Art of the New Urbanism

Rob Studeville: So, welcome to On the Park Bench, a public square conversation brought to you by the Congress for the New Urbanism. On the Park Bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and allied fields related to the built environment. And today we have an author's forum on "The Art of the New Urbanism" with Charles Bull, James Doherty, and Victor Dover. The interviewer moderator is Mallory Bocchus. So, share your thoughts on hashtag #ontheparkbench, www.tinyurl.com/otpbfeedback. And register for CNU 33, which will be in Providence, Rhode Island, June 11th through 14th, about a month from now. This is the 33rd annual Congress for the New Urbanism. It's a place to be, the place to be, to find out about all things urbanism, urban design, urban planning, and redevelopment in cities and towns. The agenda has eight tracks: climate, development, housing, policy, regulation, public engagement, regional context, transportation, and urban design. And Providence is a fantastic city. If you haven't been there, you really need to go. If you've been there, you need to go again. They're doing some amazing things in terms of bringing that city back, revitalizing and improving quality of life. So, go to cnu.org/cnu33. And I'm looking forward to the conversation today about a fantastic new book, "The Art of the New Urbanism." Dr. Charles "Chuck" Bull is co-author of "The Art of New Urbanism," and he's a tenured professor and the Tony Goldman Director of the Master in Real Estate Development and Urbanism program at the University of Miami School of Architecture. He wrote a bestselling book for ULI, "Placemaking: Developing Town Centers, Main Streets, and Urban Villages," which grew out of his dissertation on New Urbanist town centers. He received his doctorate in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And James Doherty is a co-author of "The Art of the New Urbanism," and he is principal and director of design at Dover Kohl & Partners Town Planning. James has dedicated his career to helping communities envision and implement a more walkable, sustainable future. He has participated in urban design and form-based codes projects throughout the United States and abroad for three decades. And he specializes in the creation of many of the company's three-dimensional illustrations using a blend of hand-drawn and computer techniques. And Victor Dover, who wrote the foreword to "The Art of the New Urbanism," he's also with us today. He's founding principal and principal in charge of Dover Kohl and Partners. He is nationally recognized as an innovator in city planning and design, having led more than 200 charrettes. And Mallory Bocchus, AICP, LEED AP, CNU-A, is the president of the Congress for the New Urbanism. Celebrated for her previous practice as an urban designer, Mallory brings 25 years of international work in urban planning and community development to her role, and she will moderate this session. I'm Rob Studeville, editor of CNU's Public Square. And the book is "The Art of the New Urbanism, Volume 1: 1980 to 2010." And this is a long overdue new view of the new urbanism through a lens that is not often discussed. It's not just through the ideas and the impact of the new urbanism, but through its art. And trust me when I say that most people who are interested in new urbanism or urbanism will want a copy. First, there's going to be a presentation from the authors, followed by a brief discussion between Chuck, James, Victor, and Mallory, and then Q&A from the audience. So please use the Q&A function of Zoom to ask your questions as they occur to you. And I'm going to pass this along to the authors for a presentation. How does that look on your end? Here we go. Chuck Bull: All right. Thanks, Rob. Welcome, everyone. We're really excited to share this. And this is actually a great lead into CNU 33, where we hope we're going to see you, a lot of people in person, actually maybe sit with you on a park bench there and talk about this. But today we're going to preview the book for you very briefly, and we'll have some discussion. And right now we're going to show you, give you kind of a sneak preview and tell you a little bit about it. I've got a freeze on mine. Hang on. Sorry, let me try that one more time. How's that? Does that look okay? All right. We've got the title slide. There we go. So yeah, this is something we've been working on for quite a while now and really excited to share with all of you. It's the new book, "The Art of the New Urbanism." And it's been a long time in the coming, but we've got it put together and we think it's really exciting and can't wait to share it with all of you. The book, it flows from the large juried exhibition of New Urbanist artworks that was assembled way back at CNU 20 in West Palm Beach. So, you know, this will sound familiar, probably today, that at the time I was chairing the program committee for CNU 20, and we felt we really wanted to revive or just celebrate what was different about the new urbanism. And we had so many great sessions going on about policy issues and environment and transit-oriented development. We really wanted to shine a light on the importance of the designers themselves and the art that was used to communicate the ideas of the new urbanism. So that was the genesis of the exhibition and then always intended to produce the book, which has taken us a little while to come back to. But you'll see this is kind of a classic era for the new urbanism. During that call for submissions for the exhibit, that we cast a really wide net. And the idea was to gather the full range of the kinds of visualizations that New Urbanists use in our work, and from a really wide range of practitioners. So the exhibition contains work spanning that first 30 full years of the new urbanism movement. Out of the over 700 works that came in, the jury helped us select 260 of those works produced by over 100 different artists. And all of those are here in this book. And it took us a couple of tries to find the right publisher. This is, I think, the third or fourth that we went to over the years. But Wiley has really done a great job and committed to great full-color publication and were able to show this work in a really nice large format. I think the format that they allowed us to use with the color really lets the images breathe and they really shine. And each image is also accompanied by a caption, which was written by the artists themselves. So you get the opportunity to hear directly from the creators of the images. It's really an opportunity to see works by both very well-known New Urban designers and illustrators, and a whole variety of probably lesser known people. And people know the firms, but often don't know all the names of the people who were involved in creating these illustrations. And the book, as James will tell you, gets into the methodology of the design, not just showing you the images, but it's part of what the artists tell you in their captions, what was the purpose of the work and what was the... It's really this