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Calthorpe and the rest share a basic vision, but Duany and Plater-Zyberk have gone further by developing an appealing and practical process for designing new towns efficiently. After a developer hires the firm, the planners start collecting information about the area -- quirks of geography, regional traditions. A sympathetic local architect may be incorporated into the team of designers, planners, renderers and engineers, always led by Duany or Plater-Zyberk. The group descends on the site. About one week and $80,000 to $300,000 later, they will have produced detailed plans and preliminary construction drawings for a new town, complete with a marketing scheme and an artist's slick conceptions of particular streets and possible houses. At each step of the way, citizens and officials are invited to inspect and react to the work-in-progress. "People really see what they're getting," Duany says of this quasi-democracy, instead of being presented with a mystifying fait accompli.
The couple seldom design particular houses or buildings for the towns they plan -- an almost heroic act of restraint for architects. Instead, they conjure a tangible vision of the place they mean to germinate, then draft the rules that architects and builders will follow after they go. The result is towns that are authentic patchworks, not the plainly fake diversity that is inevitable when a single hand creates all the architecture. At Kentlands the existing 19th century masonry farm buildings and 18th century regional architecture helped establish the stylistic parameters, but most Duany-Plater- Zyberk towns in the eastern U.S. carry similar prescriptions: houses must be clad in wood clapboard, cedar shingles, brick or stone, and roofs (of cedar shake, metal or slate) must be gabled or hipped, and pitched at traditional angles.
Kentlands will be the team's first true suburb. An elementary school, its facade partly designed by Duany, opened last fall. Roads are being laid, and impeccable Federal- and Georgian-style houses are under construction by six different builders. All Kentlands' real estate is denominated in 22-ft. chunks -- certain blocks are set aside for 22-ft.-wide town houses, although most lots in town are 44 ft. or 66 ft. wide. Only houses on the largest lots will be freestanding, with various size yards on all four sides. When the town is more or less finished in 1995, there are to be 1,600 houses and apartments, a courthouse, corner shops, a large shopping center and almost 1 million sq. ft. of offices scattered in smallish four- and five-story buildings.
Twenty miles to the southwest, in Virginia, Duany and Plater-Zyberk have designed another new town, Belmont, for the same developer. The first houses are under construction. Wellington, Fla., a village to be appended to a vast, conventional suburb near Palm Beach, is going through the local permit process. The Gate District, four adjacent 100-acre neighborhoods to be built on a decaying, ghostly tract in downtown St. Louis, is what Duany calls "suburban know-how applied to the city."