01 January 2000

Driehaus Prize Remarks

Driehaus Prize Remarks
Andres Duany, January 2009

Today we have spoken about Richard Driehaus, of his generosity and perspicacity. But something I've come to see in him is perhaps of greater importance: his enthusiasm. The energy of enthusiasm is important to move things forward. Most of us here are enthusiasts about this great thing, traditional architecture and urbanism. And we are something else that we don’t often realize: most of us here are brave, too, as by practicing traditional architecture and urbanism we enter the ring with champions like Lutyens and Palladio.

Modernists do not. They write their own rules of the game, so they always win. Peter Eisenman, for example, is invariably the champion of Eisenman-esque architecture. There are no other contenders. This is clever, but in the end it is not interesting because there is no tension. Eisenman's achievements are noticed less every time. He does ever bigger buildings that are ever more swiftly forgotten. They are victories over himself, about which only he can care.

But what if Peter were to design a classical building? What if he were to attempt something as dangerous as to enter that ring with the real champions? There would be a renewed interest in him as an architect, to say the least. And I’m sure it would be a great performance -- Leon Krier, who is his friend, says Eisenman knows Palladio very well.

Designing a classical building is virtually the only thing that remains for those avant-garde architects. They have already explored every shape that could be hyper‑cantilevered, crashed, randomized, slashed, perforated, photo-tuned, upturned, bent, dematerialized, dissed, or otherwise transgressed. It is by now the expected. There remains only their engaging in the ultimate test, to compete with the likes of Lutyens and Palladio, under common rules.

But even that would be merely entertainment. For the challenge that is upon us, traditional architecture and urbanism must be more useful than amusing.

It has been Lizz’s and my most serious contribution, I think, not so much to recover traditional architecture and urbanism, nor to evolve it, nor even to practice it as widely as we have, but to empower it again through collective endeavor. This achievement requires that credit be widely distributed, because our work is also the work of others; so there will be many names mentioned in this presentation.

But for not having met Robert Davis, some of these others may well be up here today receiving this award. Among them are Robert Orr, John Massengale, Victor Dover, Dhiru Thadani, Neal Payton, John Torti, Pat Pinnell, Peter Calthorpe, Liz Moule, Stef Polyzoides, Peter Katz, Ray Gindroz, Dan Solomon. It is very unusual, in this field of authorial individualism, to have such people working towards the same end.

And we should not make a distinction between designers and developers, as both are creators. Buff and Johnny Chace, Galen Weston, Patrick Bienvenue, Robert and Daryl Davis, David Tomes, Greg and Susan Whittaker, Joe Alfandre, Steve Maun, Craig Robins, and scores of others are as knowledgeable about design as we the designers must be about development.

And then the teachers. In the schools, for a short window either side of 1970, there was a genuine open-mindedness about architecture. It was the time when Michael Graves, Alan Greenberg and, above all, Vincent Scully, taught us to love and appreciate all good buildings. They didn't turn us into style bigots. I'm most grateful for that. Because of them I visit the world with much more enjoyment.

With the partners at DPZ, and the professors at the University of Miami, Leon Krier holds a special place as a teacher. In addition to urbanism, he taught us how to be polemical. Those razor-sharp cartoons clarified timeless concepts at the explicit expense of the ridiculous practices of modernism. Over the years his drawings, projects, and writings have systematically engaged everything from the region to the detail of buildings. They now constitute a complete body of knowledge. We had only to adjust them to American conditions, and to develop the massive delivery systems required by the present situation.

Receiving the Driehaus Prize with the help of so many, it is right that we should share it. It would be incorrect to take the stipend for ourselves. So Lizz and I have arranged its donation to a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the furtherance of this endeavor that we share. The publication of Leon Krier's complete works will be its first achievement.

