Andres Duany - Don’t Tell Me Anything I Could Have Heard in the 20th Cent.- 21st Cent. New Urbanism

AIA Course # 2207 AIA Provider # 10008726 Purchase 1.5 HSW Learning Units
Andres Duany, pioneering architect and co-founder of DPZ and the Congress for the New Urbanism, discusses the importance of urban planning in our modern era. Duany describes the environmental and social pressures which the Congress for the New Urbanism addressed. He notes the different challenges we face today, and how urban planners and architects can adjust their values to play a beneficial role.
The Congress for the New Urbanism played a vital role in the late 20th century, anticipating the need for accessible, pedestrian oriented, and locally sustainable communities. The next generation of its leadership must adopt new tools and opportunities of the digital age to strengthen their cause and promote health, safety, and welfare.
Learning Objectives:
1. Understand the origins and mission of the New Urbanist movement.
2. Understand how our modern challenges have changed since the late 20th century and anticipate challenges to come which urban planning can impact.
3. Identify new tools and technology which can aid the promotion and development of sustainable, human-centered urbanism for human wellbeing.
4. Identify opportunities for collaboration and learning from adjacent urban planning movements to improve the health, safety, and welfare outcomes of urban design.

[@goncalodias6402]

Andres is proposing a deserved and extremely necessary revolution of thought in classicism. We need to move from just using the orders according to renaissance treatises, we need to learn how to MANIPULATE the orders and CREATE new orders according to the new possibilities of material, wich we learned, thanks to Andres Heterodoxia, all of the great classicist were already doing that right under the classical purists and educators noses! We refused to consider that classical, we ignored it.
What Leon Krier is doing with Le Corbusier is actually what every classicist should be doing, but we should be both modern in our parti and classical in our ompositions and detailing.
The modernists have now adopted traditional urbanism wich was its biggets flaw and it turns out that even a ridiculous glass twisting and turning structure can be pretty acceptable by placing it on a dense, tight urban envoirnment and give it some color.
But people still prefer classical buildings, we are just ignoring the people and not corresponding to their needs, and as well as beauty, people need something to aspire to, something to inspire them about the future and classicism now is just boring mansions and fake temples...
We should be teaching students to draw freely like the contemporary modernists, a kind of expressive classicism or free classicism, because the classicist system always helps to give clarity to a project, and we would be much more well received than just a modernist building without any grounding, visual or historical.
Why arent international competitions for public or affordable housing FLOODED with classical proposals? why arent we proposing affordable housing for developing countries in their own traditional style, that people in those contries can relate to? the modernists cant do that.
We should be on every competition for new town developments and great civic buildings and actually presenting new stuff, new, inovative designs.
Leon Krier is the only one doing that, but the man is almost eighty, everybody should be publishing and competing for big projects everywhere, spreading the message.
Why are we letting the modernists claim our best new traditional architects? why doesnt Calatrava admit that he is a modern gothic? because we are still making conservative spires in college campuses, they dont want to be associated with backwardness.
We should be planning cities in Mars! did you know that scientists discovered that the best material to build there is stone, the red stone from mars? Thats Egipt! And it can all be constructed by robots so its ready when the firts human gets there, thats what we should be doing.
We should be using virtual reality to show people how a project feels to be in, to walk by before its built, so that people can understand how much more enjoyable a classical streetscape is!
We are not reaching out for the people, they deserve to choose what they want, and we know that they want classicism, we just have to offer it to them in a way that is to good form them to refuse, we cannot be acused anymore of being backwards, we can do everything they can do, only better.
Andre has been probably the most exciting lecturer in the whole classical architecture field. We just need to start producing work, drawing and publishing and dreaming, Western culture needs a dream, an ideal, a horizon to reach, to pursue and Vitruvius' principles fit in and encompass precisely that future that we need to imagine.
Thanks to Andres for this passionate wake up call that every young architect should see and listen to and cant wait for the next lecture wich will be about actual projects.
I hope i dint sound very pretentious.

[@GetTherapyBirmingham]

We have an article about Krier and Jung here arguing the same premise. gettherapybirmingham.com/architecture-of-archetypes/
Also our podcast has a Duany interview.

[@goncalodias6402]

@@GetTherapyBirmingham great video. Informative and relaxing.

[@andrewlandry2447]

A very passionate and challenging talk here from Andres. His assertion that we have granted certain ground to the modernists by allowing them to gain ownership of certain architectural works that have clear classical language and very precise mathematical and proportional compositions is astute. I was quite literally thinking along this exact line of thought the other day while examining the work of Gaudi, who is always included within the modernist cannon and championed as part of their “league of extraordinary gentleman”, which I always found confusing. I remember my first year in architecture school when covering Gaudi, Wright, Corbusier, even Louis Sullivan…not even a nod was given to acknowledge the very evident classical proclivities of their work. They were always just pigeonholed as modernists, or at least early modernists, which; in my opinion, is not a fair characterization.