Veritas et Venustas

CNU XIV: MetaPhysical Planning & The Long Emergency

I'VE led a few MetaPhysical Planning sessions at the CNU's annual congresses. They've been popular, getting around 150 people each time, with good comments afterwards. Here's a description from this year's program:

Material crises start in the realm of the spirit. And that is where they can be transformed into blessings.

Anyone who reads religious and spiritual writings can’t help but notice that throughout history and for thousands of years mystics have said that the time we live in now would be a period of great turmoil. Many people who simply listen to their inner voices have heard the same thing for quite a while. A Meta-Physical Planning session in Providence will look at the Long Emergency from this perspective.

A few relevant words from The Big Book of Alchoholics Anonymous:

If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace.... We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.

This year, we're meeting Saturday morning from 11:30 to 12:30. It's a group participation meeting, with no set speakers. Everyone but confirmed Muggles welcome.

On the radio

ON STUDIO 360, Kurt Andersen had a nice report on what's going on with urban planning in New Orleans. You can listen to it here, or listen to a Podcast, here.

In the paper

MOST people who read the the New York Times online missed the article Sunday about designing / choreographing public spaces, because it was put in the dance section rather than the design section. But it's an interesting article for designers, or anyone who uses public space (hopefully, all of us):

The two men thought a lot about which public spaces in New York were well "choreographed" — that is, which shaped people's movement successfully — and which were not.

Mr. Rockwell had been pondering the general subject for decades. Even while a student at Syracuse University, he would stand on the roof of the architecture building and study the patterns carved in the snow by a sort of unspoken group will, patterns he would later connect to those described by the urbanist William H. Whyte in his classic studies of public space. What caused them? It wasn't just expedience, because the paths were often curved, where a straight line would be more direct. People moved as they did, Whyte believed, at least in part because they sought out pleasing experiences; they voted with their feet.

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May 28, 2006, Theater/Dance

At the New JetBlue Terminal, Passengers May Pirouette to Gate 3

 

By JESSE GREEN

 

THE Grand Foyer at Radio City Music Hall has been described as many things: a tour de force, a people's palace, even an Art Deco masterpiece. But it has not typically been described in the language of dance, as it recently was by the architect and set designer David Rockwell. The commanding room, he said, functioned as a kind of ballet master: a magnetic presence that forced people to move well and look good. "I have a vivid memory of the first time I walked up that stairway," he said, referring to the huge yet perfectly proportioned flight of steps to the mezzanine. "I had bad posture, but just being on it made my posture improve."

Individual behavior is only part of the story; the Grand Foyer also alters the behavior of crowds, who instinctively know how to use it. Much as a dancer doing pirouettes keeps her eyes focused on a reference point so she won't get dizzy, visitors, without even realizing it, use the room's precisely deployed architectural signposts — stairway, chandelier, mirrors, doorframes — to align themselves and stay on track. As a result, Radio City can pull 5,900 people through its lobby without contusion or confusion; more than that, it does so with the theatricality and orderliness that you might imagine at a formal ball.

For Mr. Rockwell — whose mother, once a vaudeville dancer, had hoped to be a Rockette — the dance of people in public space is not so much a matter of inborn grace or hours spent at the barre, as of how the built environment pushes us around and how we push back. His designs have explored these dynamics in a variety of settings, from upscale hotels and restaurants to the viewing platform at ground zero.

But his latest project involves one of the most notoriously pushy environments there is: an airport terminal. Last year his firm was hired to design the "interior experience" (arrival, departure, retail space) of the new JetBlue Airways terminal being built at Kennedy International Airport. And in what may be a first for architectural collaboration, Mr. Rockwell hired a choreographer — his Broadway colleague Jerry Mitchell — to help him.

The two men thought a lot about which public spaces in New York were well "choreographed" — that is, which shaped people's movement successfully — and which were not.