list of artists is a testament to the amazing amount of talent in the movement at that time and continued. An important note, all the royalties from the book are going to the CNU nonprofit organization. James Doherty: Yeah, we felt, I mean, it's really, this was a labor of love and you've got a hundred different artists and all their firms represented. So it's really about that collection of work. And so we felt it was the right thing to do that any profit that comes out of this goes back to the CNU to help continue to support that work. Chuck Bull: So let's go ahead and open the book up and we'll give you a look through the inside at the contents. The book begins with the discussion of the transformative effects of the new urbanism and the importance of the use of visuals for communication within the work we do. And also a little story about that original exhibition. Victor wrote a great foreword for the book. It describes the New Urbanist use of before and after images to help communities visualize change before it occurs. Dips into kind of the history of where that work originated from and how New Urbanists refined it. Victor Dover: That's right. Chuck Bull: And then next, Chuck's essay describes the historic context of New Urbanist illustration and puts it in that context. And shows it as part of the pivot away from the post-war auto-oriented kind of modernist planning principles toward walkability. So this is actually a photo of my desk as I was working on this with a lot of the books on it. Originally, this essay was just going to be about the moment when in the late 80s and early 90s, a few seminal New Urbanist books came out from individual firms and ultimately a few years into it, the New Urbanism book that Peter Katz puts together. This was like a revelation to those of us who had already been to architectural planning school. And when we opened these books and saw the images, we were just kind of blown away and immediately thought, "Wow, I didn't learn any of this in my formal education." And it really opened a door for people from all different fields to realize, "Here's the potential for what great communities could be," and really drove us, a lot of us, to change our career direction and to become involved. The impact of those images were important. Then I had to step back. For anyone who teaches, you realize everything old really is new again to your students because as you age, your students stay the same age because they're coming in every year. And so I wanted to step back and put the work in a more of a historic context of what came before it. Why was it revelatory compared to what came before? And so that's what that opening essay is about. The heart of the book is the gallery of images themselves. We begin with a section about the seminal foundation works by the movement's founders. Within the book, the works that are organized by illustrator and the layout of the book, as I was mentioning before, gives the images really room to breathe on the page so they can be appreciated as works of art. The book begins with works by Charles Barrett and Manuel Fernandez Naval. You'll recognize some of these works right away. And for those of us working on illustrations, we really look up to this kind of dynamic pair of folks and they really kind of paved the way for a lot of the illustrations that came later. And then we've got other founders at the beginning of the book as well from CNU, like Mulan Pauli Zoides with these beautiful dreamlike images from Zhao Zhan Hei. And then after the early seminal work, we've got the major section, the largest section of the book, features work as what we call "the movement reaches maturity." So as the movement matures, there's this explosion of work by many different firms, many different artists, and a whole lot more practitioners involved. So this is a really rich, diverse section of the book. And then fundamental New Urbanist town planning design principles are shown within the book, within the pages, applied to a staggeringly broad range of different kinds of projects. So here's just a small sampling of some of the pages so you can see kind of the full layout of some of this work. This is a cottage court with gardens and compact public spaces by Cindy Cox. And we're just going to walk through some of the pages so you can see just a small sampling of the images in the book. These are live-work units and townhouses for Fernandina Beach, drawn by Clay Rokiki and Colleen O'Keefe from Historical Concepts. Here's a project called Livermore Village. It's courtyard housing drawn by Dan Perolik, Christopher Jansen, and Stefan Pellegrini of Optikos Design. And you can see we've got a really wide range of types of drawings here, from elevations to perspectives, aerials, ground-level views, architectural drawings, ones that are zoomed out at the urban scale. This is a plan for growth along the US 1 corridor and Cutler Bay, Florida, drawn by the great Chris Ritter. This is a really stunning pen and ink drawing by Abel Rodriguez. There's a number of these by Abel and by others, including Dear Tadani, in this part of the book. This one's documenting the cityscape in Havana. And then this beautiful image is an amazing watercolor by Art Zendarski. It's an image of the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and it was drawn and painted as part of a project that was focusing on proposed improvements to pedestrian pathways and the landscaping within this area. And so it's meant to show the character of the place after those improvements are in place. It's just a stunning drawing. And as mentioned, I forgot Deere was in the sequence. So this is a page with two incredible pen and ink drawings by Dear Tadani documenting historic places in France and Rome. A watercolor image, a beautiful image of a new hotel and a mixed-use village center in Portugal, drawn and painted by David Carriko. And these are classic Lucian Steel drawings, townscape drawings that also appear in the book. A really particularly evocative image. This is a mixed-use complex in West Palm Beach, drawn by Juan Carrancho. And it's looking the style of the historic architect Addison Meisner. One thing to mention about the images in the book, as we were going through the process, working with the jury and making selections and so forth, one of the big kind of criteria that we had early on was, "Does the work that's being illustrated in the image represent new urbanism?" And so in addition to these being great examples, I think, of artworks and the use of techniques and so forth for illustrating projects, that these hopefully will serve as great examples, as we're going through these, you'll see, of new urbanism as well. And so hopefully a great kind of resource that people can use in different ways. Here's another pen and ink drawing, this one by Eric Ost, that's showing UDA's design for a new public space in Seaside. Here are a variety of works by Russ Preston. And the hill town elevation on the right hand side, the drawing, I think it's just really particularly stunning as well graphically. You