Oldfangled New Towns

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Duany and Plater-Zyberk are not alone. Sharing roughly the same principles, scores of other architects -- most notably Peter Calthorpe in San Francisco, the partners Alexander Cooper and Jacquelin Robertson in New York City, and William Rawn in Boston -- are designing deeply old-fashioned new towns and city neighborhoods. Most important, developers are buying into the latest view of how suburbs ought to be built. "I still have a memory of the kind of place Duany is talking about," says Joseph Alfandre, 39, the veteran Maryland developer who has already invested millions in Kentlands. "It is the kind of place I grew up in, that I have always dreamed of re-creating. When I was five years old ((in 1956 in Bethesda)), I was independent -- I could walk into town, to the bowling alley, the movie theater, the drugstore. Duany just reminded me of it."

Andres Duany is Mr. Outside to Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk's Ms. Inside. He ^ inspires, he charms, he gives the stirring, witty lectures. She organizes, she teaches, she makes the heartfelt case for a particular scheme. Both are relentless and smart and talented, and both are American baby boomers (he left communist Cuba as a child in 1960; her parents left communist Poland in the late '40s), who met as Princeton undergraduates in the early '70s.

It was in 1980, when Duany and Plater-Zyberk were hired by quixotic developer Robert Davis to turn 80 acres of Gulf Coast scrubland into a resort, that they ceased being merely interesting architects and started becoming visionary urban planners. As with all revolutions, the essential idea was simple: instead of building another dull cluster of instant beach-front high- rises, the developer and designers wondered, why not create a genuine town, with shops and lanes and all the unpretentious grace and serendipitous quirks that have always made American small towns so appealing? Thus was born the town of Seaside -- and with it, the movement to make new housing developments real places again.

Their intent is not to reproduce any particular old-fashioned place. Rather, Duany and Plater-Zyberk have meticulously studied the more-than-skin-deep particulars of traditional towns and cities from Charleston to New Orleans to Georgetown, and of the great prewar suburbs, such as Mariemont, Ohio. They've looked at how streets were laid out, how landmarks were placed, the intermingling of stores and houses, the rough consistency of buildings' cornice lines and materials. They've measured the optimal distances between houses across the street and next door, figured out just what encourages walking (narrow streets, parked cars, meaningful destinations) and reckoned the outer limit of a walkable errand (a quarter mile). They have tried to discern, beyond surface style, exactly what makes deeply charming places deeply charming.