Mr. Rockwell had been pondering the general subject for decades. Even while a student at Syracuse University, he would stand on the roof of the architecture building and study the patterns carved in the snow by a sort of unspoken group will, patterns he would later connect to those described by the urbanist William H. Whyte in his classic studies of public space. What caused them? It wasn't just expedience, because the paths were often curved, where a straight line would be more direct. People moved as they did, Whyte believed, at least in part because they sought out pleasing experiences; they voted with their feet.

If Whyte was right, then why are so many public spaces so deeply unpleasurable — and sometimes almost dangerous — to move through? How could the exquisite choreography of Grand Central Terminal, with its powerful beams of natural light making what Mr. Rockwell called a "gateway inviting people into the city," coexist with the claustrophobic purgatory of Penn Station? (Penn Station seems to sneer and say, "Get lost!") How could the Grand Foyer at Radio City have the same function as the bewildering entry to the Marquis Theater on Broadway, which is cruel enough to suggest that the place was named for the Marquis de Sade?

With their traffic-stopping lady-or-the-tiger mystery corridors, their dizzying hairpin escalators, their misproportioned steps that send people tumbling, such places actually seem intended to enhance human clumsiness. Whyte certainly thought so.

"It is difficult to design a space that will not attract people," he wrote. "What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished." In New York, if you want to feel like an oaf with two left feet, there are many places that will gladly assist you. Quite often these will be places that people cannot choose to avoid. Jury pens, Social Security offices and ticket lobbies of hit shows, facing no competition, are usually disasters, to say nothing of emergency rooms, which only a corpse on a gurney could love.

But even those seem like successful designs compared with most airport terminals. With people and vehicles and luggage going every which way, these have always been difficult spaces to organize. A few architects have managed elegant, even poetic solutions, like Eero Saarinen's 1962 TWA terminal at Kennedy, whose soaring gull-shaped roof and swooping interiors invited travelers to imagine that they were flying even before they left the ground. But prosaic concerns like increased ridership and heightened security have turned the old buildings into dinosaurs and left what Mr. Rockwell calls their "generic and soulless" successors facing an apparently unsolvable puzzle. How do you move so many people, safely and logically and with a feeling of freedom, around a huge space that cannot in fact be free?

Mr. Rockwell's job at the JetBlue terminal — which is being built next to the Saarinen building, now empty — required him to think both inside the box (Gensler & Associates was responsible for most of the architecture) and outside it, given JetBlue's reputation for stylish practicality. "We began with the idea of using movement to personalize the experience and deal with the emotions of travel." Or as Richard Smythe, the JetBlue executive in charge of redevelopment at the airport, put it, the job was to make the customer's movement through the terminal feel "sexy."

Making movement feel sexy (or at least not random and leadfooted) is one possible definition of dance, which is why Mr. Rockwell brought Mr. Mitchell aboard. In the musicals they had already worked on together — "The Rocky Horror Show," "Hairspray" and "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" — Mr. Rockwell's sets had seemed not only to shape some of the dancing but also at times to participate in it. That the two men were about to collaborate on the musical adaptation of "Catch Me If You Can," a tribute to the innocence of flight in the Jet Set '60s, seemed like another positive omen.

Even so, a choreographer is about as typical in an architectural design process as a dentist or a woodchuck, and the idea of the highly theatrical Mr. Mitchell presenting his ideas to structural engineers and efficiency experts probably raised a few eyebrows. But Mr. Rockwell likes unusual collaborations; he enlisted Todd Oldham, the fashion designer, to help develop the color scheme for the Kodak Theater in Hollywood and had the underground cartoonist Gary Panter working with him on a Disney cruise ship project.

