Renowned Architect and Urban Planner Andres Duany will lecture at the SOA on March 5, 2012

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On Monday, March 5, 2012, the School of Architecture’s Center for Urban & Community Design (CUCD) will present a lecture by Andres Duany, renowned architect and urban planner, on the subject of Classicism. The title of the lecture is Heterodoxia Architectonica which explores the future of Classicism.

Here is an excerpt from Mr. Duany’s remarks on Classicism on the occasion of he and UM SOA Dean Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk receiving the Driehaus Prize in 2008:
“Will this generation bore deeper into refinement and elitism, or will it endeavor to spread classical architecture outwards to a broad, democratic, indeed populist, future? Will they continue reprinting ever more esoteric treatises, or will they write new ones conceived to serve, not the 16th or even the 20th century, but the future which is upon us? To explain what I mean, please permit me a rudimentary example. How can there be a viable canon of architecture that is incapable of producing an opening wider than it is high… I would propose a new ethos – one no longer dedicated to the polishing of the classical canon of Vitruvius, Palladio and Vignola, but to supplementing that canon. Because this process cannot be allowed to devolve into neo-postmodernist dissipation, it should still be based on the authority of masters and masterpieces. First, we must transcend the closed historic treatises, to rescue that which was discarded in the reductive process of writing them. Then we must recover to our side those transitional 19th- and 20th century architects who have been assigned to the modernist camp — where they reside as the foundation of their authority — when they are, in fact, the last great flowering of classicism. An expanded canon would include newly drawn plates alongside Vignola’s: the Orders of masters such as Gilly, Soane, Thompson, Garnier, Perret, Hoffman, Loos, Asplund, Piacentini, Terragni, Stern, Graves, Porphyrios and Rob Krier. This treatise would claim an enormous amount of new territory for classicism. We are almost there. We have only to climb one last Everest.”

Andres Duany received his undergraduate degree in architecture and urban planning from Princeton University and a Master’s of architecture from the Yale School of Architecture. Duany was co-founder of the Miami firm Arquitectonica, and in 1980, Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk founded Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ). Duany is a co-founder and emeritus board member of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) since 1993. In 2001, he and Plater-Zyberk were awarded the Vincent Scully Prize by the National Building Museum and in 2008 the Richard H. Driehaus Prize. Mr. Duany has co-authored several books including: Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream; The New Civic Art; and Garden Cities: Theory & Practice of Agrarian Urbanism.

The lecture on Monday, March 5, will be from 9:30 a.m. to 12 noon in the University of Miami School of Architecture Jorge M. Perez Architecture Center, 1215 Dickinson Drive, Coral Gables Campus. The event is free and open to the public. Seating is limited.