Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and the New Urbanists hope that a general evolution in thinking about
communities will accompany the evolution in language as the term “urban
code” becomes more widely used.
Valle helped digitize the urban codes of Seaside by creating a database
and a design program that included all the components of the town's codes
(such as building heights, building types, and street types). With the infor-
mation digitized and integrated, the designers could manipulate it more
easily in refining their plan; the computerized information provided them
with checks and balances as they worked.
Valle describes Duany as the “Pied Piper” of the New Urbanism move-
ment, one who has done much to organize it and publicize it. He regards
Duany as a brilliant individual and a role model.“My role models have sim-
ply been achievers, people who started literally with nothing and made a
difference in their respective worlds or areas of expertise—people who
keep trying and eventually win the odds in life.” He has found similar inspi-
ration in the writings of Ayn Rand and in the work of the Austrian town
planner Camilo Sitte (1843-1903) and contemporary colleagues such as
Leon Krier, a planner from Luxembourg, and William Mitchell, dean of the
School of Architecture at MIT and an expert in the field of computer
technology.
While Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and a small number of other architects and
planners such as Peter Calthorpe and Peter Katz (whose topic
The New
Urbanism
offers a clear overview of the history, philosophy, and principles
of the movement) are regarded as the first generation of New Urbanists,
Valle is identified as a leading name in the second generation. The first
generation did ground-breaking work in establishing the theory and
principles of New Urbanism and in dealing with government policy and
legal issues.Valle and others of the second generation have developed the
methodology and the technology that make this type of planning distinctly
different from other approaches to urban design. “Our urban codes, me-
thod of creating urban plans, and our architecture is intuitively more in line
with the principles that govern this movement. We are dealing with more
of the technical issues than the first generation. They have dealt with the
regional issues, we are dealing with the issues that reconstitute the neigh-
borhood.”
In 1987, while still a graduate student, Valle founded and was named
director of UMSA's Image Transformation Laboratory. In this capacity, he
was able to continue his research on the merging of CAD with video to
