Author's Forum: The Art of theNew Urbanism, Volume 2

Вот отформатированный транскрипт вебинара: Rob Studeville: So, we're going to get started here. 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. Today, we have an author's forum on "The Art of the New Urbanism Volume 2" with Charles Bull, James Dougherty, and Victor Dover. The interviewer and moderator is myself, Robert Studeville. Just a couple of notes: please join us for CNU 34, which is going to be held in Northwest Arkansas in just a couple of weeks, May 12th through 16th. Northwest Arkansas is an epicenter of innovative regional planning ideas and local planning ideas. Multiple downtowns are being rebuilt and linked together. Important planning efforts are seeking more rational growth in that region. It's an exciting place you should see and learn from. It's going to be a great event. Go to cnu.org/CNU34. And consider getting CNUA accredited. Sign up for CNUA. The benefits include: provides a marketable credential to employers and clients, CNU-accredited professional certificate, and listing on cnu.org public member directory as CNU accredited. Go to cnu.org/getinvolved/getseeingyouaccredited. I'm really looking forward to our conversation today, and we've got a fantastic, soon-to-be-released book called "The Art of the New Urbanism Volume 2." The three co-authors are here. Dr. Charles "Chuck" Bull is 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 best-selling 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 in Chapel Hill. James Dougherty 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 coding projects throughout the United States and abroad for three decades. James specializes in the creation of many of the company's three-dimensional illustrations, using a blend of hand-drawn and computer techniques. Victor Dover is founding principal and principal in charge of Dover Kohl & Partners. He is nationally recognized as an innovator in city planning and design, having led more than 200 charrettes. I'm Rob Studeville, editor of CNU's Public Square. The book is "The Art of the New Urbanism Volume 2, 2010 to 2025." This book is the second volume of a two-volume set that highlights the art of the new urbanism in its renderings, its plans, and its polemical drawings. The first book was about the role that art played in launching new urbanism and carrying it through the early years of the movement. The second book is about the history, or the maturation, of the movement as told through its art. The first book was beautiful, and this one even more so. It's a bigger book than Volume 1. The collection of artwork is incredible, but I'm going to let these three tell the story. First, there's going to be a presentation, followed by a brief discussion between myself and the authors, and then it's going to open up to Q&A from the audience. So please use the Q&A function in Zoom to ask your questions as they occur to you. So, welcome to "On the Park Bench," James, Chuck, and Victor. I'm going to pass this along to the authors for a presentation. Victor Dover: Well, I'll go first. I got nominated by Chuck and James to do the overview. So, I'll give you a big picture overview of what's going on in the book. Fair warning: we're going to show a lot of pictures because it's a picture book, and that's the only way to do it. So, strap on your seatbelts, because we're gonna flip through a lot of things really, really quickly. The book itself has been an amazing experience to put together. It exists because of this long tradition in the new urbanism in which the illustrators are often the designers themselves and exercise an outsized degree of influence over the final outcomes. And they fill in the blanks in the story that is emerging on a plan in live, highly caffeinated charrettes at many times. And so, as a result, a huge body of work was accumulated over a long period of time. James and Chuck realized in the early 2000s that many of these images, which had been created for purposes of influencing someone, or maybe just showing people a picture of a better world that they'd get excited about and feel some urgency about going out and helping to create, were also, while means to an end, works of fine art in their own right, and they ought to be celebrated as such. And we ought to put them together where we could all see them. So, they organized this amazing exhibition in 2012 and gave a glimpse at the end of that world. And then last year, after a long delay, we managed to get into print a catalog of basically that exhibition and some framing and commentary. And so that was Volume 1, and that's how that came to be. And now we get to bring out and roll out today Volume 2. I wondered what would happen when we sent out a call for submissions for a second volume for this later period, 2010 to 2025. I'll just be honest, I thought we might have gotten a lot of diluted projects or things that were somehow a downgrade or step down, or oversimplifying of the great work that was seen in the period 1980 to 2010. That is not what we saw at all. We received in a two-week period over 1,200 works. There was an eight-person jury from all around the country that looked at images submitted from all around the world and helped us narrow it down. The jurors looked individually at every single picture and helped narrow it down. But just like in Volume 1, there's a list on the back of the book of all the many contributors and individuals and firms that produced the work that was submitted. And I think some of you are on the webinar, I see your names on the participants list, are on this list, so you're going to want to get your hands on it, and let us know what you think. The graphic design for the book was done by my daughter, Lee Dover, but she also organized all the pictures and cajoled all the artists to hurry up and get their permission forms signed, and a lot of back-of-house things, and made the videos that have helped celebrate the books. So, let's look at what's inside the book. Let me give you a little quick look at it. It starts off with the story of how it was created. And then there are a series of essays starting with David Schant's foreword, and we divide the book into major sections, which I'm going to describe each of them to you, and time permitting, I'll also describe a little bit about my essay. Up front, there's an essay by, or foreword, a very personal foreword by David Schant, who's the lead illustrator and designer at Urban Design Associates in Pittsburgh. Appropriately enough, the picture that illustrates the first page of his foreword is a picture of Seaside. But it's not the Seaside that you visited, it's a Seaside as imagined in a further stage of evolution. And David describes what it's like in his life to be in the life of the practitioner making these things. Then Chuck's essay follows, and you'll hear more about that from him in a moment. But what happened when we published Volume 1, and we knew that we were missing some important images that had been very influential, but for one reason or another didn't make it into the first exhibition. And so, as you might imagine, a lot of those images had been found in the years since and brought back up, brought back to our attention. So, we created a little section in the front of the book called "Rediscovered Early Images," and I think you'll enjoy seeing some of these, including works by the late, great Charles Barrett, including drawings by Tom Spain, who was very influential for many of us. And the second volume has another great bonus, which is it now includes images by the amazing Michael Morrissey, whose renderings of the book include finished renderings, like this aerial on which he and Charles collaborated for Rosemary Beach. Also includes sketch-level work done more rapidly to illustrate the concept of emergent and charrette, puts a beautiful rendered site plan. Thank you, Michael, for contributing work from the rediscovered early images phase. Now, new urbanists know that travel's not a luxury for us, it's a necessity, because observation is everything. The world is our textbook. So, we include, we got a great many beautiful submissions that were from New Urbanists' sketchbooks or the like, where they were doing their own observation and study of precedents, filling their own sketchbooks or their watercolor pads with images of places that inspire, and to which we might aspire to build something new that's just as good. And that includes remarkable drawings by R.T. Harshaker, the joyful Urbanist. And I think you'll, that's just a handful. There's a great many more. In fact, RT's images appear in several places throughout the book, and for good reason. The biggest section in the book is a catch-all piece we call "Evolving Techniques." What we discovered was that many of the new urbanists have picked right up where they were working before in the same medium to which they had become accustomed, and taking that to a new level. We expected to see more greenfield traditional neighborhood developments, just as in the first era. And there are some spectacular examples of that. And you can also see how the illustrators were evolving their way of making the images for those in examples like this, including images that don't just capture the built-up parts of an idea, but also the land stewardship, bigger picture ideas, like that one from James. But, thankfully, and not surprisingly, the new submissions also included a great many images of redevelopment, historic preservation, adaptive reuse, infill, and transit-oriented development, and even less car-centric or even car-free development like Opticos Design, illustrated here by J.J. Zanetta for Cul-de-Sac Tempe. There are images that highlight the importance and focus on street design in the new urbanism. Of course, the transect reappears in the second volume, and in some cool ways you'll see the transect illustrated in a manner that you perhaps have not seen it illustrated before, maybe for the first time in this book. And there are new transect images that depict parts of the world that didn't have such an image in the early phase of the use of the transect as a tool. For example, Don Powers did an image from Rhode Island showing his beloved home state in an urban-to-rural transect. So, thank you, Don, for submitting that one. But the transect makes an even more startling appearance, and it's described in Chuck's essay, when it comes from, get this, the Florida Department of Transportation, where, as drawing of the transect shows here, it was adapted to create the FDOT's official system called "Contexts Classification" for redoing all their manuals. Another surprise is the international reach of CNU and new urbanism as a movement. The images include some spectacular images from the Middle East. They included quite a few images from Latin America and other parts of the world, so you start to see that new urbanism is not really just a North American thing, but really something that's going on in other ways. You will see images, here's just one in the book, that don't look like any other picture we've ever published, like this amazing pile art mosaic by Gonzalo Cornelia da Silva. I'm going to zoom in on it, because it's such a huge image of the imagined future riverfront of Lisbon. They're fully appreciated. We had to both include it full size and then blow it up in a detail in the book. And then computers. We did expect to see a lot of digital images. What we didn't know was that we would see a lot of images which might have as their basis a computer model, or which started as digital models, but then were painted over tablet and stylus by people like J.J. Zanetta to use that accurate world the computer can help us view from any angle, and then create images that still had all the spirit and illustration of the hand-drawn images. So, lots of images that were begun in a computer, but finished in an iPad or similar tablet. In fact, one of the most popular, the most popular image among the jury was this one, which is a collaboration of J.J. and Vayevalle and partners. So, they kept coming back to this image. It was the hands-down favorite, not by a little bit, but in the scoring, by a lot. And I stared at it until I finally realized something pretty profound: there are no cars. In the first era of the new urbanism, there would have been cars, or it would have been at least apparent that you could drive down that street. But here's a public space that's car-free in 2025. You can show that, and people will expect it. I think we're benefiting from the accuracy and to-scale nature of the computer-generated artwork in this era. But the jury was struck by this one in particular, and one juror said, "This looks like John Lloyd Penirondo. It is in control of the computer instead of the other way around." I thought that was pretty powerful. And if you want to see how this image was made, there's a whole sequence of pictures in the book that describe how it started, how it progressed, how it was evolved, and how the final one was made. There are also computer-generated pictures that absolutely look like photographs, like this one from Tordy Gallus. You see the black and white there? Yeah, okay. And there are photographs. The fine art of photography makes its way into this edition, just like the first. There are images from places we visit as precedents, just like the travel sketches, and then there are photographs of fine, built, realized new urbanism plans like Harleton Landing or Kyala. So, I think you'll enjoy seeing some of the fine art photography, especially by Steve Muzon and Steve Wright, "the Steves." Also surprising, some images that really stand out, and I can't stop staring at them, because they reintroduce abstraction. They introduced posterization and graphic design techniques used in advertising art and in magic realism. So, not aspiring to photorealism, but instead aspiring to communicate an idea like this, these from Andrea Hernandez, which the jury was also quite taken with. And there are literally poster art examples and some art for art's sake in the second volume. There's propaganda art, probably a number one in recent gone-viral images, that this pair by Christopher Liberatos and Jenny Beivan, which basically indict the Texas donut as a building type and compare it to the same amount of development realized through incremental development in the original language of Charleston. I'll just back that up again so you can see the two that they compared. This went viral and is still in high circulation, but we felt like the book would be incomplete