that house was designed to be marketed at ~300k dollars. 750k was the project budget. other teams had millions. though i think he had a good point about regarding invented complication, but it applies just as much to classical style as it does to curvy plastic style.

definitely an engaging speaker. i was especially tantalized by his critique of architectural education. shorter projects make more sense to me. learn by repetition. 6 days is silly though. one per month maybe...and if the project is too big to finish in a month, it should be assigned in teams like it would be in the real world.

duany lecture = old-style tent revival. you can get caught up in it.

?

duany is best of NU crowd, but i do think they all fall slightly under the category of people looking for a problem to fit their solution (a favorite quote from bruegmann's routine).

i have read duany's arguments against archi-education and wonder what his problem is frankly...

in the real world aaandrew even a fast project, say an interior renovation for a shop will take several months minimum, even with a team. a building takes years, usually. so am not sure what is to be gained by doing 1 project a month...except that the students will become very good at generating superficial solutions very quickly...not an improvement in my book...

that would be several months to produce contract documents for permitting though... and would include downtime waiting for the client's word on a scheme, etc.

if you remove the client and the need to please a code enforcement official, how long would it really take?

basically my point is that studio projects usually end before the real work starts in a practice, which to me indicates that students are given too long to accomplish what is demanded.

i would rather do a project, get feedback, and bring that into a new project. this, rather than getting feedback on the same project 6 times and just pushing different ideas into the same site over and over again.

or maybe students should be required to make permit-ready drawings. that's probably the best solution.

duany is a fraud - he argues about 750k houses when he specs faux beaux artes trim to his buildings and is rather expensive speaker (at the UIA conference he spoke for $U1500 an hour.

$1500 is not an expensive speaker...doesn't mean I'm a fan though

LOL

what is "faux beaux artes trim" ?

i don't know, but it sounds dirty

aandrew dude, you cannot design a building of any size in a month.

i used to design schools. usually with a team of 3 fulltime architects - just the prelim design took several months with all of us working full steam. design development was minimum 6 months to a year. construction 2 to 4 years. and that is for a school, which is not particularly complicated.

a series of vignette projects will not prepare you for that reality very well.

plans for permits are not that detailed, btw. they usually involve confirmation of building location, floor area, materials, shadow maps, sections, but no details or anything requiring detailed development.

Hey Laru,

I also caught the lecture Tues. night. IT WAS SOOO LONG!!!! I thought parts of the lecture were pretty interesting. Then, other parts, I could not disagree with more. He was also very full of himself (called himself "Master Architect, Urban Planner, Civil Engineer, etc.).

I thought the discussion about how Rural Studio should not be praised for the fact that they Force lower-class people to live in "Experimental Modern Architecture" was one highlight. I thought it was an interesting point of view.

Towards the end of the lecture, though, it got a little scary and "cult-ish" feeling. After the "love fest" of all the urban planners and landscape Architects in the crowd praising him, they started creating new-urbanism "clubs" and competitions and trying to get everyone to join.

I couldn't get out of there fast enough!!

jump,

you make some good points and i don't really want to antagonize, but i think you missed my point.

surely your firm didn't spend 2880 man/woman hours just drawing diagrams, plans, and sections for that project. there must have been significant time devoted to client interaction and business overhead. these things do not exist in school.

also, when you finish a design project in school, it doesn't subsequently get built. the design does not need to be perfect, it is merely a tool for exposing problems in your process.

so here's an example: you are given a 4 month project. you are reviewed 4 times, and each time you go back and make major changes to the design. essentially, 4 projects on the same site. the end result i supposed to be perfect, but never is.

or, you are given 4 one month projects. after each review, you take what you learned and try to apply it to a new situation (requires more critical thinking). the end result of each project will not be as good, but over the course of those 4 months you will learn a great deal more (at least I would), especially in terms of representational skill and time management.

the second approach is definitely superior for the beginning of an education--the first approach might be more appropriate for more experienced students... final year maybe.

bluesman7,

true. questions should be submitted beforehand and drawn from a hat. the q&a was like 1.5 hours.

wow, attacking rural studio!?

