoned airfield in Los Angeles.
Do the two have detractors? Legions. Some say small town ideas don't work in a society that integrates cars into daily life. Others question whether the harmony and vitality of a traditional city can really exist in what they see as essentially still a suburban subdivision.
Nevertheless, the two have gone far beyond any other advocate of traditional urbanism because they are pushing their ideas not on the printed page, but with bricks and concrete. ILLUSTRATION: MIAMI HERALD PHOTO
Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, a husband and wife team,
are among the hottest architects in the country.
by CNB