if it didn't have it in there. Before I describe my essay, I'll describe the final part of the book, which I think is a big finish. It's a collection of aerial images. We got a lot of aerials. And, you know, filmmakers call these kinds of views the "establishing shot" that tell the viewer where the scene on the ground is going to unfold. Many times, these are the cover images in a New Urbanist presentation or report. But they're interesting because they serve as a transition between the two-dimensional and somewhat abstract world of maps and plans, and the ground-level views, which are the world as seen in perspective. And so they help you see the system, not just the parts. And we're not just one close-up piece, but how the pieces go together. And there's a wide variety of aerials in this section on establishing shots, including some that bring your eye to just what the interventions are that are being proposed. There are images that are set at night or at twilight or dusk. There are zoom-outs that show the whole settlement, so you can see the variety of building types and places and the overall organization or party. There are images that show the difference between the edges and the core of a community that has a whole variety on the rural transect. There are images that describe the connection between our built-up world of buildings and streets and the natural world and working landscapes that lie just beyond them. And then some are just compelling because they really communicate compactness, and the benefit that compactness might have for a larger region. There's one two-page spread that has this big image: J.J. Zanetta, Leon Krier, and Daru Tidani collaborated on David Carico's images, which are quite evocative. Again, they're not striving for photorealism. They have a level of abstraction to them, but powerful communication tools. And fittingly enough, we end that section with yet another picture of Seaside. This one's J.J. Zone's take, which he did for a cover of a book by Giro Chidani, again, illustrating the Seaside that might be before long. I'll just finish with a quick fun thing. I got to do the fun essay. I asked about a dozen of the people whose work is in the book what was important to them, and whose work they look at and admire, and in particular, whose work from the era before the new urbanism they stare at and go back to when they need inspiration or to think about technique. Almost every person I interviewed mentioned the 1920s and 30s drawings by Hugh Ferris, which are pretty powerful on the plan. The images by Jules Guerin for the Plan for Chicago. Several mentioned American commercial artist Maxfield Parrish and his ilk. But there were other more surprising sources like travel posters and fruit crate labels and 1920s magazine ads and pop art. Here's Jerry Tadani and his take on pop art: "Just one more lane. We thought that would work." Tom Lowe, who did this beautiful drawing, takes a lot of inspiration, as I do also, from the drawings that were collected by John Reps. They're 19th century, late 19th century lithographs, like this one of Boston, which serve as inspiration for a lot of those establishing shots I described. So, there's a quick overview of the book. We'll put this back up again later, but there's a QR code to pre-order it. The reason I mention that is because all the royalties go to the CNU nonprofit. So, I don't want you to buy one. We want you to buy a truckload of them and pass them out to all of your friends. Victor Dover: With that, I'll stop sharing and ask Chuck to tell us about his essay. Chuck Bull: Okay, so everybody can see the new screen: "Before and After the Art of the New Urbanism." Rob Studeville: Yes. Chuck Bull: Yes, okay, great. So, yes. This was the essay I did for the first book, and so what I've been thinking a lot about with respect to both of these books is not only the current-day audience, but the future. The future for these books to be on a shelf and for all of this body of work to be rediscovered in this time period. The importance of why it emerged, how it emerged, and evolved over this really long time period now. And in reflecting on it, I thought about my own experience, and it probably mirrors the experience of a lot of people in this webinar, of having to really dig to find the earlier time period, the time period of the 20s, the time period of great civic art in the first quarter of the 20th century. And this was a lot of what the neo-New Urbanists were doing, the neo-traditional people and people of different corners of the country. Back in the 70s and 80s, it was really trying to find a new path. And it was arduous to rediscover a lot of this material. So, we have two volumes that we feel really good about now, that have gathered it from 1980 to 2010 in the first time period, and now from 2010 to today in the second. The first one turned out to be a much harder assignment, because I had to explain to people who I'm assuming knew nothing of what came before new urbanism, why this was significant at all, and how it changed from the earlier time period. And so that's what that essay was about. And those of you who may have seen that essay, you'll be happy to know the current essay is much more concise, and it was allowed to be, because it was an easier story to tell from 2010 forward. But I had to give a couple of examples. I used the Lower Manhattan Expressway and the art of architectural illustration and communicating ideas such as they were from this time period. And I used another example of Battery Park City, because they were these long projects, very prominent, that involved the top architects, planners, renderers of their day. And they really kind of convey, "This is what came before." And Battery Park City in particular was interesting because, as probably many of you know here, it was a big turning point toward the end of that long time period where Cooper and Associates came up with a new plan that revalued the grid and the traditional city, in this case, Manhattan, Lower Manhattan, and came up with a plan to reconnect it. And this was like a watershed moment in urban design. And then if you go back and you look through that great document that you can find online, there was still a missing piece, right? So this is just one of the many architectural illustrations that were included in that. And so at this time period, 1979, you can guess what was coming next was the new urbanism to kind of address the whole body of work from the plan all the way through, you know, to every layer of urbanism and architecture. And then this was the essay I was going to write. It was just going to be my own reaction to discovering new urbanism in these books, and then going back in time. So, you see town planning, Raymond Unwin's tome, the civic art book by Hegemann and Peets, and others. These are scattered on my desk. This is while I was writing that essay. But that civic art book, not that one, but a copy of it. I was doing my doctorate in Chapel Hill, and I had to scour the libraries, and I found an obscure library in the art library, not the main library, not my planning library—the planning department had its own library, which is great. But I had to find this book in an art library and dig it out to open it up and rediscover, you