Andrés Duany

Andrés Duany is a founding principal at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ). DPZ is widely recognized as a leader of New Urbanism, an international movement that seeks to end suburban sprawl and urban disinvestment. In the years since the firm first received recognition for the design of Seaside, Florida, in 1980, DPZ has completed designs for close to 300 new towns, regional plans, and community revitalization projects. This work has exerted a significant influence on the practice and direction of urban planning and development in the United States and abroad.

The firm’s method of integrating planning with accompanying design codes is being applied in towns and cities for sites ranging from 10 to more than 500,000 acres throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. DPZ has received numerous awards, including two State of Florida Governor’s Urban Design Awards for Excellence. Seaside has been documented in more than 800 articles and books and was described by Time magazine as “the most astounding design achievement of its era.” The projects of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company have focused international attention on urbanism and its postwar decline. DPZ was instrumental in the creation of the Traditional Neighborhood Development Ordinance (TND), a prescription for pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use, compact urban growth, which has been incorporated into the zoning codes of municipalities across the country. The firm has developed a comprehensive municipal zoning ordinance called SmartCode, prescribing appropriate urban arrangement for all uses and all densities.

Andrés Duany has delivered hundreds of lectures and seminars, addressing architects, planning groups, university students, and the general public. His recent publications include The New Civic Art and Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. He is a founder of Congress for the New Urbanism. Established in 1993 with the mission of reforming urban growth patterns, the Congress has been characterized by the New York Times as “the most important collective architectural movement in the United States in the past fifty years.”

Duany received his undergraduate degree in architecture and urban planning from Princeton University, and after a year of study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, he received a master’s degree in architecture from the Yale School of Architecture. He has been awarded several honorary doctorates, the Brandeis Award for Architecture, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Medal of Architecture from the University of Virginia, the Vincent J. Scully Prize for exemplary practice and scholarship in architecture and urban design from the National Building Museum, the Seaside Prize for contributions to community planning and design from the Seaside Institute, and the Richard H. Driehaus Prize for exemplary work in keeping with the principles of classicism, including sensitivity to the historic continuum, the fostering of community, and the impact to the built and natural environment in contemporary contexts.