As you may know, it is not my practice to be as nice to everyone as I have been today. But on this beautiful occasion I will continue to do so by thanking our opponents. We are grateful to them because they have discerned the threat that our ideas pose to theirs. By relentlessly attacking the New Urbanism from their illustrious institutions, they have provided us with visible platforms. I must thank them also for maintaining such a high level of strategic ineptitude. How easy they have made it for us outside their circumscribed world. We thank them for how much they concede by sticking to irrelevant ideologies; by their fascination with the transient, the unworkable, the uncomfortable, the unreproducible, the unpopular, the expensive, the unbuildable, the useless, the repellent, and the unintelligible. That has been a gift greater even than this prize.

This gift has not been without sacrifice on their part. Modernist architects of great talent have willingly performed for the regard of only about six critics. And they do so knowing that these critics have a history of raising them up and then discarding them once they are bored. We have seen in our own time the marginalization of truly brilliant architects -- Paul Rudolph, Charles Moore, Robert Venturi, James Stirling, Bob Stern, Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman -- all once raised to the heavens and then dismissed, even when at the peak of their powers. As with Paul Rudolph, these architects will outlive the critics, but it is a terrible waste of resources.

We have taken a different course. We seek judgment, not at the mercy of those six, but in the regard of America at large. When people ask, "Aren't you worried about what Orousoff wrote?" I tell them, "But I don't know anyone who matters to our practice who knows him." What he writes has no effect. For the time it would take me to write a publishable response, I could edit a code that would affect perhaps hundreds of buildings. Besides, if we were to respond, it would only empower those critics by granting them a visibility in our world that they do not have.

What then is this world of the New Urbanism, and why is traditional architecture important to it? There are many reasons, but the primary one is that because traditional architecture is a common language of the American middle class, it is the symbolic discourse through which we implement the social and ecological ideals of the Charter of the New Urbanism. The enormous American middle class is the group that really matters, and yet they are the only consumers of architecture not addressed in the modernist schools or the professional periodicals.

Beyond the snobbism, there is a reason for that. To the middle, class unlike the poor, the market gives choice -- and given choice they choose traditionalism. Their ability to evade the modernist discourse (which the poor cannot do) confuses architects. But it does not confuse us. It is through the steady reputation of traditional architecture that we enlist the middle class to our cause, which is to have them inhabit again a walkable, compact, and diverse urbanism.

You might ask: but isn't the American middle class culturally trivial? The response to that depends on your conception of culture; it can be either the late modernist one of cultural activity as critique, or ours (coinciding with the early modernist concept) of cultural activity as action. Theirs attempts to express the condition of the world, while ours attempts to reform the condition of the world.

You see, the lifestyle of the American middle class is the root cause of the environmental problems of the world today. It is that simple. It is the way we supersize our habitat, the way we consume as entertainment, the way we drive around to do ordinary things, the way we so freely allocate land to our use, and even how we choose to eat, that is the cause of climate change. It is this lifestyle, and now its export version (pushed by architectural consultant-criminals) to Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, South America and Eastern Europe, which is responsible for the environmental problems we will all suffer. It was traditional architecture that both politically and technically enabled New Urbanists’ extraordinarily early commitment to environmentalism.

If that is what traditional architecture has done for us, the urbanists, what can it do for itself?

The current renaissance of traditional architecture must be seen not as a single event, but as a process. A first generation restored the old and sturdy citadel which is the discipline of the classical language. The next generation now entering the peak of their practice can continue to unfurl beautiful banners from the ramparts, in the hopes that virtue will be recognized by all … or it can sally to take territory by force. There is so much territory forlorn by American design. I do not allude to the bits held by modernism, but to the vast areas held by mindless production builders, by the green gadgets that pass for environmental buildings, by the nauseating plan books, by the junk-space of civic buildings, by the junk-products at Home Depot, by the hapless mobile home industry. These are blights on our physical and cultural landscape that can only be redeemed by traditional designers. This is risky, I know. We could jeopardize the impeccable reputation of the citadel … but we could also show the space that traditional architecture can occupy as nothing else can.

