Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company

Since its founding in 1980, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company has completed designs for over 300 new and existing communities. This work has exerted a major influence on the practice and direction of urban planning in the United States.

DPZ’s projects have received numerous awards, including two National AIA Awards and two Governor’s Urban Design Awards for Excellence. The firm’s early project of Seaside, Florida, was the first authentic new town to be built successfully in the United States in over fifty years. In 1989, Time Magazine selected Seaside as one of the 10 “Best of the Decade” achievements in the field of design. The firm has been featured in other national media such as NBC News and ABC News, as well as Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New Yorker.

A significant aspect of DPZ’s work is its innovative use of planning regulations, including the Urban and Architectural Codes, which accompany each design. Tailored to the individual project, the codes address the manner in which buildings are formed and located to ensure that they create useful and distinctive public spaces. Local architectural traditions and building techniques are also codified within the regulations.

The firm’s method of integrating master plans with project-specific design codes and regulations is currently being applied to sites ranging from 10 to 10,000 acres throughout the United States. Abroad, DPZ projects are underway in Canada, Germany, Belgium, Australia, the Philippines, Mexico, and Turkey. Urban redevelopment plans for existing communities include: Baton Rouge, Louisiana; West Palm Beach, Naples, Stewart, Sarasota, and Fort Myers, Florida; and Providence, Rhode Island.

DPZ maintains an architectural practice as well, primarily confined to construction in the southeastern United States and the Caribbean. Working within a defined region allows the firm to focus on the relationships of individual buildings to specific geographical and historical traditions. The firm’s architectural work has been published and recognized internationally.

In addition to its design work, the firm is widely recognized as a leader of the international movement against the proliferation of suburban sprawl. The firm’s principals, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, are co-founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, recognized by the New York Times as “the most important collective architectural movement in the United States in the past fifty years.” Their recent book, Suburban Nation, written with DPZ Director Jeff Speck, was hailed as “an essential text for our time,” and “a major literary event,” in the national media. In 2001, Duany and Plater-Zyberk were awarded the Vincent Scully prize by the National Building Museum in recognition of their contributions to the American built environment.

Celebrating its 25th year in 2005, DPZ includes approximately 34 employees in three offices located in Miami, Washington D.C., and Charlotte.

Firm Principals

Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk are architects and town planners whose work for the past 20 years has been centered on the design of new towns and the revitalization of existing cities. These efforts have earned them international recognition and dozens of local and national awards, including the Thomas Jefferson Medal and the Vincent Scully Prize.

Having each received a bachelor’s degree in architecture and urban planning from Princeton University and a graduate degree from the Yale School of Architecture, Duany and Plater-Zyberk spent their first years as architects designing buildings. They were founding partners of the still vital firm, Arquitectonica, renowned for its playful condominium towers on the Miami coast. It didn’t take long, however, for the young architects to feel dissatisfied with the results of their labor. They struggled with the sense that the individual buildings they designed did not relate in any meaningful way to the cities surrounding them. This concern soon evolved into finding ways to design environments in which the placement of individual buildings made sense – communities in which buildings are less important than the spaces between them.

Focusing their attention in this new direction, the couple founded Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company in 1980. That same year, they designed their ground-breaking project of Seaside. This now famous “village by the sea” on Florida’s Gulf Coast won worldwide praise as the first traditionally organized new town designed in over 50 years. Its success led to diverse new commissions, with which Duany and Plater-Zyberk have spearheaded a resurgence of neighborhood-based design in the U.S. and abroad.

Their quest has not been without frustration. The partners quickly learned that in order to create such towns, current zoning laws would have to be rewritten and the real estate development industry would need retooling. Duany has spent the last two decades traveling the world, lecturing on the distinctions between traditional neighborhood development and urban sprawl. Seeing a need for instruction at the university level, Duany and Plater-Zyberk created a program in Suburb and Town Design at the University of Miami, where Plater-Zyberk is currently Dean of the School of Architecture.

Both are active members of organizations that work to replace suburban sprawl with a return to neighborhood-based planning. They are founding members of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a non-profit organization with over 3,000 members. Duany sits on the board of the National Town Builders Association, and Plater-Zyberk shepherds the Knight Program in Community Building, a program that brings an interdisciplinary approach to the revitalization of inner cities.

The two are also accomplished authors. Their book, Suburban Nation, written with DPZ Director Jeff Speck, was hailed as “the bible of urbanists” by the Wall Street Journal and described by the Weekly Standard as “the most coherent and important attack on American sprawl to appear so far.” Other recent or forthcoming books include The New Civic Art (Rizzoli, Fall 2003), The Lexicon of the New Urbanism, and The Smart Growth Manual. In addition, Andres Duany has completed a new universal land use ordinance called the SmartCode, which is being distributed nationwide by the Municipal Code Corporation as an alternative to conventional (sprawl-oriented) ordinances.