They make free houses for god's sake!

his idea was that rural studio was too much like the way european public housing authorities force the poor into whatever architecture they deem fit--the poor are not given a choice as to what type of architecture they are given and are often given something sub-par, but free.

do the beneficiaries of rural studio get any input in the design process? if so, duany is straight up wrong. if not, he has a weak point.

he said that the US mortgage system creates a culture of consumerism for architecture that europe doesn't have. most americans can afford to "own" a home, and thus pick their architecture.

what he didn't acknowledge was that most americans can't actually afford the mortgage they have, and most of them still live in crappy houses and would have taken better architecture if it were offered for the same price. plus the huge debt that our society has incurred creating this system is probably going to be the single biggest factor leading to the eventual destruction of our economy. is that really better than what europe has?

that is a curious reaction to the rural studio, considering the problems NU has with social equity themselves. for example at biloxi NU has been credited with more or less pricing te original impoverished coastal residents out of their original homes and replacing them with rich ones. NU is for the elite, not the poor. it is very nearly an apriori truth by now. i haven't followed the story since that article was released, and it is maybe not true anymore, but it raises some series critiques about new urbanism as an approach. duany may best move out of his glass house before he throws stones. there may be some truth to the comment, but it misses a powerful point. apart from the rural studio no one is doing anything at all, and if not for RS there would be nothing to criticise...maybe duany prefers nothing to something...

aandrew. i understand you. in my experience an office is not as you describe, especially for people who are designing. the client meetings usually became more of an issue during DD, because we always did invited competitions for govt projects. really the process was just like studio. limits are set, budgets, requirements, etc, then we would spend a few months designing...my boss talked to the govt but had little to do with design. that was/is his job. so meetings did not affect the design schedule very much, except that new information was added. pretty much just as you describe re feedback from your profs really...

your idea of a few small projects and a few large is more or less how my school managed things. not too many small projects though, cuz there is benefits in learning about a typology in more detail than a month long job would allow. studios were also tied to tech and theory courses so projects were undertaken with prolonged intensity. i quite liked that but can understand how it might not be best for all...

Social Engineers Unite!!!!

Some short comments from NUer who generally leans towards the traditional side of things...

Duany, Mouzon, and many other of the figureheads of the CNU are huge douchebags, and an increasing number of members are coming to that conclusion. As much as I agree with some of his views, I see his ability as an organizer and accomplishment of popularizing NU having been overshadowed by his outlandish statements and general jackassery, i.e. the submersible house idea and Rural Studio comments. In situations like these the criticism of of NU as being regressive is completely valid. In light of the biloxi situation his (and others) supposed support of critical regionalism is hilarious. It does not dawn on many that the vernacular forms that they put forth as examples, are products of changing demands and conditions. A post & beam New England Saltbox via Asher Benjamin, Bullfinch, Adam, and Palladio? BLASPHEMY! Somehow I think classicism could survive having to sit on stilts, if one actually gives a shit about design beyond regs requiring fypon encrusted facades in contrived Grant administration era instatowns.

As much as NU seems like jonestown lite there is quite a deal of dissent and friction within the CNU, like Calthorpe threatening to leave when some fundie texas developer proposed amending the CNU charter with some bullshit about making a max height of 8 floors (or some number like that) for buildings outside of a CBD.

Despite my cynicism, I see NU having a net positive force in the scheme of things and would like work towards change instead of tossing it out.

bluesman -

sounds like i got out just in time...

i thought his take on the rural studio was at least well reasoned (though wrong). it would be very interesting to have seen he and sambo have a genuine discussion over the ideas he was implying. duany's criticism is aimed at projects like the carpet tile house - sure it seems pretty cool to a kind of jaded, media saturated artsy crowd, but it has very limited ability to be replicated and has a higher than normal potential for failure over time.

and this is where i thought his critique (in general) was aimed at: if you don't address the various problems we all face (bad codes and planning practices, craft, poor mass housing, etc.) at their roots and for more a mainstream audience, then we're all wasting the vast amount of collective intelligence we possess. on a certain level, it's hard to argue he's wrong - most of our best designers do see themselves as artists first and they are the ones constantly praised. and their proposals are almost always the most 'one-off' solutions possible. duany simply wants some of that talent to really get into the trenches and try to affect an audience larger than the magazines.

also, duany probably isn't aware, but the work the rural studio has been doing since sambo's death actually is engaging 'mainstream' building practices as a foundational principle and is generally moving in the direction he was alluding to.

his critique of the poor/rich/middle class is actually very similar to koolhaas' - they diverge on how to remedy the situations and have a very different mental attitude towards the middle class, but are more similar than people might think.

digital urbanity - i would concur that the principles of new urbanism tend to become weighted down by everything from the name, to the personalities, to the kind of shmaltzy, badly done buildings inside them, to the clients who seem to see it more as marketing than genuine principle. the reality is, no other architect or planner has put up as coherent or replicable set of PLANNING (not architectural) principles in the last 60+ years. you could easily adapt many kinds of architectures to those core principles and create much more coherent and better planned cities than anything in the last 60 years has produced. the problem, and i agree with duany, is that most architects simply are too close minded and can't get beyond the surface qualities of what different strains of architecture are about and simply won't engage other, fellow professionals in any kind of productive dialogue.