In any case, Mr. Mitchell took one look at the JetBlue terminal flow simulations and started dancing around the conference table at the Rockwell Group office on Union Square. "The original design made it hard to understand where you were supposed to go, either entering or leaving," Mr. Mitchell said. "Traffic diagrams showed a huge amount of path-crossing. I started to think it would be fabulous to eliminate all this crisscrossing and straight edges, which cause anxiety when they go on too long. David asked me what dance patterns I would use, and I said, 'People move easiest in circles: off and on the merry-go-round.' "

From his many "nightmare" hours spent at O'Hare International en route to or from his family, Mr. Mitchell recognized another problem: The design did not account for what he called the "different emotional experiences" of arrival and departure.

"Coming into an airport when you're leaving on a trip you have to slow down," he said. "You've got to arrive two hours early, and you've got security, luggage, kids, older people to deal with. That experience has to be made more leisurely. Coming back, to New York at least, you want to get out of the airport as fast as possible. You want a little Hot Wheels acceleration as you're coming off the plane and heading to the exit."

Mr. Mitchell was talking about feelings, but for a choreographer, feelings are what get expressed through pattern and rhythm. So he and the architects looked for ways to alter the shape and pace of passenger movement within the terminal, drawing less on transportation hubs (which are patronized of necessity) and more on urban spaces that people actually choose and enjoy. At Union Square, as Mr. Rockwell explained on a recent tour through some of those sites, the paths are wide enough for pedestrians to move along them in both directions at once, allowing for the pleasure of proximity without discouraging eye contact. (Squeeze people too close, as on a rush-hour subway train, and they won't look at one another.) The paths are also gently curved, allowing some surprise about what's around the next bend. And those curves seem to stretch time; as we circulated slowly, we were always aware of how we were deviating from the Manhattan grid, which nevertheless persisted as a faint impression, like a distant drumbeat.

"Friction is crucial for creating successful movement," Mr. Rockwell said. At Union Square — a green platform raised like a stage between streets that bustle with normal urban activity — that friction causes pedestrians to slow down, even if they don't mean to stop. At Times Square, where the streets do not recede but instead seem to multiply, the ambient rhythm accelerates. If a tourist unfamiliar with the beat stops to gawk, he is inevitably shoved along. (Successful movement doesn't always mean leisurely movement; Whyte liked a "nice bustle" of up to seven people per foot of walkway a minute.) At the Channel Gardens arcade leading down to the ice rink in front of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the contrast between the mass of the buildings on either side and the void in between sucks passers-by down toward the rink with an accelerating force that feels almost gravitational.

But an even more fundamental rule of human movement was in operation at all these spots: People will not generally walk into large objects. So if you want the foot traffic to turn left, put an obstacle — a statue, a row of planters, a large building — on the right.

"It's like they tell you in white-water rafting," Mr. Rockwell said. "Follow the water because it avoids the rocks."

Out of such thoughts, and Mr. Mitchell's choreographic insights, came the Rockwell Group's solution for the JetBlue terminal. Various obstructions (principally two large bleacherlike seating areas rising up like icebergs after the security checkpoints) would subtly lead outbound travelers toward the periphery of the space — the longer, more circular route — while inbound travelers would be directed straight between them, down a level and swiftly out. The periphery walls would be curved like the paths at Union Square to slow down the outbound experience and, not incidentally, enhance the likelihood of lingering over merchandise. And the bleacherlike seating areas, improving on the usual pods of wee chairs and tables at floor level, would encourage people to get above the action and watch the shapes of the promenade that they were recently part of.

Mr. Rockwell calls that kind of alternation, which he had pointed out in all the successful urban places we visited, "public theater": "Are we the actors? Or are the actors the other people we're looking at? What's thrilling is that it keeps flipping back and forth. The ambiguity allows people to be whatever they want."

Mr. Mitchell expressed it less abstractly: "Is it an airport? Is it a Broadway show? What's the difference?"

It will take a while to find out; the terminal isn't expected to open until 2008. But for Mr. Rockwell the interplay of architecture and choreography has already begun to inform his purely theatrical work. In its evocation of a biomorphic 1960's urban "eventorium," "Hairspray" contains a direct reference to Saarinen, and the show's blinking jewel-tone backdrop owes a debt, Mr. Rockwell said, to the 20-foot waterfall at the back of Paley Park on East 53rd Street. Both the waterfall and the backdrop act as unifying focal points that drag the viewer through the fourth wall, whether literally at Paley Park — it's hard not to walk in — or figuratively at the Neil Simon Theater.

