We recognize that today in the communities of architecture and urban planning there tends to be, generally, a dividing line between those who believe in the primacy of individual designers (those who seem to put their faith in individual genius and the talents of -usually- celebrity architects), and those who believe in the primacy of a master plan. Those who believe in a master plan believe that individual design creativity has become rather meaningless in the vacuum of emptiness that has been created by the dogma of modern suburbanism in the United States in the last 5 or so decades.

These two groups tend to find little to like about each other and little to agree on. The animosity is, however, we believe, completely unnecessary.

Those who believe in design genius believe in the freedom and artistic imperative of individual design statements. They believe that great individuals will push "Architecture" into "the future." And that these individuals will invent, by the sheer power of their genius alone, a great NEW architectural language (at the scale of individual buildings). This new language will, presumably, usher in a new era of peace and beauty, and it will also of course elevate the status of all of those involved either in creating this new style or in admiring it. The believers in "Architecture" generally tend to have little tolerance for those who believe in the primacy of the "master plan." They tend to believe that master planners are anti-creative, boring, talentless, traditionalist hacks.

Those who believe in the primacy of the "master plan," represented primarily today by the "New Urbanists," tend to believe that those who put all of their faith in the architectural avant-garde, modernism, "deconstructivism", fill in the name of your favorite architectural style, are mostly a bunch of vapor-headed, celebrity mongers who anyway have demonstrated nothing of value in the last 50 years in creating the kinds of cities and towns that people like being in. And while they admit that suburbs of a certain kind do offer certain pleasantries, they believe that cities that are entirely dominated by surburbs tend to lack certain primary qualities. These qualities can be summed up with the simple observation that there are now in the United States precious few urban places that are actually places that one would enjoy walking around in to accomplish a varity of ones daily needs. Certainly few people would say that walking around in strip mall parking lots is an enjoyable experience. Furthermore we are now almost never able to encounter places in our cities that are made by a mixture of different kinds of activities like shopping, working, schooling, going to religious places, living, residing, dining, and so on. The master planners say that it is not individual design genius that matters at all, rather it is a continuum of urban places that make and are made by many types of buildings, both ordinary and sometimes extraordinary, arranged in such a way and driven by the idea that it is urban place that is primary, not individual design genius at the scale of individual buildings. The master planners believe in a master plan. And they believe their plans can and should be executed by way of zoning ordinances that proscribe spatial arrangements at the scale of the street, block, square, neighborhood . . .

These two apparently contradictory positions, Individual Design Genius vs. Urban Place First, are not necessarily mutually exclusive. They can and should be unified in the following manner:

IDG should recognize the potential for increasing its own value by acting within a context of a continuum of outside place (urban space) – buildings – inside place. Individual Design Genius is far more significant within that context than it is in isolation in a vacuum of suburban nothingness, or in a "green field," where it remains, sadly, utterly meaningless under these prevailing conditions today.

UPF should recognize that the codes of master planned neighborhoods inevitably tend to become bastardized in practice beyond recognition. Urban Place First should admit that while in many cases zoning that prohibits the kinds of urban places that we like must be dismantled, many of the codes that have been implemented under New Urbanist rules have been unnecessarily restrictive. Indeed the New Urbanists are careful about this and do tend to shy away from proscribing details of style, but in practice, New Urbanist zoning too often is simply boiled down to a requirement that every house have a porch and a particular ornamental style, and that also tends to get corrupted beyond recognition. Eventually, it will be shown that a reliance on zoning alone is not having the intended effect. Furthermore, master plans never say anything to anyone about what to do when reality suddenly deviates from the plan. One day, we look at an area and see that what has happened there in fact looks nothing at all like what was planned. Now what do we do? The plan did not require that anyone think about what they were doing. You either follow the plan, or ignore it and do what you have always done before. In either case there is little or no critical or creative thinking. And no one has learned what to do when the plan is just dusty wrinkled paper in a filing cabinet.