Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Downtown
I am perfectly happy to use the term postmodernism to describe architecture. But I am baffled by its use to describe planning.
Most urbanists distinguish planning from urban design from architecture. Obviously, there are gray areas between planning and urban design, and between urban design and planning. But it's pretty easy to distinguish planning from architecture.
Planning has embraced, over the last 20 years, a movement generally called neotraditional town planning or new urbanism. Tenets of this movement apply to a building's placement on its site and to its relationship with the street, elements of urban design. Though some developers of new urbanist communities have ideas about what will be saleable, the new urbanist movement is entirely agnostic with regard to architecture. I have never heard the term postmodernism applied to planning, and I do not understand how it honestly could be.
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Yeah, but they're really only relevant to suburban areas and smaller towns and cities. Established cities generally have enough of their own urbanism already inherent in the physicality of their built environment, as well as open spaces, circulation (freeways/roads/pedestrian ways/transit), and the culture of the city, its neighborhoods, and so on.
Neotraditionalism and stuff are generally promoted by groups like the
Congress of the New Urbanism (CNU) who are trying to save suburbia from itself. They're planners, not architects; they did a lot of work in post-Katrina New Orleans and the region. Their roots really came out of Seaside, Florida, courtesy of
Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.
The big thing about this kind of community master-planning is that they established an architectural codebook - based on traditional "features" - that you could not deviate from, and completely described how a building would be built, what materials you could use, what colors, and mandated things like a front porch, large windows, and small picket fences.
"New Urbanism" is kind of just a bullshit marketing term. People have been living in cities
for over 11,000 years; its just that people in the USA don't realize this. Thus... the need for a marketable buzzword. And planners
L-O-V-E buzzwords!
Their goals are, however, laudable: pedestrian-oriented cities, parks and open spaces, low-medium density, safe for families, and a mix of uses. Seaside, in fact, has a "town center" with several very modern buildings in it. Many of these had neoclassical wooden facades plastered on them when they filmed the Truman Show.
I encourage all of you interested in this subject to read about
Seaside, Florida.
There is also a
wiki and some diverse set of
papers out there on it.
Excellent
Harvard debate between Rem Koolhas and Dunay (founder of CNU)
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I like your posts. 
if you said that THIS work of art was terrible.
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