In this quest, we must be as courageous as the generation of pioneers. Bob Stern, Alan Greenberg, Tom Beeby, Rob Krier, and Thomas Gordon Smith all risked their good name by entering the trackless wilderness of post-modernism. But see what they gained on the other side: the architecture that we now so confidently reward with the Driehaus Prize.

The best proof that architecture has been well and truly recovered through that heroic thirty-year campaign is that it can be dependably taught. Classicists today can be as good as their masters even while still young. I am aware that the rigor of the classical canon enables this instruction. I am also aware that the discipline of the Orders was the compass that guided architecture out of postmodernism. But in teaching the Orders today we should take care that students not become overly dependent of bookish authority. They must not learn the fear of being caught "incorrect." The measure should be what Lizz calls "plain old good building." We are, after all, building primarily for common folk and not patrons.

Will the current generation bore deeper still into refinement and elitism, or will it spread classical architecture out to a broad democratic, indeed populist, future? Will it continue republishing ever more esoteric treatises, or will it write new ones conceived to serve, not the 16th or even the 20th Century, but this future which is upon us?

To explain what I mean, please permit me a rudimentary example. How can there be a viable canon of architecture that is incapable of producing an opening wider than it is high -- by that I mean a horizontally proportioned intercolumniation? We cannot be effective today if we cannot even deal with a simple barn opening or porte-cochere. And that is just one problem. We confront the conclusion that the classical canon must be expanded if it is to engage the 21st Century.

I would propose a new ethos -- one no longer dedicated to the recovery of the classical canon of Vitruvius, Palladio and Vignola, but to expanding that canon. Taking care that this process does not devolve into neo-postmodernist dissipation, it must be based on the authority of masters and masterpieces. First we must transcend the authority of the historic treatises, to rescue that which was discarded in the reductive process of writing them. Then we must recover to our side those transitional 2Oth Century architects that historians have assigned to the modernist camp -- where they reside as the foundation of their authority -- when they are, in fact, a late, great flowering of classicism.

Take Frank Lloyd Wright. You could see the Prairie School as the beginning of the fall, but you could also see it as the last of the Greek revivals. Wright was among those who, instead of the Parthenon and all of its proprieties, took the Erechtheion and all of its freedoms, to extract a contemporary architecture. If the Erechtheion -- its dynamic massing and multiple columniations, its agile engagement with topography, its free repertoire of moldings, its localized symmetries and rotated approaches, its complex, multi-leveled interior, its contradictions and unresolved tension -- is classical, then the young Wright is certainly among the great masters of classicism. Wright must be on our side if we are to take the territory defined by the 21st century.

Another master of the canon would be Jose Plecnik. Plecnik, who knowing the classical language perfectly, took it and translated it to the folk vernacular. Like Shakespeare, who found literature in a moribund Latin and bequeathed it in a native English with vitality to spare, Plecnik shows us the workings of what my brother Douglas calls “the vernacular mind.” Not “the vernacular,” which is a style, but the vernacular mind, which is the way of folk art. It is the ability to compose from memory and circumstance, with found materials, of working sequentially through anything and everything, with craft but not perfection. The robustness which Plecnik brought to architecture is essential, I think, to the withering that the 21st century will impose upon us. Leon knows it. Look at his American buildings at Miami, and at Seaside and Windsor. What lessons do they hold? Not one of them is correct in the canonical sense, and yet they are canonical buildings. And so I would also bring into the canon the work of Leon Krier.

An expanded canon would include newly drawn plates alongside Vignola's: the Orders of masters like Friedrich Gilly, John Soane, Alexander Thompson, Tony Garnier, Auguste Perret, Josef Hoffman, Gunnar Asplund, Adolf Loos, Jose Plecnik, Marcello Piacentini, Michael Graves, Rob Krier, Robert Stern, Scott Merrill -- and a score of others. This treatise would claim an enormous amount of new territory for classicism.

A portion of this Driehaus Award will be applied to such a treatise.

We are almost there. We have only to climb one last Everest.

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