know, this amazing collection of work from that time period. That's how difficult it had become. Now, these books have been reissued, so they're a little more in circulation, but we have to realize that there could very well be a time in the not too distant future where the work we've collected here, and the new urbanism itself, maybe is not as well known. And so I'm thinking about not five years from now, or ten years from now, I'm thinking, like, 50 years from now. So, I picked up this book from the 20s in the late 1980s. So, 60 years later I could pick it up, and I could really learn about what came before, not just in words, but through the illustrations. And in this case, in these books that we've put together, in the words of the artists, what was the intention of the work? Which is, I think, critically important. And it was part of the original concept of this series, the two volumes, is that the art of the New Urbanism is the art of communicating timeless ideas of placemaking, of urbanism, as well as the fact that they are amazing artistic works. And so we hope, and we do feel, we've captured, through hundreds of artists, that body of work, not just for today, but for future generations. And, you know, kind of the footnote on that is, I teach graduate students. And my graduate students and my master's programs, most of them have now been born in the 21st century. And by the time Volume 1, but the exhibition was done in 20, we're working on it in 2011, they were only in middle school. So, they really don't have knowledge, personal knowledge, of anything from the Volume 1 time period and just some in the current time period that we're teaching them now. But this was the big emergence impact of these early books and why they were so important. Now, Volume 2. I had a more condensed timeframe: 2010 to 2025. And the story here is how the movement evolved, and I think Victor's overview gave you a really good look at that material. I can move pretty quickly through this. But to start out, the point is that new urbanists were always active in downtown redevelopment, regional planning, retrofitting sprawl, writing TD codes—all of that from the outset. But what we were best known for in the earliest days, in the earliest years, were the large-scale, people would say greenfield projects, right? But there was a purpose, there was a reason why the focus was there in that first era. And that's because there were tens of millions of houses. It was where the accident was being built. Over that time period, an explosion of suburbanization that was the major crisis of the day. And so I never shy away from saying, yes, that was a major focus. And you'll see in the essay, 83% of the nation's population growth from 1950 to 1970 resulted in 52.5 million new housing unit—new housing starts, all suburban in that time period. And then another 24 million were built between '79 and when the charter was signed in 1996. So, this is an enormous challenge. It still is a challenge that sometimes gets brushed aside that was being addressed. What would happen after this time period, and you can see, we have great photographs of that early work, was: How do we respond to change and challenges over the coming decades? And I refer to Donald Schön's book on the response of practitioner, and I think the new urbanists really represent that responsive practitioner, responding to each challenge that came along. So, we responded in the late 1990s, because that's when the time period was, the market came back for downtowns. You know, prior to that time period, downtowns were in a steady decline. There was not a lot of market force to support new development, new infill development, redevelopment. And that really shifted in the late 90s, and new urbanists were there, ready to act on that. Then there were two major black swan events: the great financial crisis in '08 and the recession that followed, and the COVID-19 pandemic. These would really shape this time period of 2010 through 2025. And then there's a whole series of other opportunities and things that New Urbanists focused on in response to the challenges ahead. So, urban redevelopment became a big focus, a more significant, prominent focus in this time period. Sprawl repair, suburban retrofit. This is, we could see very clearly in the South, because those land markets, and there was still a lot of population and employment growth happening, really made possible redevelopment of tons of projects, thousands of acres in urban areas that had only been touched once, that were at a very low density, whether they were residential or commercial, particularly commercial, that were waiting for the redevelopment opportunity. That took off. There was a series of more environmentally tuned responses in some ways, but also showing a path forward in embracing the environmental movement and initiatives through green building, through LEED ND, through agrarian urbanism and light imprint. All of these were things that New Urbanists were super active in. We have great examples throughout the book. Included, here's one by Ronnie Pelusio showing four variations at different scales of urban farming and gardening. So, not even a simplistic look at this, but a much, that this is kind of the strength of the new urbanists, right? Taking a much more in-depth and looking at different densities and arrangements and building types that can address the same challenge, the same effort to be relevant and to show a path forward. Form-based codes is one of the biggest areas of impact during this time period. Hundreds of codes were produced. There was a great survey that you can find on the CNU website that identified 740 codes that from between 1981 through 2019 that were produced. Form-Based Codes Institute did a great job of advancing that effort through that time period. You see the one here from Opticos. There's many, many others. Dover Kohl has many. Many of you on this call have been involved in that. Victor mentioned the impact of new urbanism on federal policy. So, federal transportation policy all the way down through state and local policies. This context-sensitive effort through thoroughfare standards. Also, the "Highway to Boulevards" movement. New urbanists have been very active in. Here's an example from J.J. Zanetta that Mil Paul Azoides was involved in, involving the 710 freeway in Pasadena. Lean urbanism. When the housing crash occurred in '07 to '09, and the Great Recession, it was a big reset. You know, suddenly the massive capital for the big projects was not so available at all. And long efforts to promote more smaller-scale incremental development really came to the fore. So, lean urbanism and incremental development, small-scale urbanism, all of these initiatives came forward at that time, and many of those involved missing middle housing and multi-generational housing. Here's the classic diagram from Opticos, who originated this concept at the bottom of the screen here. And some examples of live-work, you know, a really memorable piece by Michael Morrissey showing live-work units done in Atlanta. Then up at the top left, you've got the first version of a secure block. So, addressing security concerns, particularly in Latin America, but other places as well, by Charles Barrett and Eusebio. And