Whyte was a big fan of Paley Park; in his documentary film "City Spaces, Human Places," he showed how its architecture altered people's movement (and mood) in specific, predictable ways. That's what dance does too — to the dancers at least — and why the connection between choreographers and architects is not so far-fetched.

The urbanist Jane Jacobs referred to the dynamics of her Greenwich Village block as the "ballet of Hudson Street," a phrase often interpreted as a tribute to the randomness of people's unpredictable daily choices. That's surely part of it, but given Jacobs's aesthetic and political convictions, it must also be a reference to the thousand quite nonrandom decisions about scale and setback and zoning that shape people's randomness. Successful public spaces invite you to join the dance of city life by first helping you to see it; without the rhythm of the street grid there could be no languorous fox trots like Union Square, no elegant struts like Bryant Park, no jitterbugs like Times Square, with everyone hopping around the traffic and bending off at Fosse angles. The city is more choreographed than we may like to think, and for better or worse, we're all hoofers within it.

 

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Garbage in Bedford, NY: Save yourself the aggravation, don't use Finne Bros.

To make a long story short, I needed garbage pickup on a few days notice. After 9 or 10 calls over 4 days I got a pickup a day late, because Finne was very disorganized.

The next week I called back because there was no pickup again. It turned out that the schedule was a day late because of Memorial Day. But that didn't really matter, because there was no record of me starting service. Instead of being sorry for the mixup and all the time I had spent talking to them, Finne then decided that unless I paid by credit card immediately, there would be no service. That was bad for me for three different reasons, and they wouldn't accept a check going out at nine am the next morning -- leaving me with a garbage problem at five pm one hour before going on a five day trip.

In my brief experience, Finne Brothers had little concept of listening to the customer, or of not causing the customer problems, let alone believing "the customer is always right." So if you're starting service in Bedford and you found this post through Google, I recommend a different company. Finne also works under the name Rogan Brothers.

The Great Mr. Bud, May 25, 1990 - May 28, 2006

BUD was always a big hearted guy. When he was still a puppy, I lived in an 18th century house: it had very small floors, with a story and a half on the front, but an extra story on the back, where the hill dropped away behind the house. My bedroom was on the top floor, under the roof, while Guinness, Bud and Frank slept in the kitchen on the lowest floor. The stairs in between were winding, narrow and steep, with risers about as high as Bud was tall. But two or three times a night, Buddy would climb the two stories in the dark, look in on me to make sure I was alright, and then go back down the stairs to Frank and Guinness.

I'm sure that in the beginning he would sometimes have problems with the winding stairs at their narrowest part, and slip and fall in the dark. And if you know about dachshunds you know that when he went back down the stairs he was doing very bad things to his long and poorly designed back. But Bud was a hard worker who was very serious about his job, and as far as he was concerned, his first job was taking care of me. This was more important than his own well-being.

He was also a serious hunter, who was known to do things like take a running, flying leap out a door ten feet above the ground after seeing a deer outside in "Budland." Leaps like that may be normal for cats, but they're bad for dachshunds, who have a body perfectly evolved for going down into underground lairs (dachshund means "badger dog"), but very poor for jumping.

In time, all of this took a toll on Buddy, and when he was four years old, he had two badly ruptured disks. The disks cut into his spinal cord, and paralyzed his rear legs. The pain of the jagged disks cutting through the spine was excruciating, and his mother and brother ignored him and generally acted as though he was dead. But I stopped working for more than a week and got him back on the path to health. He was known as the Love Puppy, because of all the love he gave, and I thought that if I gave back a fraction of what he gave me he would be alright. In time he was walking again, but his rear leg control was never more than 80% of what it had once been, and a few times a year he would stop walking altogether. This usually happened with seasonal changes or very stormy, low pressure weather: Bud is called "the Budrometer" in the leading book on alternative veterinary medicine, because you could perfectly predict the weather by the state of his back.