can imagine we've worked with these images for so long. I mean, going all the way back to the exhibition, this is always... All of these have really stuck with us. But this one in particular, this one by David Sant with UDA, drawn and watercolored a new village in the Canadian Rockies. This is one of those images. I'm really glad that working with a publisher, working with Wiley, we were able to get the images in color and really large on the pages to really let you appreciate this. James Doherty: Yeah, I agree with you. This is such a beautiful image. And these are beautiful watercolors by Dee Dee Christopher, and from projects in Montgomery on the left and then El Paso, Texas on the right. Chuck Bull: And the book also features a number of master plan drawings. This is another one that has always stuck with all of us. It's a beautiful example from Jacob Lindsey. James Doherty: Yeah, both beautiful design and beautiful rendering. Beautiful cartography. Chuck Bull: And within the book, we've got a lot of examples of contrasting media also. So on this single spread, we've got a great watercolor on the left by Michael McCann, and then on the right-hand side, a digital rendering by Dbox of new buildings at Yale. Here is a serene night view of harborfront infill in Nantucket. This is by JJ Zanetta. Such a beautiful image. And this one, interestingly, this image was actually originally a day view produced in watercolor, and then it was converted to that night view in Photoshop by JJ. There's an image of Tordy Gallus's design for a more pedestrian-friendly Route 1 corridor in Crystal City, Virginia, watercolored by Vladislav Yelisayev. Another stunning image. And here's another great set of drawings by Lou Oliver, architectural designs drawn in his really distinctive pen and ink style. James Doherty: Yeah, another example just within urbanism, so many of the practitioners having fantastic scalable, both in terms of the design of the three-dimensional thing that's being envisioned and also the two-dimensional representation of that design. Chuck Bull: And we have within the book examples of digital imaging too. And these are by Steve Price. These are before and afters of Lancaster Boulevard showing transformation of an auto-oriented thoroughfare there. Existing conditions previously on the upper left, and then this one's been implemented. And so it now looks like that vision that Steve had in the bottom right of a much more pedestrian-friendly place with markets and so forth. Here's another beautiful piece. This is by Joe Skiba of UDA, the Lake District of Saxony Village. Beautiful pencil drawings by Marisi. And ink drawings by Steve Muzon. And then we had a lot of entries from a lot of different people related to the transect. The transect was really spreading as an idea and being applied to all types of numerous work at the time. So we made it its own section in the book, and it has a whole variety of contributions from people here. You'll get a glimpse of those on the next slide. James Doherty: Yeah, the transect is really kind of an innovative drawing type that the Urbanists evolved, DPZ and Andres and so forth, beginning it. This compression of the rural to urban spectrum within a single drawing is fascinating. And so within the book, we've got a variety of those from the original transect drawing by DPZ, to Krier's European transect and others. And we also have a page dedicated to Sandy Sorling's transect collection photography. Chuck Bull: And of course, we've got the DPZ's original transect image by Eusebio, and that helped us establish the convention of this drawing type for others to adapt and use for different purposes. And that drawing drew inspiration from the European transect drawn by Leon Krier originally that you see here on the far left. And they were followed by many other transect drawings like these examples by Eusebio and James Wassau and Tom Lowe. And I'm sorry. Go ahead, James. And… James Doherty: Oh, and this is an example by Andrew Giorgiatis, his transect drawings for Richmond, Virginia. And here's Eusebio's drawing of the natural transect by DPZ. And then to the right, that's Optikos Design's transect drawing for Flagstaff, Arizona. Chuck Bull: Next is an interview with James describing techniques and methods employed by an Urbanist designer or illustrator working in the trenches. James Doherty: Within this essay, I tried to present some of the information that we've been presenting within the art room. This idea of kind of lifting the hood of the car and letting people see the engine of how the images are produced a bit. So within the essay, I've got a discussion, for example, of important steps to craft an image, working collaboratively with the team, often in public. So in this sequence, for example, showing going from a rough charrette sketch through the steps needed to get to the final rendering. Chuck Bull: James also describes how the illustrations function as design tools, helping to test ideas. James Doherty: That's right. Yeah, the finished illustrations are really useful within these projects to help communicate the vision of the project and the design, and to help people organize and get the resource to get together needed to implement a project. So they help to help to help marshal everyone together. And so here for Glenwood Park, for example, in Atlanta, Georgia, here you can see some of the original design sketches. And you can see us here using those sketches as a design tool. So this is one of the first versions. And we worked iteratively through these. So you can see us testing out different ideas for the architecture and for the details of the public spaces, the way that people would inhabit those public spaces as well. Small details like signage on the buildings, whether it's flat to the wall or if we're going to have delayed signs and so forth, you know, so many different small and large details can get worked out through this process and tested with both the design team and with the public, with everyone involved, the stakeholder group. And so here's more testing of the ideas. And then we were collaborating back and forth with the client also. They were giving us input on these and we were adjusting things as we went through, based on their input and then showing revision and seeing if this is what they meant until we had it just the way we wanted. Victor Dover: James, can I make that vivid? This client saw the first draft and said, "What's that BMW doing in the foreground? And how come there are the stemware on the table and a white tablecloth? Change that. I want to see a Volkswagen and a beer mug," and totally change the vibe of the drawing. That was a great moment in illustration. James Doherty: That's right. Absolutely. Chuck Bull: Within the book, after the main gallery section, we've included a short section with photos to help transport the readers back to the original "Art of the New Urbanism" exhibition at CNU 20. And then along with the exhibition, this is when the CNU Art Room was born at CNU 20. And James has continued that throughout