Tag: new-urbanism | ArchDaily

Farewell to Masters: Remembering the Architects We Lost in 2025

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 07:30:00 +0000

Every year brings new ideas, projects, and shifts in architectural culture, but it also marks the loss of voices that have shaped the discipline across decades. Architecture moves forward, but it also advances through absence. When figures who helped articulate its language and its ambitions disappear, they leave behind more than completed works or influential texts. Their absence becomes a threshold, a moment in which the discipline pauses to understand what remains, what evolves, and what continues to guide us. These moments of loss remind us that architecture is a long, collective construction, carried not only by those shaping the present but also by those whose visions continue to orient how we think about cities and landscapes.

The Corporate City: Three Models of Company Town Design

Ankitha Gattupalli — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 07:31:00 +0000

For over a century and a half, corporations have periodically taken on the role of city builders. Neighborhoods or even entire settlements that exist at the intersection of commerce and civic life, "company towns" are recurring urban types. The corporate city has long reshaped itself to match the spirit of each era, whether through the pastoral idealism of industrial England or the cinematic optimism of mid-century America. In its latest guise, the mixed-income campus district, architecture becomes a language of belonging, branding, and quiet persuasion.

The Cayala Paradox: How Are Private Districts Shaping Public Space Design in Guatemala?

Moises Carrasco — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Ciudad Cayalá, a privately developed, mixed-use community on the outskirts of Guatemala City, is often described as a "theme park" of white lime-washed walls, red tiles, and cobbled plazas. A closer examination, however, reveals a more complex urban narrative. Its significance, however, lies in its capacity to create a safe and well-managed public space, proposing a modern reinterpretation of historic urban principles that mark the region's architectural and urban heritage. Behind the Antigua-style façades lies an urban experiment: a modern re-engagement with architectural elements like arcades, courtyards, and open plazas, which propose a privately-managed public space as a solution to urban challenges in the region.

Léon Krier, Influential Voice in New Urbanism, Passes Away at 79

Reyyan Dogan — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 06:30:00 +0000

Léon Krier, the Luxembourg-born architect and urban theorist renowned for his critical stance against modernist planning and his influential role in the New Urbanism movement, passed away on June 17, 2025, at the age of 79. Known for his uncompromising critique of modernist planning and his vision for human-scaled, walkable communities, Krier leaves behind a substantial body of built work, theoretical writing, and educational influence.

How the Much-Maligned Porch Supports Walkable, Sustainable Communities

Steve Mouzon — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 03:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

The Ideal City According to Five Urban Concepts

Somos Cidade — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 02:30:00 +0000

Cities, like people, are dynamic and constantly evolving to keep pace with and adapt to the social, economic, and environmental changes of their time. Similarly, the vision of how the ideal city should be planned has been influenced by each era’s realities and prevailing thoughts.

What’s the Point of Lower-Density Urbanism?

Steve Mouzon — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 03:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

The 15-Minute City, Deconstructed

Steve Mouzon — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 03:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

The Second Studio Podcast: Interview with Andrés Duany

The Second Studio Podcast — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 03:30:00 +0000

The Second Studio (formerly The Midnight Charette) is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by Architects David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features different creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions.

The Fight Against Urban Sprawl and the Principles of New Urbanism

Kaley Overstreet — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 05:30:00 +0000

How we plan our cities, suburbs, and rural communities is a constantly evolving set of goals essential for creating sustainable cities. Not only do we need to consider what lies within these areas, but we also need to effectively design the boundaries between each, where urban meets suburban, and where suburban meets the small town. In recent years, urbanists have paid close attention to urban sprawl, or what sometimes happens when towns rapidly grow outwardly from city centers. What happens when cities seem to “sprawl” out of control, and are the design principals behind New Urbanism able to turn urban sprawl into equitable communities?

EPCOT: Walt Disney's New Urbanist City

Ankitha Gattupalli — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 07:30:00 +0000

Beneath the Spaceship Earth geodesic sphere and the display of world cultures that symbolize Disney World’s EPCOT lies the buried vision for a utopian city. The original EPCOT - a community built around innovation - was one of Walt Disney’s last visionary projects. Bothered by haphazard urban sprawl, Disney had bold ideas for an urban fabric that would drive progress in the USA. The “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow” was Walt Disney’s antidote to the decay of American cities.