Last December, Bud's brother Frank died, a few months short of their sixteenth birthday. Bud has been sad and declining ever since. His eyesight was weak, his hearing was weaker, and his sense of smell declined greatly. He had problems with incontinence, and had to frequently be carried outside.

When I went to New Orleans in April for the Gentilly charrette, Bud stopped walking, and never walked again. Since then, he has had problems with infections, bedsores that opened large holes right through his skin, and more recently, seizures that left him disoriented and temporarily blind. In the week of rain that we had in New York, he stopped eating and drinking, and seemed as though he would die.

Bud developed gangrene, and to make a long story short, more than once it seemed as though he would die quietly and without much suffering -- only to rally once again. This morning we found him in a terrible state, and we drove him to be put to sleep. On the way, he became almost lifeless, and we stopped on a beautiful Bedford road to let him die peacefully while I held him on my lap. After half an hour, he came alive again.

We drove him to the vet and tearfully put him to sleep. It was clear he wanted to continue. He had his work to do watching over me, and he wasn't ready to leave his post. But we couldn't watch anymore the pain he was putting himself through, and we were told that if the gangrene killed him it would be a difficult death.

He was a great companion, and a sweet, sweet guy. Everyone who shared his life loved him. He will be sorely missed.

— thanks to Robert and Daryl Davis, who let me take their dachshund Guinness when I left Seaside after my stint as Town Architect. I never would have bought a dachshund, but Guinness, and later Bud and Frank, showed me how special they are, with more character per pound than any breed I know of. Today is the first time in twenty years that I have not had a dachshund in my life.

For those who think New Urbanism is a Conservative movement...

New Orleans architects call New Urbanism "the Halliburton of architecture," because we're supposed to be tied in to all the Republican politicians. The American Enterprise editors disagree:

(One might naturally think Snob = Conservatives, but the magazine is is making the Conservative Republican "liberal elites" argument. Those are wild-eyed, tree-hugger radicals with beards on the cover.)

The New York Times on Duany

A FEW DAYS AGO, the New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a long story about Biloxi, Mississippi, where 200 New Urbanists charretted in October, after Hurricane Katrina. The magazine was a special issue on architecture, mainly written by journalists. As journalists like, there were lots of opposing opinions from different parties. I thought the only person who came off well in the issue was my friend Gautam Bhatia, who wrote his own article. Steven Holl's client described his house as "uninhabitable half the time."

The journalist who wrote the article about Biloxi is a Libertarian, with, it seems to me, some Libertarian biases against New Urbanism and for sprawl. His article was fair, but a journalist with his preferences will find lots of criticism of New Urbanism from architects and Good Ol' Boy developers who want to keep building the same junk they've been building for the last 30 years. And he did.

Tomorrow (Tuesday), the Times is running a more sympathetic story, in a profile of Andrés Duany. It starts like this:

MIAMI — He's the man architecture critics love to hate: Andrés Duany, charismatic prophet of the New Urbanism, with his nostalgic prescriptions for dense, walkable neighborhoods energized by stores, mass transit and traditional housing.

Opponents cast this architect as an imperious enemy of progressive design and a threat to the Gulf Coast, where he has been involved in plans to redesign communities that were devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

Reed Kroloff, dean of the architecture school at Tulane University in New Orleans, for example, has referred to Mr. Duany and other New Urbanists as "Svengalis" who "have now seduced Louisiana's hapless governor and been given the keys to the state."

Later, Prof. Kroloff comes up again:

By speaking the language of developers so effectively, Mr. Kroloff asserts, New Urbanism has come to monopolize urban planning. The congress, he said, is "the only truly organized voice in planning in the United States and has become the most important force in architecture, with the exception of Frank Gehry, in the last 30 years."