the years at each Congress. The Art Room is an opportunity for people to hear and learn design and visualization techniques directly from experienced practitioners. James Doherty: That's right. Within the book, we've got all of those programs year by year. And the idea, you can see here, this is the program from Savannah, Georgia. We've got the session titles, the folks who are originally involved in presenting in the session. And then, I think importantly, the description for each of the sessions. And the hope is that by having this kind of menu of the various sessions that were used as training sessions for New Urbanists through the Art Room, it can hopefully serve as a resource to folks who are interested in doing training sessions in the future. I think there are a lot of great ideas that could be done again in different ways. So we really feel this book certainly captures this great 30-year period of New Urbanist design work. We think it's a great resource for people looking to design and build walkable, sustainable communities to learn from. And I think it also, I mean, it's meant to capture this body of work for, you know, if not the decades, for the ages. Just as we went back and we were able to look at Raymond Unwin's book and the original civic art book and those books, we think this book will have a longevity, we hope and expect it will, going into the future. James Doherty: Yeah, huge thank you to all of the artists from all of us and to all of the firms who contributed their work to the book as well. We hope you like how your work is presented here. We'd really like to hear what everyone thinks. Thank you for listening to our presentation and we'll get into the Q&A. James, you've got one more thing to add here. Chuck Bull: Oh, that's right. James Doherty: Using this QR code and the discount code, you can order copies of the book for your own firm's use. And… Chuck Bull: And I'd like to… And if you're, uh, we hope you're coming to Providence. On that Thursday, we're going to have a dedicated session. We're devoting it to the artists. So we'll do a short introduction, then we're going to have probably about a dozen of the artists. This book briefly described the work, how they were, what the intention was, the visual communication that was involved. And then we'll have an open discussion. That will be followed by a reception and we're calling it a book signing. We think this will make for a perfect kind of yearbook book signing. You can go around your favorite artists and have them sign out of the hundred that are in this book. We hope you can join us for that. James Doherty: That's right. It's CNU 33. We're going to have a great Art Room program as well. So yeah, please come to CNU 33. It's going to be fantastic. Thank you. Mallory Bocchus: Thank you, gentlemen. And thank you for doing my job for me of encouraging everybody to come to CNU 33. I want to remind everybody, all of the attendees, to use the Q&A function down at the bottom of the screen to offer some questions that you might have for James and Victor and Chuck. I have a few teed up as well. And I want to start by making it a point to thank the three of you for the extraordinary amount of dedication to CNU that this represents and to the movement at large. But it's important for folks to know that this is a volunteer effort that y'all have put into bringing this artwork together and compiling it in a single volume. That's, you know, the yeoman's work of really caring about this movement and the future of the movement. So CNU is incredibly grateful, and particularly the proceeds going back to the organization, I think represents really the best of what the New Urbanist movement brings to the world. And I am grateful to y'all. I also wanted to sort of kick us off by thinking a little bit about how important this compilation of art is and that it is the first of what is, you know, many generations to come of artwork that represents the new urbanism. And I think the first question I'd like to ask y'all is, were there certain, you know, was there learning that you all did in compiling this work together, trying to organize it, trying to think about what that first era of New Urbanism's visual representation meant to you all as professionals? And if the audience might learn something from that. Chuck Bull: I think we definitely had a sense of that. It was a task to kind of sort out and decide, first of all, how to present it in the exhibition and then later in the book. And in the book, I'm glad we didn't choose to try to organize it according to the charter. That would have been a challenge. But even remember at the time, it was the only era, right? Because we collected work right up until the CNU 20. But we were very aware that the earliest work was the foundational work, right? And also the contemporary focus on the transect was something unique. Victor Dover: Now, at Victor and James's idea, it's been called Volume 1. So the call is going to go out immediately for Volume 2, which will start from the time this collection ends into the current era, so for the next 15 years. Yeah, it was that's... Spoiler alert, we will have a formal call for submissions for a second exhibition and Volume 2 CNU. So those of you who are on this call get a sneak preview of that fact and listen for that. I suspect we're going to get deluged, Chuck, you know, because in the prior era, where things were handmade for the most part and fewer number, and our numbers were fewer in the movement, there was still too much to choose from. And there were some really hard choices made. One of my hopes for that second volume is that we'll also have a little extra about the time period covered in Volume 1, where we can include a few more images that weren't done there. But to get it down to a 300-page book and the 260 image exhibition originally meant not including everything we wish we could have. That will be even harder in the second call for submissions. James Doherty: This process of gathering the images together, you know, I had the opportunity going back and looking at them to get inspired all over again. You know, it was interesting. A lot of the images, for example, I had years ago, I had an opportunity one time, just once on a charrette, to sit across the table from Charles Barrett. And I was working on renderings and looking across and watching him work on his. And I remember it just being transformative for me, just to just the experience of getting to do that and be there kind of in his presence while he was working on his drawings. And it sticks with me to this day, you know, as an inspiration. And so to get to go back and collect and look through those drawings again, I could feel that all over again, that inspiration from so many of these artists. One of the things that's really interesting, I think, about the work within this time period as well is that it's pre-digital revolution. And it's one of the fantastic things about it, I think. There's this real kind of human touch to the work. And I find that really inspiring as well. Mallory Bocchus: That sort of leads me, and I felt the same way, James, although I was not compiling. I was just getting the benefit of looking at them all brought together. But, you know, this era reflects for me sort of how I learned about New Urbanism and coming out, I came out of architecture school in 1999. And folks who know, know that I should be able to have a better hand than I do. I relied on illustrators that are in this book. I see some of my classmates in this book, certainly some of my colleagues that I was working alongside and maybe drafting up some sketch that then was becoming a visual through this work. And I kind of wanted to pick apart that topic. Victor touches on it and you do too, James, of the role of drawing in learning and sort of understanding. And, you know, both I think that, you know, I represent sitting next to an illustrator and having them try to draw what I'm describing and learning whether it's realistic or not. But I wonder from the illustrator standpoint, you know, a little bit more about how just in the process of drawing, you're learning about this place that you're trying to visualize and ultimately create. Victor Dover: Well, I'll start. And James, you should talk about the eye, hand, brain connection. James Doherty: Yeah, absolutely. Oh, go ahead. Victor Dover: But what I would say is that, and I make this point in the foreword, that human beings carry around a ton of pictures in our heads. The neuroscientists are always telling us the vast majority of us are categorized as visual learners. There are other learning modes, but... And so that means we're short, we're sort of shortening the distance in communication or improving the signal-to-noise ratio in communication when we add more visuals. Because when I say, you know, "Let's preserve the historic small town hometown feeling that our town has," that's the way many comprehensive plans began. You get a mental picture of what that means. And I get one or I get 10, and Chuck gets one, and James gets another. So making visuals actually helps us double check, "Is this what you meant?" And I think that's why we try to say illustration starts at the beginning of the process. And just like design is not something you add on at the end after all the big decisions are made. That means the illustrator is the designer. So one characteristic of a lot of the images, the vast majority of images in this book, is that the people who created the image were doing so before the design was fully worked out. They were given a little bit of information maybe by their seatmate or someone at the charrette who was saying, "I think the main street goes like this," or "the square is like that." But then they were filling in all sorts of blanks as the illustrators. So the designers in many cases are the illustrators, and the illustrators are the designers. James Doherty: It's an interesting process. Working that way, you know, being both working on the illustrations and the design simultaneously, you know, there's essentially there's kind of two compositions when you're sitting at a table working that way, two compositions that you're always simultaneously working on. You know, there's always the two-dimensional rendering, the actual picture plane of what you're drawing. And then there's the three-dimensional design of the urban place that is contained within there. And you can, as a designer illustrator, you've got the ability to affect both of those. It's not just doing the two-dimensional illustration of a three-dimensional thing that's already worked out, but you've got the ability to kind of adjust both of them. And so there's this really interesting kind of back and forth where if something is not working well within the two-dimensional drawing, it's oftentimes a sign that something is not working well in the three-dimensional design. If you've got a focal point that doesn't sit well in the rendering, for example, it oftentimes means it's not sitting well in the three-dimensional design and needs to be adjusted. And so there's this great kind of feedback that happens being able to touch both of those at the same time. Mallory Bocchus: There's a couple of questions in here that sort of are a foil for a question I had for y'all. So I'm going to tease up my question, but I'm going to point out the audience questions that are sort of the opposite side. One of the things I think as you flip through the book that I really noticed is what a compelling vision, you know, any one of these is that you want to, you find yourself wanting to drop into this illustration and be able to explore it, you know, and walk the streets and step into the buildings. And I, you know, obviously that's part of what makes for a great illustration is that it speaks to some part of your soul and what you want to experience yourself. The flip side of that, and our task as New Urbanists, is to understand the context of where these visions are occurring. And there's a couple of questions about their idealized visions. They aren't showing the garbage that collects on the street, or they might not be showing the nearby neighborhood that doesn't have the same resources. It might be excluded from participation in the sort of vision that this particular point of the illustration is representing. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that dance that you do in any sort of design process of trying to adequately represent what a positivist vision for this place might be, while also recognizing that this place is real and it has obstacles, it has challenges. There's been disinvestment or there's been ignorance that has to be stitched into the design as well. James Doherty: Working within the charrette process, for example, you know, it's great to hear that it seems like they're idealized looking at the images. You know, working within charrettes, and we design in public all of the time when we're working. So it's really kind of a crucible in terms of the ideas where we've got all of the different stakeholders. You know, oftentimes I'm working with, and our team is working in a room with the public looking right over our shoulders, literally while we're drawing and giving us live feedback. And so it's interesting. There are so many different kinds of things that need to be kind of checked and cross-checked and so forth as the designs are evolving. We've got people from public works and the fire marshal, and we've got elected officials coming through, and we've got the citizens' representatives coming through and individuals. And so we're getting feedback from everybody. And so it's interesting. It's really a really interesting process, taking all of that, this kind of, this kind of, you know, they talk about, you know, a drawing is a, it's a noun, but it's also a verb. Drawing as a verb and designing as a verb. And that's really what it feels like on the charrettes. It's this process of taking all of that input and finding a way to get harmony through all of that. And so, yeah, I'm happy to hear if the images are coming across that way at the end. But I've been in the making