The suggestion has been made that this gathering be called The Seaside Tapes, giving appropriate remembrance and credit to ‘The Charlottesville Tapes’ meeting of fifteen years ago in Virginia.

The Charlottesville Tapes was an international meeting of prominent architects organized by Jacquelin Robertson, then Dean of the School of Architecture at UVA. It aimed to engage in dialogue the brightest designers of an emerging generation on the current state of architectural culture.

The proceedings of the meeting were published in book form. The dialogue among the participants as documented in the book was as self centered, aimless and confusing as the Architecture they produced in their later lives. The star system that has dominated Architecture in our time was both exposed and abetted through the Virginia meeting.

The introduction to the gathering spoken by Jacque Robertson is after fifteen years the highlight of the Charlottesville Tapes document. It is both a scathing criticism of the ideology espoused by most then present, but also and most importantly a prophecy directed to the future. It called for the invention of an Architecture that was culturally rooted, socially responsible and connected to the city and nature. It is a bold stroke of insight and clarity amidst the cacophony of the competing voices of his guests.

I would like to read some excerpts of the Robertson statement to you today because it is so fundamental to who we are, to why we are here and to what we are trying to accomplish this weekend.

‘I was also struck, as I always am, by how cut off we architects are from the world around us. This seems particularly true of the thinking architects. We don’t seem to understand very well yet how our society works or what our people want or need. We are continually caught up in a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland situation of either giving answers to questions no one is asking or ignoring completely some of the more pressing and obvious problems.

I suspect this is a partial explanation of our relative powerlessness and why, despite our prodigious efforts (we work as hard as anyone), we are so poorly rewarded. It is not just our high-mindedness or altruism that keeps us off the scent, nor is it that our public is not interested in higher things. (They are).

Some basic unwillingness to see things as they are and then attempt to take corrective action is missing in our present make-up. We are neither good diagnosticians nor good leaders. Rather, we are caterers and men of fashion, more interested in curtain walls and how to accommodate the car, mercenaries but not generals. As such, we will continue to lose whatever war we have chosen to fight in. Unless and until we see and promote Architecture and planning together as legitimate public concerns and attempt to create for them public policy, we will continue to be little more than hairdressers and couturiers, whether to the masses or the rich.

He goes on to say, ‘This continued avoidance of confrontation with the real public issues of Urbanism...’

The use of the word Urbanism here is a very early introduction of this professional term into the English language and the American architectural scene. Supported by the preceding paragraphs, it is also presented in a light very similar to the way New Urbanists have come to define it and to understand it:

Robertson argued that Architecture and planning needed to be married through design. This ‘Urbanism’ could then drive a policy agenda of public action by highlighting the positive economic and social consequences of physical design. In the last quarter of the 20th century, this has been the key idea, the missing link necessary to revitalize an architectural culture in decline and to make it central to the civic life of our country.

His challenge went unanswered until the recent emergence of the New Urbanism. Alone among his contemporaries, and to his great credit, Robertson has joined us in the search for a genuine American Architecture and Urbanism. He is among us today, and we should acknowledge his insight, his support of us and his pioneering role in leading the way to Seaside and to the Congress of the New Urbanism.

In my brief remarks today, I would like to discuss the forming of the New Urbanism as a movement. And to trace its roots in the professional experiences of its founders, early leaders and proponents through three distinct phases: Beginning years, which were a time of education. Years of maturation which were marked by an engagement with teaching, the received profession and society. And finally, the current years of leadership and action on a broad front, a time of establishing theories and ideas and practicing them across the board.

A typical professional education in Architecture and Urbanism is an introduction into the field, the process of preparing to practice. It is also an intense moment of acculturation. Through teaching, students are presented a structured view of their discipline, and the instructions on how they may operate within it. Their response is affected by the state of the world around them, and by their own unfolding lives’ experiences and interests. In their eventual practice they end up either confirming or transforming the ideological and the pragmatic foundations of their education. This educational experience for a whole generation of architects beginning in the mid 1960’s was particularly intense.

An air of rebellion dominated the life of American educational institutions during the Vietnam War. A normal, human tendency to question authority and received wisdom, rapidly degenerated for our generation into a torrent of dissent. The perceived shortcomings of our education became a point of departure toward an Architecture and Urbanism in sharp counterpoint to that received from our elders. This critical spirit dominating our early years in Architecture guided many of us in later life. And the perceived urgency to recast our profession led, after many years of soul-searching, to the definition of a New Urbanism and an Architecture within it.

The dominance of a pedagogy based on the single building monument, the primacy of cars and road building and the terminal abuse of the natural environment were already so distasteful to us thirty years ago, that they became, beginning then, the focus of intense scrutiny. We responded to a grossly dysfunctional architectural curriculum by eventually rejecting the gospel of perpetual progress that was its foundation. What were the educational deficits we experienced and how did our response to them lead to new urbanist counter positions?