Funny that earlier he said, "I don't even know why they exist." Full story here, or below.

       

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May 24, 2006

An Architect With Plans for a New Gulf Coast

 

By ROBIN POGREBIN

   

MIAMI — He's the man architecture critics love to hate: Andrés Duany, charismatic prophet of the New Urbanism, with his nostalgic prescriptions for dense, walkable neighborhoods energized by stores, mass transit and traditional housing.

Opponents cast this architect as an imperious enemy of progressive design and a threat to the Gulf Coast, where he has been involved in plans to redesign communities that were devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

Reed Kroloff, dean of the architecture school at Tulane University in New Orleans, for example, has referred to Mr. Duany and other New Urbanists as "Svengalis" who "have now seduced Louisiana's hapless governor and been given the keys to the state."

Mr. Duany, 56, said that a year or two ago he would have paid those critics little heed. Typically he lacks the time or the inclination to counter his detractors, he said during an interview in the office he shares here with his wife and partner, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, 55.

But these days, with the future of New Orleans; Biloxi, Miss.; and other cities hanging in the balance, Mr. Duany (pronounced DWAH-nee) said he was speaking out more aggressively.

"The response is not about convincing him — I'll never convince him," he said of Mr. Kroloff. "It's more like defending your side, or heartening your allies."

Recently, the New Urbanist planners involved in rebuilding Biloxi, Elizabeth Moule and Stefanos Polyzoides, resigned from the project after clashing with federal officials and with Mayor A. J. Holloway of Biloxi over control of the reconstruction.

To Mr. Duany these issues are crucial because the Gulf Coast offers the rare opportunity to start over from scratch, potentially with quick results. "For a city to become a city that's planned, it has to destroy itself; the city literally has to molt," he said. "Usually this takes 20 years, but after a hurricane, it takes five years. The people can see the future in their own lifetime."

"If architecture mattered to the world, " Mr. Duany added, "this would be the most important thing in the world."

Last fall, at the invitation of Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, Mr. Duany and the group he founded, the Congress for a New Urbanism, led a conference of 200 architects and planners in Biloxi in drafting architectural proposals for the coastal communities. He recently held a similar brainstorming session in the Gentilly section of New Orleans.

Critics of New Urbanism argue that Mr. Duany and his allies seek to create a picture-postcard image of the past and will squander the opportunity to start anew. They note that Mr. Duany's most famous project, the town of Seaside, Fla., was used as the location for "The Truman Show," the 1998 Jim Carrey film that in part parodied idealized small-town America.

Mr. Duany did not originally set out on a traditionalist path. A son and grandson of developers, he was born in New York City, then grew up in a suburb — of Santiago de Cuba, the island's second largest city, after Havana — and moved with his family to Barcelona, Spain, when he was 13.

His father was a conventionally modern developer in Cuba, he said, building single-family houses on large lots at a great distance from one another and far from commercial activity. It seemed at first that Mr. Duany would follow a similar path. After studying architecture at Yale in the 1970's, he and his wife helped to found Arquitectonica, a Miami firm that became known for its modern and hip sensibility.

Mr. Duany insists that New Urbanists are not averse to contemporary architecture. "They think that I don't know modernism or I can't design it," Mr. Duany said of his critics. "It's not true."

It was while living in Coral Gables, Fla., that he and Ms. Plater-Zyberk realized that the suburbs needed to be thoroughly rethought. "We would walk out and be bored to death," he said. "It was just this terrible lack."

"We needed to have meaningful destinations within walking distance," he continued. "You can't just walk past beautiful lawns, you want to walk past action."

Disenchanted with the high-rise business, he and Ms. Plater-Zyberk left Arquitectonica in 1980. By then they had decided that the best way to affect a landscape was not through designing discrete buildings, he said, but by writing new building codes governing zoning, parking, retailing, transportation and urban design.

