“The Charter of the New Urbanism”

Abstract

Charter of the New Urbanism, Congress of the New Urbanism, Edited by Michael Leccese and Kathleen McCormick, McGraw-Hill, 1999, 180 pages. Style and Moral Design Had he lived a few decades beyond his thirty-seven years, Andrew Jackson Downing would have had the satisfaction of seeing how pervasively influential his books had been. He would have visited places like Evanston, Illinois or the Hill District of St. Paul, where streets perpetually bloom with the kind of houses described and drawn in The Cottage Style and The Architecture of Country Houses. Within a surprisingly short time, his books, published from 1837 to 1850, revolutionized the design of the American house and how Americans would expect to live. For a time that lacked a massive real estate industry that could fill sections of a metropolitan Sunday newspaper with homes for sale, that most single-family houses built for the next four to five decades were in the Italianate, Gothic and Queen Anne forms that would today all be called Victorian testifies to the power of Downing's persuasive argument that the Greek Revival or neoclassical house was obsolete. Strung along the old two-lane highways in the Atlantic and Midwest states, the white, framed, neoclassical house identifies farmsteads and defines the antebellum character of many small towns. But, after the Civil War, few would be built again as the Victorian house now dominated house development. Yet, two generations after Downing, Victorian houses would be ridiculed for their florid excesses and give way in the early twentieth century to simpler, craftsman style dwellings. And again about two generations later, these craftsman dwellings would fade into a collection of post World War II forms called modern. Now, two generations later, pure and adulterated modern forms are be challenged by the New Urbanism. More than others, American cities show the outward accretions of style signaling the character of streets, neighborhoods and subdivisions as they sprawl into the countryside. Within each successive style is a covertly packaged moral design movement that defines a new way to live formed by the arrangement of interior and exterior spaces. Downing's was not merely an appeal for housing that was safer, better built, more sanitary or more spacious. It was a moral revolution; a call for a new way of living that he was convinced could not accommodated by the neoclassical style house, the ideal since the American Revolution. That the ideal of this earlier generation of houses would be Greek Revival, not the Georgian or medieval English built during the colonial period, indicates the American nation's desire to express its heroic democracy and underlying Athenian ideals. Yet, in Downing's view, these simple classical symmetries were ill-shaped to meet the needs of families and their relationship to the beauties and bounties that inhered in America's natural environment. Just like Downing, the advocates of each successive domestic building style made their appeals based on a moral principle, that the housing that was being built-especially in terms of floor plans and the relation of the interior to the exterior-could no longer sustain a way of life that was specifically American, and that a new form of housing was a moral necessity. Why these moral design movements seem to arrive about every other generation and whether the New Urbanism will be equally influential are separate questions. But that the New Urbanism is as authentically American as the other moral design movements preceding it there is little doubt. No Professional Courtesy The New Urbanism is largely an architectural reaction to the planning profession's abandonment of interest in urban and built form. As post-war American urban planning turned toward policy, it turned away from a decades-long interest in civic design and no longer involved itself in questions of the physical form of places. …