There was a total disinterest in dealing with anything in our surroundings that was particularly real. The curricular focus of those years was the introduction of modernist architectural and urban design ideas that were European (CIAM) - inspired. The teaching method was based on the prospect of developing student geniuses under the direct guidance of brilliant, individual faculty members. The design programs were abstract and the design emphasis was on personal expression. Little has changed since then.

At Princeton University In the period of seven years between 1965 and 1972, not a single course was taught in American Architecture and Urbanism. The work of Olmstead in Trenton, the colonial houses of Princeton, the skyscrapers of New York, the Princeton campus itself, remained mute witnesses to an education thriving on ignorance of the urban and environmental facts in place. Some of us, upon concluding our studies, were left with an intense curiosity and desire to engage these special places and objects. Most of our colleagues were directed to depreciate the millennial design and building traditions of our continent.

There was the lack of engagement with the social, economic and political forces that sponsor and direct both public and private aspects of development and construction. This was a particularly urgent, almost desperate challenge at the time. Urban Renewal was in full deployment as a federal policy and its ravages were being felt everywhere in the United States. The toxic evidence of sprawl was emerging all around. Strip development and the economics of the franchise business were challenging America’s down towns. Massive tract construction was threatening the importance and viability of America’s historic Neighborhoods. The Civil Rights struggle then unfolding begged the question of social equity.

An ideologically insensitive curriculum based on ignorance of the effects of design on society and society on design had predictable effects. It led some of us to begin to rethink our role as architects and to reform the view of Architecture then prevalent. It drove most of our peers and mentors towards an orgy of formalism that has lasted a quarter century and shows no sign of abatement.

There was no exposure to a method of learning Architecture and planning accounting for the evidence of a living tradition. Instead of intelligence transferred from generation to generation, as it has been throughout most of human history, both policy and design were presented as a process of perpetual re invention. This terminal lack of concern with history is now firmly established in the current teaching of our discipline. For some, this disconnection with the past led to practice, teaching, research and writing in the interest of rooting design in existing knowledge. For most it has meant the pursuit of design as self-indulgence.

In many ways, the word neo-traditionalism is only a partial description of the cultural intentions of the New Urbanism. A much more apt word to describe this movement would be neo realism.

In response to a deficient modernist education, its leaders and supporters embraced design as engagement with real places, real people and institutions, a tangible public process, and a commitment to cultural continuity.

The second stage of a professional career extends beyond education. It begins with recent graduates placing themselves in the context of an existing professional structure. This is a time of apprenticeship and of accommodation with the established values of an older generation. There are two choices typically available to young professionals at this juncture. Joining their fresh, new voice and their personal interests to a stable, existing professional ethic. Or, alternatively, rejecting existing canons and practicing in an attempt at professional reform.

Peter Calthorpe, Dan Solomon, Lize Plater-Zyberk, Andrés Duany, Liz Moule and Stefanos Polyzoides became the founders of the New Urbanism. We chose the second route. Our initial professional exposure to Architecture and its allied professions convinced us that our elders’ obsession with obsolete rules, with single buildings, high technology and self-expression was incompatible with the mounting, world-wide crisis of sprawl. During formative practice from 1975 to 1990, it became clear that the challenge of our lives would be the pursuit of individual design projects in the service of a larger order: The reconstruction of the city and the stewardship of nature.

The founders as well as the early proponents of the CNU knew each other either as Architecture students and young practitioners, or were acquainted with each other’s ideas and professional trajectories. As early as the beginning of the 1980’s there was awareness of common understandings and related undertakings. After fifteen years of laboring separately, and despite various procedural and ideological disagreements, the founders reached a fateful conclusion in 1992.

Without sacrificing the individual interests, professional recognition or creative potential of any single office, working in unison operating under a single ideological umbrella, there would be unimaginable opportunities for advancing the cause of Architecture and Urbanism in America. Thus the decision to organize the first three congresses. Out of these was born the New Urbanism, paraphrasing Robertson’s words of fifteen years ago, as ‘market –driven, community –responsive physical design at the scale of the region, the Neighborhood and the single building that could drive the policy agenda of public action in the entire country’.

The CNU was consolidated only after the third Congress in 1995 and under the leadership of its first executive director, Peter Katz. The decision was made to pursue a charter and to form a permanent institution to help advance the common agenda of its members, who by now numbered approximately 500. A strong outreach effort after the second congress had extended membership to an ever wider set of parties interested in bringing sprawl to a halt: Developers, professionals of all kinds, elected and appointed officials, civil servants, leaders of allied non profit groups and generally the entire panoply of forces interested in changing the course of development in America. The membership was now in a position to address sprawl in all its complexity and vast continental scale.

The Charter was authored as a road map for this multifaceted body of new urbanists and was validated during the fourth congress in Charleston in 1996. It was a manifesto wrapped around a set of principles enabling constructive action. It was more of a way of engaging private development and the public planning process than a direct instruction on how to design projects. It was meant to energize as many people and disciplines as it was necessary to push the anti-sprawl agenda forward. Therefore, it was phrased in the manifold terms that generate the reality of sprawl. And it allowed those who wish to combat it from every direction, not design alone, to find a niche within the CNU.