then down in the middle, this is really interesting from Kenny Kraft. You've got housing concepts for Charleston, South Carolina. And this shows a whole variety of approaches that could involve different concentrations of uses, different combinations of either residential, hotel, multifamily, or townhouse concept for a compound. And there's a lot of experimentation and look at creating compounds through new urbanist approaches. And then finally, the last thing touched on in this section of some of the major sub-movements in this time period was tactical urbanism. And this was already active before the pandemic, but it really took off. I mean, in successive ways following the Great Recession and then the pandemic as to reclaiming public space and quicker, lighter, quicker, leaner approaches. Chuck Bull: We'll stop there and hand off to James. James Dougherty: Thanks so much, Chuck, and thanks, Victor. There we go. As a designer-illustrator myself, I focused on creating a section for the book that was dealing particularly with the composition of the images themselves. You know, as the new urbanism, we've resurrected the techniques of making walkable cities and towns, and over the past decades, we've worked really hard to rebuild a body of knowledge and skill that has almost been lost. And so the ability to formulate design ideas and to express them graphically with others is a part of this skillset. So, drawing and design are not just nouns, they're verbs. And so it's about empowering humans to shape their environment in a positive way. And so I hope that this book serves as an inspiration to the next generations to pick up a pencil or a brush for themselves and learn how to use it. So, yeah, I've focused on a section here that deals with the techniques of composing illustrations. I've intentionally really tried to avoid esoteric language and make it really accessible, and I've tried to lay out a clear series of actionable tools for folks. And so in this book, at the beginning of my section, you'll find this Renaissance-era diagram of perspective drawing technique, and I often use it to explain that as designer-illustrators, we're always dealing with two primary compositions at the same time. We're dealing with the composition of the two-dimensional picture, or the rendering, but we're also dealing with the composition of the three-dimensional urban design idea itself, and so we can manipulate both of those, and they both inform one another. More and more over time, I've also really begun to realize the significance of the person on the left side of this diagram also, the person who's doing the drawing, and this act of creative expression is one of the really good things that we are capable of as human beings, and it's part of what's best in us. So, I just want to make sure that we keep picking up our pencils and keep our skills sharp, because the world is a better place having designers and illustrators in it who are strongly skilled and capable of visualizing and expressing our ideas. The compositional ideas that I discuss in this essay work regardless of media, so they work whether you're working in manual media or digital media, for example, they're universal. So, I discuss things like, for example, clarifying the story that you're trying to tell, and also ways of seeing the images that are in your mind's eye. I talk a bit about during the process of designing and illustrating, trying to be accurate but loose at first, seeing the big picture ideas, and then adding sharper focus to the details as you go. I talk about ways of creating strong focal area for urban design images, and picking a good viewpoint. For example, that image on the bottom right of the person, the viewpoint is standing on the sidewalk, and so it's a place where a person would feel comfortable in that scene. Place the person in the middle of the street, for example, where psychologically you might feel that you could get hit by a car. So, the psychology behind the images and the feeling of the viewer is really important. I talk about things like placing the elements of your composition within the picture frame. So, designing foreground, middle ground, and background. And I talk a lot about also seeing the big effect of a composition. So, there oftentimes can be many details, but if you've got a strong *parti*, or a big kind of a design skeleton behind all of those details, the overall composition will be stronger. And I show how compositional ideas from Golden Age illustrators like Andrew Loomis, for example, can be applied to urban design illustrations. In his book, *Creative Illustration*, Loomis discusses a series of compositional *parti* archetypes. And so I demonstrate in my essay how these archetypes can be seen also in classic urban design images and postcards, like the ones that are in the online collection of car-free cities, which is a great resource, by the way, if you haven't been there, check out their website. Their image library is fantastic. So, for example, Loomis, in his books, talks about the power of a composition that may be built, for example, on strong vertical forms. That's got a certain feeling to it. So, that's this scene from Bayeux, France. And he contrasts that, for example, with the more serene feeling of a scene composed of horizontal lines. So, two towns in France—Laban here, two towns in France—but very different compositional feelings to the overall form language when seen in perspective. And in so many urban vistas that we design as new urbanists, we often use a *parti*-type where we're combining a V-shaped skyline with a strong vertical focal element. And that results in a W *parti*. So, this kind of W *parti* is that framed vista to a focal element down at the end of the street, one of the most powerful and common tools in the urban design toolkit. And in my essay, I show how these *parti* types can be combined to create your own compositions. So, for example, here, starting with an L-shaped *parti*, framing in the left side and the bottom of the image. And then combining that with the X *parti*, so that X tends to draw a person down toward the vanishing point, and so here it's drawing the viewer into the image and across that crosswalk and onto the sidewalk. Combining that with a C-shaped *parti*, so the overall sweep of this public space has got a big arc to it, the arc of the trees as well. And then here I've combined that with a strong vertical element, and so that's creating a focus in this example of the three-dimensional urban design, so that tower in the background anchors that space, but it is also the focal element of the rendering. And then I've reinforced the harmony in the image with this repetition of similar forms. So, you can see, for example, those curves of the arches in the architecture and the curves of the foliage, for example. It creates a harmony through similar forms repeated. And the stacking of all of these *parti* types helps to lead one through the image. So, you can see here, again, going across and down the sidewalk, then into the public space itself, and then ending up on that tower form. So, looking at both of those compositions simultaneously, the two-dimensional rendering and also the three-dimensional design of the urban space. Regular practice is the real key to