FEBURARY 2006 » book review

Building diversity

The Architecture of Duany Plater-Zyberk and Company
by Joanna Lombard
Rizzoli, New York, NY; 2005
175 pp.; hardcover; 200 color illustrations; $49.95
ISBN 0-8478-2600-7

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

No monograph has ever delved into the architecture of the Miami-based firm of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ). The office is best known for its town plans, most famously for the wildly successful Florida resort of Seaside, which set off the New Urbanist movement. (Not even DPZ's plans have been well documented yet. In fact, there's been no book on the subject since 1991.) DPZ designs don't make good monograph fodder. There are few potential money shots of mansions at dusk, and still fewer streetscapes where DPZ has kept itself in the limelight rather than collaborating open-mindedly with other firms.

Not that Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk themselves are low profile. While running their practice as well as the University of Miami's architecture school, the couple lecture tirelessly and organize advocacy drives and pro bono charrettes. (Andrés, the more charismatic member of the team, recently spearheaded the post-Katrina Mississippi Renewal Forum. )

This mid-career study is fittingly modest in size (8x9 in.), with comparatively whopping 3-in. margins. The author, Joanna Lombard, an architect, landscape historian and University of Miami professor, has known and taught alongside Duany and Plater-Zyberk for 20 years. Lombard pithily describes three dozen projects dating back to 1977, almost all of them in Florida and in a quite narrow stylistic range. DPZ concentrates on Mediterranean Revival, "cracker" vernacular and Moderne. Deep eaves, porches and courtyards nod to regional traditions and climate, and the structures' masses almost never reach more than two stories tall.

That is, nothing screams "look at me." More so than most traditionalist firms now practicing, DPZ doesn't just give lip service to the idea that New Urbanism should be anti-heroic, context-friendly and inclusive. This monograph showcases affordable freestanding houses for migrant workers, state-subsidized rental apartments and churches and civic centers in working-class neighborhoods. Every DPZ project, Lombard writes, "is a demonstration of a responsibility to the community."

A few coastal palazzos and a Caribbean golf-centered subdivision have nonetheless crept into the mix, bearing the whiffs of elitism and developer-kowtowing that enrage so many critics of New Urbanism. Classicists, meanwhile, may be discomfited by the austerity of DPZ's buildings; even the relatively well-funded civic or institutional projects seem ornament-deprived – there's little sincere entasis and few cornices worth their salt. DPZ's little-known 1970s houses for family members, meanwhile, are downright glum in their trim-less, muntin-free state, abstracted practically to Hugh Newell Jacobsen levels. (Remember that Duany and Plater-Zyberk are veterans of Robert Venturi's and Arquitectonica's offices, and more comfortable being called pluralists rather than Classicists.) Lombard delicately refers to DPZ's early phases as examples of "extreme formal translations of vernacular."

The author has munificently provided elevations and floor and site plans, but her text seems stingy. Client biographies and materials specs are largely absent, as is data on how the buildings have evolved and whether DPZ's dreams of affordability or mass-transit access have come true. There's no timeline, no project or address list, not even an index, and hardly any people appear in the photographs.

Another frustration is that there is a good deal of passive-voiced near-jargon: "The ground for the architectural practice was formed by an analysis of vernacular culture and building tectonics in all its problematic quality, both mitigated principally by the community."

DPZ has built some structures and places that sing intelligibly to inhabitants and tourists alike, and that help re-knit unraveled urban fabric. Their output doesn't perhaps warrant hagiography – too many monographs fall into that trap, in the style of Vincent Scully claiming Louis Kahn's work "thrums with power." But more storytelling, more reportage about sites in development or in action, more quotes or even essays from users, clients, friends or critics, would have suited DPZ's ideals of diversity. As Lombard sums up the firm's core belief, "Authentic urbanism requires many hands." TB

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