Past this point, the movement developed very rapidly. Armed with an inspiring set of instructions, every member of the CNU felt empowered to act to further the interests of the group as a whole. Guided by a Secretariat in San Francisco, a Board of Directors and a variety of Task Forces, members can act horizontally with a considerable degree of freedom to engage in battle with-out-of-control sprawl in their own terms. This decentralized institutional structure has allowed the movement to flourish with unprecedented speed and effectiveness.

Finally, the third phase of a career begins at the point where personal and professional maturity allows for a full engagement with society. Leadership and service are the process of doing daily work that is principled and in the interest of establishing a new standard of practice. In the case of the CNU, this means a practice that elevates physical design at all scales to the position of stitching the physical world back together, one action at a time, after 50years of anarchic, dumb growth.

We see the CNU as promoting an evolving agenda that comes directly out of the intractable livability challenges we encounter in every day existence. There are a number of commonalities of approach that characterize new urbanist practices today:

1 A bias towards designing physical settings where people can associate by choice

By community, we mean the making of places where people can freely generate a community of neighborly interests, not the deterministic framing of humanity in a particular Architecture. One of the most central aspects of the community we seek to enable is generating a balance between the city and nature. Again not in the sense of dominating and domesticating nature, but rather conserving it and allowing people the choice of relating to it individually and collectively. The key concept of an emerging new urbanist ideology is the idea of choice. We are in favor of designing physical settings that offer living options in many forms. Sprawl only provides one: The single-family house in a tract with nature slowly sailing away as subsequent tracts drive it out of reach.

2 A pre-disposition to cooperating

Until I run across Liz Plater-Zyberk and Andrés Duany, fifteen years after we had been together in school, I unthinkingly subscribed to the prevailing professional ethic: “The only good architect is a dead architect. As long as they are alive, they are competition”. Andrés and Liz persuaded us to look at our colleagues not as threats but as valuable collaborators. They shared their work with many in the CNU and launched them as legitimate new practices. In fact, they spawned new opportunities and a whole new professional class of urbanists. Sharing common goals and cooperating, CNU practitioners have precipitated change in volume and in speed disproportionate to their numbers.

3 Promoting generalist practice and multidisciplinary peace

We are all children of professional divorce. The modern culture’s fetish for professional hermeticism, protagonism and specialization is notorious. The separation of schools and professions dealing with physical design into tribes, each with their own myopic credos and marching orders is commonplace. New Urbanists have broken this mould. Whether through charrettes or regular practice, we have promoted respect, collaboration, self-awareness and deep inquiry among all diverse professions with a role to play in Urbanism. One of the most dramatic characteristics of this kind of practice is in fact the reigning in of formulaic transportation and environmental engineering. This has been accomplished not by the dominance of architectural design, but by the elevating of engineers into humanist thinkers with a role to play in design. It is commonplace these days to have deep urbanist design insight arise out of the comments of a collaborating engineer.

4 A commitment to the public advocacy

The public process is grinding. It is often irrational and frustrating. It is at times quite unpleasant and often infuriating. But in a democracy like ours, there is no choice but to move the CNU forward with the help of deep popular support. All new urbanist projects, with no exception, are carried out in public. Community engagement becomes particularly important beyond the single project level. The challenge of changing general plans and zoning codes means rallying citizens to politically espouse and support the new Urbanism. Providing superior living places through design in the marketplace is also a form of eliciting popular support. People vote with their pocketbooks. The financial success of new urbanist projects is a form of political support for our cause.

5 Continuing to learn

Urbanism is a lost art. Most of us are self-taught urbanists. In the process of practicing, a substantial effort is being made to enhance the theoretical base of this movement. The most profound contribution in this respect has been DPZ’s Lexicon of the New Urbanism: An encyclopedia that both clarifies nomenclature and provides a taxonomic order of the formal elements of urbanist practice. Many new urbanists are engaged in typological and morphological studies of buildings and urban settings in order to establish the regional strains of new urbanist form. The CNU is publishing as quickly as it can relevant evolving standards in transportation, community design and other topics. There is awareness that we do not know enough about the nature of our work. That we need to discover its past and invent a new order of practice. We need to continue to learn in the interest of remaining critical observers and self-critical actors in the process of urban development. The task of defeating sprawl requires no less a commitment of intelligence and energy.

I am not the person to officially summon this meeting. But as I am the first person and the first founder of the Congress to speak today, I would like to suggest what this meeting’s purpose should clearly be:

The people who represent the New Urbanism should present their work both as an individual and as a collective illustration of the Charter of the CNU. Those invited to criticize the projects and the principles of this movement should to do so in a manner that enhances the ability of new urbanists everywhere to understand the possibilities and limits of their thoughts and actions.

Both presenters and critics should argue their case with a larger audience in mind: All those beyond us today, believers, opponents and agnostics should be given a chance to develop a point of view based on an authentic case for the New Urbanism and intelligent, legitimate arguments against it.

Let the fun begin!!