internalizing these principles and making them a part of your skillset. And so the images in this book, and also the ones in Volume 1, they can be used for study to improve your skills. And so I encourage you all to take a piece of trace paper, for example, and lay it over the images, and to trace and draw and sketch from the images that are in the book, and you can help internalize the lessons that they have to offer. You can see what makes the images effective, and you can make it part of your own personal toolbox. Those images, by the way, were by the great Seth Harry. And, hopefully, if you'll be in Northwest Arkansas next month to join us at CNU34, please try and stop by the CNU Art Room series. We've got a great series of skills-building sessions that we're going to be doing. And so here you can see that schedule. And please also join us for the official "Art of the New Urbanism Volume 2" Book Launch and reception, where you'll be able to flip through the book yourself, and we really hope to see you there. James Dougherty: And with that, I'll turn it back over to everyone. Thank you. Rob Studeville: Fantastic! Thank you guys so much for those great presentations. And I wanted to remind everybody that, you know, ask some questions in the Zoom Q&A function of Zoom, and we will get to those shortly. I'm going to ask a few questions to begin with and get the conversation going. I really enjoyed reading Volume 2. You know, I enjoyed both books, but Volume 2 was even more impressive, I found. It's a bigger book, there are more drawings. It is eye candy, but it is more than that, and it tells a distinct and powerful story about new urbanism and the history of new urbanism, you know, especially Chuck's essays on history, but in fact, the whole books are a history of, you know, all of the, all the images present a history of this movement. And, when you set out to write this book, did you set out to tell a history of the New Urbanism, or did that history just naturally come from presenting these images? Chuck Bull: I think it really came out of when you sit down and you look at the entire body of work. And, you know, in my case, since I do teach, thinking about how to put this in perspective, and how to give it a long shelf life, thinking about it in terms of generations, not in terms of "here's a case for the moment," right? Or a trend or a fad. So, it really did, and it also comes with age, right? So, at this point in our careers, I think we are thinking in terms of telling the story of New Urbanism, and ensuring that it lives on, and that, you know, all of the amazing work and thought that goes into each of these drawings, you know, they become lessons for the future, not just for today. Victor Dover: Yeah, we've all certainly lived. I think the jury was affected by this question, Rob, because after a while, looking at all these images, so many of them were good. It wasn't like we, you know, we had to search for ones that were worthy of being in an exhibition or in a publication. There were so many. But the jury, after a while looking at the images, you begin to realize, "Well, all seven of these are great, but we have three of these already. And if we add these other ones, which are different in some important way, or older or newer, or have a content difference, then we can show both and get..." I think it was less about a historical chronological timeline and more about showing the wide range. And I think that affected the jury. Listen to our day-long conversations about it. You could hear that coming up again and again. You know, what happened with the jury was the jurors worked by themselves and scored every image with, you know, a set of criteria, and a spreadsheet. It sounds kind of cold and clinical, but then what happened from that was that the first 250 images to include were immediately obvious. Like, immediately obvious. It was broad consensus. And then there was at least a day of vigorous debate about the next 50. But part of the reason was in order to accomplish what you just described, in order to show, in terms of documenting the history of the images, the whole history or the whole range. James Dougherty: You know, when we're working on projects or working on charrettes, oftentimes we're thinking of a precedent that we had seen previously also, you know, and wanting to bring that image back up. And I don't know, maybe many of you have had the similar experience where the further back in time some of these images are going in terms of their production, the harder and harder it had been getting to find them online, for example. It was really going to be a challenge just to kind of dig through the internet and find an image that we remembered. And so that was, I think, another goal with this, with documenting the images that have been produced by the movement, was creating this great resource where it would be easy to go to and find that image that you remember from 20 years ago that had been produced. And, hopefully, that will be a big help for everyone in their work. Rob Studeville: Another thing that really strikes me is the volume of great art that was presented in Volume 2. Volume 2 covers half of the time period that Volume 1 covered, and I somehow thought that Volume 1 was... there was sort of a golden age, and that Volume 1 was covering the golden age of renderings. And also, you know, the first five years, basically, of the Volume 2 were lean times for the New Urbanism. So, I was surprised. Were you surprised at how much great art was presented to you for Volume 2? Victor Dover: I'll just say I was trying to edit. I found myself wondering what we would get. And remember, this was just a two-week window or so for the call for submissions. I think Volume 1 gave people a lot of guidance about what to submit for Volume 2. They either gave them the sense of the level of quality they should be selective from their own portfolios and just send the ones that hit that. Or, maybe, some of the ones who submitted something that was notably different from what we had seen in Volume 1. I think that also affected what people chose to submit. You could have out of the first 1,200 images, and after that, you know, James and Chuck and I dragged some more images in because we knew about them or somebody brought them to our attention. So, they're there in the end, there are quite a few. But you could have taken that group of 1,200 images, and you could have made an exhibition of 1,200 of them, or 950 or 1,000 of them. Anyway, it was not a matter of struggling to find something to include. Sometimes a jury would pick a picture that we realized was the after picture in a before-and-after pair. So, we dragged the before picture in, too, so you could see the two for the process images that in the case of Jean Lloyd's computer art. I think that also affected how to include. Rob Studeville: Okay. We'll get to the Q&A really shortly. You know, we're actually, not too, not too much time until one o'clock, but, you know, in Volume 2 was in some ways more technical than Volume 1, and it gave a peek into the artist's inspiration and how it's done. Most new urbanists and planners are not artists, however. And what do you want them to gain from those insights? What do you think they will gain? James, sir? James Dougherty: Yeah, I think that hearing the words from the designers themselves, you know, the captions that you see in the book, those are the descriptions from the artists themselves of the work that they've done. And, so it varies widely, and it really depends on the project, for example, and some of them are describing primarily aspects of the project that they're working on, and some are talking more about the process that they went through to create the images. I think this human approach to creating the images, you know, hearing actually directly from the artists is a valuable thing. It's interesting, you know, with the evolution of technology that's happening, this ability to produce images that have less emphasis on the human involvement, I think that's one of the magical things about both of these books, is this ability to hear directly from the humans that produced the images, and I think that's gonna continue to be a very powerful thing moving forward as well. Chuck Bull: Rob, I'm trying to, I'm trying to respond to some of the questions that are posted just in texts, because I know we'll probably run out of time. I'm sorry, was this a question about as a non-artist architect, what the relevance, usefulness of the work can be? Because this is one I answered since I am a non-designer. I'm the non-designer of the three authors. And part of that first essay that I wrote was talking about how the work, the site plans, the diagrams, the renderings really kind of jumped off the page at the time, because there was nothing like it that communicated these specific ideas and applications, and it really inspired a whole generation of people—of lawyers, of developers, of builders, of planners, to people working in stormwater, you know, people working in public works—to really embrace this material and use it for your own purpose, right? You could then show people in your field or in your community that, "Look, there's a different way to approach this." And now, you know, through Volume 2, we have so many more built works, right? We have so many more built examples. Before, a lot of it was diagrams and ideas. Tom Lowe's great diagrams of the New Urbanism. But now we have built places that we can use to make these cases. James Dougherty: I think it's important to remember with these images in both of the volumes as well, that as new urbanist practitioners, we're working with communities. And the images are almost never produced within a silo and just the designer working isolated by themselves, but it's really working hand-in-hand with the community, oftentimes on charrette in the same room with community members, for example. And so the people producing the images, the idea is that these images are being produced for the benefit of people who don't typically express themselves graphically, and we're trying to give a visual voice to the things that they are telling us. We're trying to translate their goals and dreams for the future for their community into an image that hopefully consensus can be gathered around. But yeah, giving a voice, giving a visual voice to those people is what these images are all about. Victor Dover: I'll put it very simply. A non-designer, non-planner, non-practitioner who gets inspired by something they see in this picture can take that picture to the meeting. They can slide it across the table at the city manager or the developer and say, "How come we can't have a street like this in our town? How come we can't have a neighborhood like this in our town?" That's a way they can use it. And because there's every imaginable angle and every imaginable color and every imaginable region, and every imaginable architectural style, there's something for them to use that way somewhere in this book. Rob Studeville: Do you think it's really valuable for a developer, for example, to be able to understand, you know, how art works in terms of the new urbanism design and selling and polemics? You find, yeah, that's a useful point. James Dougherty: With the images in both of the volumes also, you know, as we mentioned, they're great works of art, I think, in many cases in their own right, so they stand alone as two-dimensional images. What we try to be very careful with in the jury was, as well, in terms of their selection criteria, making sure that the content that's being illustrated within the images is also really good representations of the principles of new urbanism. So, for someone who's a, for example, a developer who's looking through the books, hopefully the books will also serve as kind of a great idea resource for projects. We've got projects and images that are dealing with projects that many different transect locations, for example, and many different geographic locations around the world, different mixes of unit types and building types and so forth, and so hopefully it will be a great treasure trove that people can pull ideas from as they're envisioning new projects. Chuck Bull: I would just add, we're planning an exhibition. You know, there was an exhibition before the first book. There will be an exhibition after the second book. Somebody asked. But stay tuned for more details on that. We have a question: "Do you feel AI will affect how we design new urbanist-style places in the future? And how?" James Dougherty: You know, that's all rolling out right now. It's interesting to watch, and so it is fascinating to see the process for me as a designer-illustrator. One of the things that we're trying to be really careful with, you know, as you all have seen, it can really produce spectacular images. It, I think, is very important to make sure that the humans in the process maintain their skills through this process, through the process of the evolution of AI. It's an interesting thing because it's possible to produce what look like compelling images with simple text prompts. It's conceivable that if someone didn't try and actively maintain their own human ability, at the same time, there could be atrophy. You know, we worked really hard over several decades to resurrect and rebuild all of these skills in terms of city-making, and it would be a shame to watch the human capacity reduce. So, I think as long as people are mindful about this idea of maintaining their own ability to express themselves and to formulate designs in their mind's eye and express them, I think that AI can be a great tool on top of that. You know, it would be great if it can be a force multiplier and can be in addition to that great capacity that we've built up as humans, it can be a beneficial tool. So, yeah, so it's a little bit like driving a car, though. It's possible to go really far with a car, but if someone only uses a car, then their own physiology starts to get weaker. And they're not getting enough exercise. And so I think as long as people are mindful and try and maintain their skills, I think it can be a positive thing, for sure. Rob Studeville: So, we're actually at the one-hour point. And this was a fantastic conversation. I look forward to seeing you all at CNU in Northwest Arkansas at "The Art of the New Urbanism," where you're going to be, you're actually gonna be using this book to a degree in your instruction that day, James? James Dougherty: That's right, that's right. Yeah, I showed some examples of