process enough to see kind of all of the things that have to get resolved to get there. And yeah, there's kind of a lot of looser reality on all of these things as they were being crafted. Mallory Bocchus: There's a question here about balancing different rendering mediums and sort of how did you go about doing that for the book? How might you do that for a future volume as we've talked about? But I also wonder, you know, thinking about different mediums representing different stories you're trying to tell. And, you know, I wonder about as you've gone through these images, how a particular style might have served a particular purpose in one location or with one project versus another. I wonder if you all noticed some themes coming out of this collection. Chuck Bull: I think, you know, from the original collection standpoint, it happened naturally because it was these were the mediums and methods used at the time. And so much of it was hand drawn. The interesting part is going to be what comes next for this Volume 2. But we had no shortage of diverse material to choose from. Then it was a question of how to organize it. And you'll see in the book that organization is more by artist and less by medium. It's a little different than the exhibition was to start with. James Doherty: As we collected the works together and we were working on the order, the sequence through the book, it was interesting that there were some interesting resonances that occurred, kind of looking at the sequences of images in different ways. So images that are close together, for example, sometimes are speaking to one another in the book. Like there's an example, Victor's pointed out before. There's a great, we showed it just a little while ago, great pen and ink drawing by Diradani of Piazza Navona in Rome. And within the book, I think we showed it, but in the book it actually sits on an adjacent page. There was a fantastic oblong space from Valde Europe within the book as well and Ariel. And the two of those, the shape and size of the space is quite similar to one another. And you can really feel, really, the effect of the kind of historically of the Piazza Navona affecting the later design, and you can feel that resonance between the content of the two images by having him sit close to it together in the book. Chuck Bull: Also, the juxtaposition of things like transect drawings that were illustrating the idea next to the Perolik drawing that's showing it applied to a code. Victor Dover: Yeah, I have something on this one. Well, first of all, we began to really realize that it wasn't just a rare once in a while the designers or the illustrators would produce an extra image that was more about the idea than it was the realistic depiction of the objects that make the ensemble of objects that is the village or the neighborhood or the TOD. They would do the drawing that was that kind of documentary drawing. Chuck Bull: Yeah. Victor Dover: Just like in architecture school, you do plan and section elevation. They would do that perspective that can be used to illustrate or to tell people what the project was. Then they would also, like Russ P's beautiful poster art image of the hill town, for example, make propaganda images or poster art or just standalone works of art in their own right that were inspired by real projects or real places. And some of those are, it jumps out, some of them are documentation of meaningful presence like Dira's drawing of the Piazza Navona, but there are others. And I found myself just reassured that other people were doing that stuff, you know, that we're also drawing their project to scale at the same scale as a great place they know already exists to compare. Yeah. That was really encouraging. There's another realization made through editing a book, was that there's no similar collection. If you knew about an image or you knew about a drawing because you had seen it in somebody's web presentation or it came across your social media feed, and you could remember the name of it or remember the name of the person who posted it or who drew it or the firm that was leading the work or the city or whatever, you might be able to search and search and find it somewhere on a website, probably at low res if you find it at all. This is especially true with some of the older things that were done sort of pre-web. And so now we put a lot of those, not all of them we wish we could add, but a lot of those in one place. And I picture taking the book or the ebook on charrette and running over to somebody's desk and saying, "Hey, James, can you do a perspective like this one?" You know, this kind of angle, this kind of light, this kind of color or this kind of place, using it to get people started by showing them an example of that you've seen before. Now, you know, you can find it all in one place. There's that kind of was slowly revealed to me as was Lee Dover undertook the graphic design that she was trying to rearrange and figure out what would fit on the page of each other. It suddenly dawned on me that suddenly we can't find this anywhere else. There's also a short video trailer, less than a couple of minutes long, that kind of introduces what the book is. And so if you're interested in telling other people about this or whatever, that's all over social media and on YouTube and whatever, you can get that and then get that, send them the link to that. And I think they get to hear a little more from Chuck and James about what the book and exhibition meant. And then I see a lot of the images all in one place right there in that two-minute blitz. Mallory Bocchus: There's a question in here that I got a chuckle because I've experienced this on charrette myself, the example of someone coming up, seeing the drawing happening and picking out where they want their house in that particular, where they want their home or their business in that particular illustration. And the funny thing of that is, and this ties a little to that compelling vision idea that I think a lot of folks might immediately think of these illustrations as marketing tools or a way to represent what a lot of more technical documents describe about a particular design. But Victor, you've touched on this a little bit. There are a lot of audiences for any one of these illustrations, including the audience of trying to find your own precedent to understand what you're trying to do by looking back on what others have done. But I wonder if you all could talk a little bit about the, you know, thinking about the evolution of new urbanism and the different audiences that needed to come along on that journey with us and how the illustrations might have helped do so. Chuck Bull: Well, this was part of the genesis of the original idea. What was so different about new urbanism was it provided a visual means of communication. And for all different audiences, right? But the only audiences that the prior generation of illustrators was talking to were the power brokers in the architectural media. Really, when you go back and look at the works, they were either intended