Exploring New Urbanism Principles in the 21st Century

Kaley Overstreet — Fri, 18 Jun 2021 07:30:00 +0000

The discussion around how we plan the cities we want to live in is a never-ending conversation. As our world experiences shifts that impact urban designs in both predictable and unpredictable ways, some principals have held true- that cities that rely less on private transportation, create walkable neighborhoods, boast a multitude of public parks and spaces, and are designed at a more human scale tend to be favored and well-recieved by the people who inhabit them. Enter the concept of New Urbanism. Backed by these ideologies with a modern spin on is how they might apply to our 21st-century lifestyles, New Urbanism a planning strategy that has been both praised and critiqued since its implementation.

The Challenges and Opportunities of Urban Regeneration in Gentrified Areas of China

Scarlett Miao — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 02:30:00 +0000

Since the 1990s, copious amounts of cities in China have been undergoing urban renewal. Prompted by this state-facilitated urban redevelopment, skyscrapers are being built rapidly in major cities to attract affluent middle-classes, resulting in countless relocation and displacement of the working-class population. Such process is known as “gentrification”.

Architect and Urbanist Jaquelin Taylor Robertson Passes Away at 87

Eric Baldwin — Tue, 12 May 2020 05:00:00 +0000

Architect and urban designer Jaquelin “Jaque" Taylor Robertson, FAIA, has passed away at the age of 87. Known for his large-scale planning projects and private residences, his projects included the iconic town of Celebration, Florida. Often linked to New Urbanism and New Classical Architecture, Jaque also designed many award-winning houses in the Hamptons on the East End of Long Island.

Spotlight: Léon Krier

Patrick Lynch — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 03:30:00 +0000

One of the most boldly dissenting voices of our time, architectural and urban theorist Léon Krier (born 7 April 1946) has throughout his career rejected the commonly accepted practices of Modernist Urbanism, and helped to shape the ideals of the New Urbanism movement. Through his publications and city designs, Krier has changed the discourse of what makes a city successful and returned importance to the concept of community.

Architecture Doesn’t Need Rebuilding, It Needs More Thoughtful Critics

Matthew Johnson — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 04:00:00 +0000

In the last few weeks, a number of reactionary architectural commentators have come out of the woodwork to denounce what they see as the currently negative direction of contemporary architecture. They claim that architecture needs to be “rebuilt” or that it is “imploding.” From their indications, architecture is on life-support, taking its last breath. The critique they offer is that contemporary architecture has become (or always was?) insensitive to users, to site conditions, to history—hardly a novel view. Every few years, this kind of frontal assault on the value of contemporary architecture is launched, but the criticisms this time seem especially shallow and misplaced. Surveying the contemporary global architecture scene, I actually feel that we’re in a surprisingly healthy place, if you look beyond the obvious showpieces. We’ve escaped from the overt dogmas of the past, we’ve renewed our focus on issues of the environment and social agency, we’re more concerned than ever with tectonics and how to build with quality. But the perennial critics of contemporary architecture appear not to have examined that deeply, nor that thoughtfully either. And unfortunately the various rebuttals to their critiques, ostensibly in support of modern and experimental architecture, have been ham-handed and poorly argued.

A Different Kind of Architectural Drawing: Léon Krier's Sketches

Ella Comberg — Sun, 24 Jun 2018 08:00:00 +0000

When Louis Sullivan rang in the era of the skyscraper at the turn of the 20th century, the vertically soaring building—with its views and elevators—was unthinkably cutting edge. By the fifties, the dense downtown had experienced its moment in the sun and endless suburban sprawl began to surround the city. As early as the eighties, both the suburbs and the skyscraper felt oppressive in their own ways.

Spotlight: Andrés Duany

Rory Stott — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 06:00:00 +0000

Andrés Duany (born September 7, 1949) is a founding partner of Miami firms Arquitectonica and Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, and a co-founder of the Congress for New Urbanism. As an advocate of New Urbanism, since the 1980s Duany has been instrumental creating a renewed focus on walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods, in reaction against the sprawling, car-centric modernist urbanism of the previous decades.