Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk

Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk are American architects whose early success was rare in a profession in which critical acclaim often was not achieved until late in a career. Their rise to prominence began with their revolutionary scheme for Seaside (begun 1980, completed 1983), a resort on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Duany, though born in New York City, was raised in Cuba and Spain, the son of refugees who fled the Cuban revolution in 1960. Plater-Zyberk was the daughter of émigrés who escaped communist Poland in the late 1940s. They both earned undergraduate degrees in architecture and urban planning from Princeton University and graduate degrees in architecture from the Yale School of Architecture. They moved to southern Florida in 1975, married, and in 1980 established Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. (DPZ), an architecture and planning firm, in Miami.

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That year, a Florida developer hired them to design a resort called Seaside on 30 hectares (75 acres) of Gulf Coast scrubland. Instead of replicating the fortresslike condominium towers commonly found along the Florida coast, Duany and Plater-Zyberk turned to 19th-century town planning for their design cues, including the compact, picturesque streets of such cities as New Orleans and Charleston, South Carolina. One of their most radical prescriptions called for reserving the town’s choicest real estate, the beachfront overlook, as the centrepiece of the community and site of its public square and marketplace. Clustered along gridded streets radiating from the town centre were low-rise houses designed with traditional roof lines and featuring picket fences. Housing densities were increased, which enabled residents to live within easy walking distance of stores, the post office, and the beach. To promote spontaneous neighbourly interactions, the detailed building code mandated front porches in close proximity to the sidewalk and pedestrian paths.

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Seaside caused an immediate sensation, and Duany and Plater-Zyberk’s design philosophy, known as New Urbanism, became as prominent in the popular press as in professional design journals. Whereas critics derided New Urbanist principles as an exercise in irrelevant nostalgia, supporters hailed them as an antidote to the anonymous, automobile-dependent suburban sprawl overtaking the United States. Herbert Muschamp, an architecture critic for The New York Times, called the movement the “most important phenomenon to emerge in American architecture in the post-Cold War era.”

Following the development of Seaside, DPZ designed more than 300 new towns and community revitalization projects and drafted numerous development proposals for existing communities around the world. Projects ranged from plans for the town of Bamberton, an 880-hectare (2,170-acre) site on the coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, that was intended as a model of ecological sustainability, to a 30-hectare (75-acre) mobile-home park near Phoenix. Moreover, DPZ’s concepts inspired scores of neotraditionalist projects by others. In 1995 Plater-Zyberk became dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture, a position she held until 2013. Duany and Plater-Zyberk received the Vincent J. Scully prize of the National Building Museum in 2001. The award was established in 1999 to recognize exemplary practice, scholarship, or criticism in architecture, historic preservation, and urban design. They co-authored the books Suburban Nation: The Rise and Fall of the American Dream (2000), The New Civic Art: Elements of Town Planning (2003), and Smart Growth (2007).