to like overwhelm the public and impress them with their skill, but it was never with the, as Skelly talked about, the architecture of community as part of the conversation. And so as planners, we know this, that all of our planning documents were legalese. There was never an illustration to be found. And then in the communication of ideas about projects, they were just, "Check this out. This is what we're doing. Get out of the way." So, I mean, new urbanism really, you know, Victor used the word propaganda sometimes and marketing. Well, that was intentional. There was an intention to communicate with the public the ideas in that, "Look, this is, this can be better. This is a vision of what your neighborhood or a new neighborhood and community could possibly be," because most people don't carry all that around in their head or they can't articulate it in words. The visual kind of captured everything, right? It's like, "Ah, now I get it." James Doherty: Within the charrettes, you know, it's interesting how many times that people come in from the public, for example, and if the particular design challenge has only been discussed verbally before, that people are envisioning completely different things. Oftentimes with the same words, they'll have a completely different mental picture in their mind of what the proposal might be. And so oftentimes communicating just verbally about these kind of physical changes can lead to a lot of arguments and to a lot of friction. And so it's interesting watching the process of graphically drawing the ideas, taking the words that people are saying in the room and trying to graphically draw them. And on a charrette, we'll typically try and draw at the beginning, especially everything that, you know, every idea someone has, whether we considered it a kind of in the back of our mind a good idea or a bad idea. We try and draw everything so that people can see it for themselves on the wall and compare the ideas. And it's really interesting to see the kind of the logic of a strong kind of a diagram or a strong solution to a problem if it's drawn graphically resonates with people. And it's interesting that it can oftentimes be a really great bridge in terms of building consensus within a community, having the ideas physically drawn out. Victor Dover: Yeah. I think the timing of CNU 20 was also important, origin story for this. Because at that stage in the evolution of the movement and the CNU organization, we finally expanded far beyond the original group of founders and early adopters who are mostly designers and, uh, mostly architects. And we had captured all sorts of microphones for policy and the like, and for form-based codes. But there was a feeling 20 years in that design had started to get shoved out of the center of the spotlight at the Congresses. That we were having panels about important subjects like the economics, if you imagine we were in the throes of the depths really of the Great Recession right then, or about transportation policy or about equity. But design was getting kind of design left alone, like not making it to the screen very much or getting talked about a lot in the room. So the eruption of the exhibition, this was during my time as chair of CNU, and the eruption of the CNU Art Room was a deliberate correction to that. Say, "We're not going to give away or give up any of what we've accomplished in getting into these other spaces with policy and planners, but we want to bring design-minded planning back into the center of the spotlight so that design isn't something extra." And I think that that's been a reason why the CNU Art Room kind of caught on. There are a lot of people who come stay in the Art Room the whole Congress. Because, you know, in a CNU tradition, we're showing other people how we learn to do things or if you make a discovery or you find a book, you show it to people. That's always been the CNU way. So moving design back to the center, that was a reason. Chuck Bull: Okay. Yeah, yeah. Mallory Bocchus: Well, and I think that kind of brings up an interesting point about the moment we're in today. And there's a couple of questions in the Q&A there about some of these, the ongoing, what might be seen as policy challenges. On some level, there may be existential challenges and are embedded in CNU, the organization's current strategic plan: the designing for a changing climate and addressing the unaffordability of urbanism across the country and around the world and reforming the vast network of regulations that completely inhibit what we're trying to accomplish. And those challenges, I suppose, can seem sort of irrespective of art, right? And yet I think there's such a valuable lesson to be learned from the earliest era of New Urbanism that when facing a challenge, that visualizing the alternative to that challenge is fundamental to how you bring people along on that as a part of that movement. And I wonder if y'all have some thoughts about the visualization of the challenge of climate change and the response to climate change, the visualization of the housing crisis, but also the response to that, and the role that the art of New Urbanism going forward might be able to play in that. James Doherty: Yeah, I think with some of these existential kinds of challenges, the ability to visualize, I think, you know, there's a lot of anxiety that occurs within individuals and within communities as a result of a lot of these kinds of themes, you know, climate change and many of these kind of overarching, looming crises that affect us all. And this ability, I think, to try and envision a place that is not just tolerable to live in in the future, but a place that feels like a compelling future that we want to move toward, despite simultaneously solving or dealing with the challenge, depending on the challenge. I think that's an important thing, you know, this idea of giving people a feeling of assurance or confidence, stepping forward and being proactive about trying to move in a direction together to help address being a community in the future in light of these challenges. I think this idea of creating a compelling vision, this idea of a place that we want to be, I think that's really, really going to be valuable dealing with all of these challenges of the future. Chuck Bull: I think it's something that New Urbanism and New Urbanists have always been good at is stepping up to whatever the latest challenge and issue was. So, I mean, going back deep into this era of Hope 6, the Hope 6 era, it's like, "Okay, affordable housing and figuring out how to come up with a better model for public housing." But I mean, even up through climate change, I think we've had some really interesting work produced as well as through the pandemic, different housing types and arrangements of housing types produced. I think New Urbanists are really good at this. So I expect us to continue. Victor Dover: I have two quotes that rattle around in my head. One is really famous. It's from Daniel Burnham, who wrote the... I'm in Chicago. It's on my shelf here behind me. We