teaching those damn new urbanists a thing about design...

Ok, not really.

Look, those New Urbanists drive me insane. Their taste in style makes my stomach turn. In theory they've got a good planning practice, but in reality, it doesn't work. In some ways it's exciting, but perhaps more frightening, that the Mississippi Gulf coast is going to be rebuilt in this manner. Maybe the opportunity to build from scratch will actually make the ideology more successful in practice (I contend that it adds to congestion rather than relieve it; see Kentlands and the expansive roadway required to access it). But, naturally, these damn designers don't know beans about social things or these silly notions we have about race and class. I distinctly recall Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Dean of the School of Architecture at University of Miami in Coral Gables and design partner of Andres Duany (granddaddy of New Urbanism), stating that race was not an issue in rebuilding the Mississippi coast at a talk during the SACRPH Conference. It's fucking Mississippi, you bet your white ass there's racial issues there. This of course lead to cocktail conversation later that night where I had to inform highly-educated people (at least one professor among them) that whiteness is race--being white means you have race, and even if the coast was mostly or wholly white, that doesn't mean there are no racial issues.

Ok, enough about my enlightened superiority and back to the article. It's an interesting look at Modernist architecture and techniques. Karrie Jacobs (my favorite Metropolis columnist) rightly points out that this illustrates that design has implications beyond curb appeal.