The Driehaus Prize jury has taken a turn in their selections. For the second year in a row, an urban designer—this time a pair of them—has been selected to receive the now $200,000 prize. Classical architects with a variety of theoretical and built work were selected for the first four years of the award’s existence. Now with the choice of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk following last year’s recipient, Jaquelin T. Robertson, it’s reasonable to question whether the Driehaus Prize has become an award for urbanism.
To be sure, the husband and wife team and the talented group at the DPZ are best known for their work in codes, rewriting the guidelines that have strapped America into the suburban fast lane, helping to found the Congress for New Urbanism and designing more than two hundred new and infill communities, most notably 1981’s Seaside in the Florida panhandle. They are, in short, both the godparents and poster children of the New Urbanist movement.
But this should not be a question of urbanism versus architecture. It is instead an issue of scale for the two are one in the same.
To design a building is a beautiful thing, but without relationship to context, the community or nature and its inhabitants, there is little value. So too with good urbanism. Traditional architecture and urbanism, if the two terms must both be used, are aimed at understanding hierarchy, decorum, relationship to the human scale and sustainable use of our natural resources. Both allow powerful voices, but leave little room for the starchitect’s ego-driven aims opting instead for shared goals and the common good. Quality is appropriate everywhere while elaboration knows its place.
Only in the last century or so have the dividing lines been drawn between planner and architect, landscape designer and interior designer. Here’s to celebrating the erasure of those lines wherever possible by paying tribute to those who have crossed the boundaries and succeeded.
Samantha L. Salden
Comments