all know the Plan of Chicago in 1909, like high point in the history of American city planning, even while the world was going nuts in a lot of ways. And there were huge problems to solve, especially in cities with their toxic conditions at the time. And there was a kind of optimism built into those images of the plan for Chicago. The quote from Burnham, which has at times been disputed, lately confirmed, was, "Make no small plans or make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood." But there's another piece to the quote that is almost never repeated. And that's where he said, "A logical diagram once recorded will never die." And so these images are in a way the logical diagrams. The other quote that rattles down in my head is from Dan Carey, late Dan Carey, who used to be the head of the Treasure Coast Regional Planning Council. And during his time became the hippest planning agency in the nation. That's a quote from Peter Katz. Dan said that no community worthy of the name should ever deliberately set out to plan for less than what it considers ideal. Let's let that sink in for a second. The idealized nature of these drawings, that is in a way very much the point that we should be trying to put down and put in front of each other the full aspiration of the people of the place. And that is what they're for. Dan's quote stays with me. Yeah, of course we draw something that is probably even a little better or a little even more magical than it might turn out in real life. But that is what we should do. We should be trying to, using the word James just used, build confidence. That's because Americans, you know, they're kind of conditioned to be suspicious of growth and change. Look around. There's all this evidence built around them that confirms their suspicion that growth and change made things worse rather than better. And we're never going to get the ideal communities we want or get enough new urbanism implemented unless we can reverse that trend and build confidence that change and growth can make things better rather than worse. Mallory Bocchus: Well, that, looking as we're coming up on the hour, that sort of brings me to a closing question that I had for y'all. Thinking about the arc of what this compilation represents and the arc of what a future compilation or future compilations might represent. You know, these earliest images would have been captured with a photographic slide and then shown with a slide projector projected onto a wall to try and compel people, if not just the image itself pinned on a wall. And, you know, at some point we evolved to JPEGs and projection, and we're now in the era of AI. And what I think about that, less the mechanisms and more about the access that the public has to these ideas. And how what an opportunity that is for us to better spread our message. And so I, you know, wondered if you all might want to reflect on a bit of a futurist thinking about what these sorts of tools could become for the average citizen. There's a lot of questions in here about, you know, when do you bring the average member of the public into these choices and into these ideas and how do you do so? These visualizations are incredible tools to help do that and to really help change the narrative of this country away from sprawl. I'm wondering if you all could reflect on that and what you might hope, having pulled this compilation together, what you might hope for what that future might include. Chuck Bull: Well, there's the engagement aspect of it, which you're talking about. We've talked about what this next volume might consist of. And we've also taken up the discussion already of the impact of AI on the design side. But James has an interesting perspective that we've had a lot of new tools introduced over the last 10, 15 years. And it's not all been bad. They've been put to good use. So James, maybe you can comment on that. James Doherty: You know, in terms of the work being produced itself, um, you know, there's been this huge revolution. The Volume 2 is going to be very interesting, I think, because there's been a big digital revolution that's occurred since the end of the period in Volume 1 here. So lots of interesting kind of, kind of interesting kind of new things that people are trying out in terms of technology and so forth, producing the images. And as you're saying, I think fantastic opportunities for increasing outreach to the public in many ways. Lots of these digital tools during the course of a charrette, for example, they get a much wider funnel of information coming in from a wider range of people than would have typically been able to just come in person originally back a few decades back. So I think that's all really, really exciting. In terms of producing the work, you know, as someone who sits down at the desk and is producing images, I think there's a lot of exciting possibilities for technology, and I, and I, we incorporate it a lot into the work that we do. I think that it's an important thing to think of it as a kind of a force multiplier. And it's a little bit like an automobile. An automobile, you can go further and faster than a person could have on foot. But if someone only rides around in an automobile, it can lead to the person being really out of shape and not getting enough exercise. And so their human capability, not enough kind of good stress, the human capability itself can kind of go down and be reduced. With these technologies for design and illustration, I think thinking of it as a way to create a boost on top of someone's kind of human ability, I think is a really great kind of a positive use for it. Really focusing. And that's one of the things we're doing with the Art Room training, you know, this idea of really continuing to try and focus on developing people as humans in terms of their internal capability, their kind of biological capability. And then on top of that, use the technology as a multiplier on top, but continue being really strong and capable as humans. Mallory Bocchus: Well, I think that was a wonderful final answer to the questions that we had today. Victor, Chuck, James, I want to thank you again so much for the work that went into this book, for joining us today on this On the Park Bench, for helping to shepherd this special session we're going to be having at CNU 33, and for the many years of ensuring that the Art Room is a foundational part of the Congress. And with that, I'm going to turn it back over to Rob so he can close us out for the day. Rob Studeville: Well, thank you very much, Mallory. Thank you, everybody. James, Victor, Charles. This is a fantastic book. I know that everybody's going to want to get a copy. I just ordered one. I'll probably get another one at the Congress. So this is such a big moment for CNU to get such a beautiful book coming out. And I look forward to seeing everybody in Providence. And… Chuck Bull: I really look forward to seeing everybody. Thank you guys so much. Thanks for putting this together. James Doherty: Yeah, we really enjoyed this. Looking forward to seeing everybody.