the Original Green

   Andrés Duany led off Thursday morning at CNU21 by laying out a far-ranging view of what the near future needs to look like, and what we can do to get there. Here's a selection of my tweets from that session:

• CNU has now held 10 more congresses than CIAM.

• CNU's great conflicts have always been conflicts of ideas, not conflicts of territory.

• LEED, while powerful, has become a dinosaur. It can barely move.

• I was for establishing standards; Dan Solomon was always against it, and he won. 3 years ago, I told Dan "we could have been LEED"

• Now, looking at how ossified LEED is, I say "thank you Dan Solomon for paralyzing my argument!!"

• Duany, to Edward Erfurt early this morning: "I don't think this talk is coming together." Edward: "Good. We need talks like that."

• Landscape Urbanism and Harvard have set themselves up as "not the New Urbanism."

• You're not a New Urbanist if you haven't read the Charter.

• Emily Talen said: "the New Urbanism is intrinsically top-down and bottom-up."

• The New Urbanism is the Charter and the charrette. Principles and practice. It has never been combined like this before.

• Urban Land has become a New Urbanist publication. Why do we need one when they do such a good job?

• The New Urbanism forges ideas, and others take them up. And that's the way it should be.

• We don't worry about taking credit; we want to see the work get done.

• We knew the greatest beast we had to enter as a virus was environmentalism. We didn't know how technocratic it would be.

• The virus is now inside the beast, but unfortunately, the beast is infecting the virus.

• New Urbanism could become just like 1000 other environmental organizations, and we don't need 1001.

• Becoming just another environmental organization would make the New Urbanism completely irrelevant.

• Nature was about beauty until about 1900, when it became scientific.

• The American environmental movement is the only environmental system in the world that doesn't include humans.

• American environmentalism began with the national parks. Every human that enters degrades the ideal.

• Defining humans as being outside nature leads to draconian environmental laws.

• No European environmentalism could ever say "you can't build on the hills," or in the woods, or near the river.

• American environmentalists say Times Square is horrible, but it hosts millions of visitors who aren't in Yellowstone bothering the bears.

• New Urbanism works to build places so enticing that people will willingly choose to live compactly and efficiently in the city rather than ruining the countryside.

• Nature doesn't care so much whether rainwater enters the aquifer here or a mile down; it doesn't hurt the little water molecules.

• We do not polemicize the visual green. If we did, you can't build Charleston again.

• If an ideology won't let Charleston be built again, I cannot condone it.

• You cannot achieve the extraordinary reward of street life by Landscape Urbanism, except by using PhotoShop.

• It's not our fault that New Urbanism becomes too expensive; that simply means there's not enough of it yet.

• "Locally widespread but nationally rare": environmental parlor trick for protecting species that are plentiful.

• American environmentalism is perpetually the overlord and the underdog.

• New Urbanists study success wherever it occurs.

• We know Portland's small blocks are good and Salt Lake City's big blocks are bad, right? look deeper, and we need both.

• The problem with Salt Lake City is that it's not today what Joseph Smith and Brigham Young had in mind.

• The problem with Salt Lake City today is that the original grid was infected with the DNA of sprawl.

• Nature doesn't begin as primal forest; New York didn't begin with 100-story buildings.

• The problem with the New Urbanism over the past 10 years was that we were bitten by the bug of financial protocols.

• Make many small successional deals, not one big deal.

• We absolutely need to deliver town centers at the beginning - the inaugural condition is a single-story town center.

• Everything of the New Urbanism in its first decade was incubated. we must restore that.

• Seaside has a comprehensive set of green measures, but they were all done because they were cheaper.

• "Environmentalism costs more, but it pays for itself in 8 years" is utterly biased to high-tech.

• High-tech environmentalism is absolutely going to crash. The Original Green will replace it.

• Code-writing was the least cool of the uncool, but those incredibly lean early New Urbanist codes were glamorous.

• Fat codes are bad because you can't amortize small projects.

• why has NextGen become tactical? Because they can't get things done through today's code burden. So they bypass them.

• The last act of the first generation of New Urbanists should be to deliver a world where the young can operate.

• Centuries do not begin when 00 clicks. The 20th century lasted until the real estate bubble of 2008.

• The real estate bubble. Peak oil. Climate change. All of this happened at the same time. It didn't have to… nothing tied them together… but it did anyway.

• The real estate bubble revealed the economic limits of the US permanently. Essentially, we're broke.

• It's not about oil running out. It's that energy is going to hereafter be more expensive.

• The problem with climate change is that it's so slow-motion, but there's a pall that we have lost the war.

• When people are depressed, they lose their idealism, but we can turn all of these problems into virtues.

• We can turn these into virtues, pleasures, joys, and meaningful things IF we avoid getting infected by the pall.

• We have to say that sustainability is adapting to the circumstances.

• The Now Urbanism

• Architects have no hope of achieving the Vernacular Mind; it's been engineered out of them.

• A new century. Protean CNU. Viruses & Membranes. The Vernacular Mind. Subsidiarity Process. Successional Growth.

• Interim Buildings. Light Green Tech. Pink Codes. Flexbuildings. Pod Practices.

• The SmartCode has flaws because it plugs into the existing system.

• CNU is based on the genetics of CIAM: separate firms pulling together to create a movement.

• If you get along, you're not noticed. The New Urbanism was noticed by ITE and ULI because we caused them problems.

• Adaptation has no friends and is in bad odor because it's considered to be giving up, but it's what will work, and what will give us hope.

• "Copyright - Use Without Permission" that's what we do to prevent our materials from being copyrighted against us.

• Lean Engineering = the Original Green.

• Let us rediscover real engineering that allowed the cities of the West to be built with little money.

• Lean Engineering = Light Imprint.

• Lean = the Subsidiarity Process.

• Subsidiarity: person-family-street face-block-neighborhood-municipality-state-nation-UN. 

Decision should be made at smallest scale at which it makes sense.

• Today's true avant-garde isn't doing frivolous buildings, but rather lean ones.

• The model that's crashing next are the architecture schools.

• I hire people because of the firms they've worked in, not the schools they've gone to.

• We should self-certify the graduates of our firms.

   ~Steve Mouzon

PS: Here are my upcoming sessions… please come!

Original Green Hope for Architecture (with Clay Chapman): Tonight at 8:30 PM at the Peery Hotel

Agrarian Urbanism and the Mormon Block: Saturday at 10:45 AM, Grand Ballroom BC

Art Room: Design Techniques for Charrettes: Saturday at 2 PM, Murano room