that, you know, ways of using the book as a study tool, and ways to do some skills-building exercises from the book itself. And so we'll be having the book there in a couple of forms so that it's possible for people to look through and see all of the images, and they can go through, and if they've got an image in the book, find their own image. But we'll also be using it in those art room sessions as a tool, as a resource, when we're doing these kinds of sketching exercises and so forth, and getting people to put pencil to paper and work on building skills. Rob Studeville: Will it be, like, tracing over some of these images, or how are they going to use it in that? James Dougherty: That's right, yeah. There's a few different approaches. Tracing over the images is a wonderful thing to do. That's actually quite good because it's very accessible, you know? Anyone can put a piece of trace paper over one of these images and just start tracing over the lines and imagining yourself as a designer, moving your hand in that way to create the images, and you can start to really... it's a little bit like if you want to learn how to do a baseball swing, for example, and you've got someone next to you who's a great baseball player, and they're demonstrating, you can learn a lot faster by replicating their movements. And so it's a bit like that, trying to replicate what you imagine the designer had gone through when they were drawing the image themselves. Having a piece of paper next to the image, a blank piece of paper, and then looking and translating it onto your blank piece of paper is one level up in terms of challenge, and so that's great. You have to formulate the picture in your own mind's eye before your hand puts it on the paper. So, it's great to kind of ratchet up through these levels of difficulty, and you end up embedding all of these skills in your own capabilities and build your own skills that way. Rob Studeville: Do you think, go ahead. Victor Dover: The CNU Art Room, which is a tradition now for many years, this year will be one day, Thursday, May 14th, at the 21C Hotel in Bentonville. It's just a few steps off the Bentonville Town Square. And they have a big gallery there. So, we're going to use that for the CNU Art Room, and we'll have sessions, James and others will lead there, culminating in the little reception at 4 PM, which we'd love to have people come. We celebrate the launch of the book, and we give them a chance to get a deep dive into it at that time. We interviewed the artists for my essay. Sarah Vega and I talked for quite a long time. She's a professor at Notre Dame. And she talked about her experience as a student using the technique of scansion, which is a term we normally would think of as a literature term, you know, what poets do, analyzing, breaking down a poem into its parts. Scansion in the visual arts means drawing right over the top of the old masters and understanding the structure of both the composition and the content of that composition. And she says, "That builds muscle memory," and I think that's the muscle memory that James is just describing. So, we don't just trace things in the CNU Art Room, and you don't have to have it. We do lots of other things, too, and you don't need any prior experience as a designer or an artist to come and get benefit out of joining us in the CNU Art Room. James Dougherty: That's right. Rob Studeville: Let me just ask one question to close this out. You guys have now put together two incredible books on the art of new urbanism. It was a great idea, by the way, you know, putting these together in books. What makes a great New Urbanist piece, work of art? Who can just answer, and Victor, start. What? Victor Dover: It depicts a world I'd rather live in, that I want to build, a place that doesn't quite exist. So, but what I can imagine could exist. To me, the reason the precedents are so important is you can flip back and forth between the book, parts of the book, and you can see a visionary image of a place in the future, a wonderful world of tomorrow. I think the back of the book and see the study of precedence and say, "Wait, human beings created this in the past. We've experimented with this for thousands of years. We know how to do this, and we can do it." And then you can look back at the visionary image and say, "I bet I could help make that happen." So, to me, the images that are the most powerful are the ones that create that sense of urgency about a better world. It's an optimistic book, I'll say. Rob Studeville: You guys… James Dougherty: That's right. I think the images that make someone want to go and achieve what's in the picture, that it's a world they want to step into, I agree. You know, you could break down the kind of technical aspects of what makes a strong image and so forth, and also the three-dimensional urban design idea, what makes it walkable, and so forth. But yeah, I agree that when all of those elements come together and it's an inspiring vision for the future, and someone feels positive about their future, their possible future as a result of looking at the image, and it's a vision that they want to move towards with their life, and it occurs within their community, I think that's a really positive thing, yes. Chuck Bull: There's a great quote from Liz Plater-Zyberk about the art of the new urbanism in my first essay, actually, I used it, and she said, "The illustrations for numerous ideas are so important because people can't visualize at all. The kind of charm and hope that those drawings represent are such an important part of what we do. It's not the diagram, the circle with the arrows centered at the edge. That won't convince anyone. But the beautiful illustrations, the idea that the architecture might be great, that the street will be appealing, that the sidewalk will be wide, there will be trees, and you can take your child out by the hand or walk a dog on your way somewhere, is what tugs at people's hearts." It really is. It's the artistic works that most often stay with people of visions of what great neighborhoods could be. Rob Studeville: That's a great quote. And it's right, it's hard to even capture it in photography. I mean, you know, like how it feels to be in a place. You really have to live it, almost. And these renderings allow you to, you know, picture that feeling of living in a place or being in a place. And the benefits of a great place. But anyway, bravo to putting this book together. And thank you very much for sharing it with us today. This is going to be posted on CNU so people can go back and look at it again. I will see you guys in a couple of weeks in Northwest Arkansas. Hopefully, I'll see everybody who's attending today, or many of you in Northwest Arkansas, and I look forward to actually getting a physical copy of "Art of the New Urbanism Volume 2." Have a great day, guys. Chuck Bull: Rob, that, Rob, that quote before you leave came from your interview with Liz for "The Great Ideas of the New Urbanism," and thanks to you, because you are the real chronicler of the history of new urbanism that we've been following forever, for as long as I've known about new urbanism. So, thanks to you. Rob Studeville: Well, thank you guys and have a great day and look forward to seeing you all soon.