In departing, they took along the firm's Seaside project, a traditionalist community in the Florida Panhandle, completed in 1981, that proved immensely popular. Lecturing across the country about Seaside, Mr. Duany soon met dozens of likeminded planners.

Groups began gathering to learn from one another, and "then, it grew," he said. Ultimately those encounters led to the creation of the Congress for a New Urbanism in 1993, with a charter espousing principles like "the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods" and diverse, mixed-use districts.

The congress used to maintain a list of New Urbanist communities but stopped counting two years ago when the number reached about 600. "There's not enough of us," Mr. Duany said. "We're dying of overwork." Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, founded in 1980, has alone completed designs for more than 250 new and existing communities, including neighborhoods in Providence, R.I.; Baton Rouge, La.; and West Palm Beach.

And Ms. Plater-Zyberk, who is also dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture, now leads Miami 21, a project to overhaul city zoning intended to discourage exposed parking garages, assure wider sidewalks and create homes where people can live above their businesses.

By speaking the language of developers so effectively, Mr. Kroloff asserts, New Urbanism has come to monopolize urban planning. The congress, he said, is "the only truly organized voice in planning in the United States and has become the most important force in architecture, with the exception of Frank Gehry, in the last 30 years."

"The development community loves New Urbanism," Mr. Kroloff added. "It speaks to the sentimentality that seems to underlie Americans' home-buying habits. And creating higher density per acre allows developers to make more money. There is no organized contradictory voice in planning."

Mr. Duany counters that critics like Mr. Kroloff are often acting on misinformation. "We're not just about picket fences and porches, and it's frustrating to have that repeated," he said. "Yes, we want you to walk, but we're not eliminating cars. We're not forcing transit; we're simply fitting communities so that, if they ever want transit, it will work."

"Yes, we love Main Streets, but we don't expect that the shop owners are going to be mom-and-pop stores," he continued.

As for contemporary architects, Mr. Duany said they were welcome in New Urbanist communities, but only for public buildings like a town hall or library. "The star architect is confined to the civic building," he said. "The civic buildings are free of any constraint."

Clearly, New Urbanism is out of sync with the phenomenon of the star architect, Mr. Duany added pointedly. "We're a group," he said, "and these days, anybody who's an architect who isn't an 'individual' is very suspicious: 'What do you mean, you all have a system of beliefs? You believe in something other than artistic expression?' "

Ms. Plater-Zyberk echoed his sentiments. In New Orleans, she said, "The avant-garde, the individual great building, is not the answer for what were the postwar ranch house suburbs."

Peter A. Calthorpe, a planner based in Berkeley, Calif., who is working on a regional plan in Louisiana, said that the debate over New Urbanism was a depressing distraction from the urgent issue of rebuilding towns ravaged by Katrina. "It is tragic to reduce issues facing New Orleans to issues of architectural style," he said.

Mr. Kroloff himself stepped down from a rebuilding role in Mayor Ray Nagin's Bring Back New Orleans Commission this year, saying he felt that he had become too much a focus of attention.

New Orleans policymakers were initially wary of the New Urbanists until they saw the local planning work that Mr. Duany did this year for the nearby St. Bernard Parish and invited him to do the same for Gentilly. "He showed the possibilities for how the area could come back," said Cynthia Hedge Morell, a city councilwoman.

Mr. Duany, who with his handsome looks and polished, articulate style, can easily hold a crowd, said, "What happens is, we connect to the people." It is clear that he does not suffer fools gladly: during the interview he snapped repeatedly over the phone at a colleague with whom he was preparing an op-ed article.

Mr. Kroloff said that Mr. Duany's popularity with the public was unsurprising. "A disaffected generation of traditionalists suddenly found themselves with a champion and flocked to him with a passion," he said.

Mr. Duany said that those who deride the New Urbanists are threatened by their influence.

"Nobody gave a damn about us until we got powerful," he said. "The world watches."