Plazas, Squares and Other People Places

“An architecture of place delivers projects that respond to two fundamental purposes: Incrementally constructing the city and establishing a sustaining relationship with nature. And doing so for the economic, and psychic benefit of all. This pro urbanist and pro environmentalist architecture delivers settings for human life that are constantly evolving, while being validated by those who stake their identity and their everyday life around them.”

“The figural void of the city is the essential ingredient of urbanism, as the building is the measure of its architecture. Cities should be designed reciprocally between buildings and the public realm they define.”

“The patio, the courtyard, the quad, the green, the field, the plaza, the square, the greenway, the thoroughfare, are all kinds of urban space with historical precedence, dimensional and proportional characteristics, geographic and climatic variants, symbolic and functional expectations.”

These excerpts quoting Stefanos Polyzoides from Terrain sum up his content in this webinar on Places for People. Born in Athens, Greece, Stefanos is a registered architect in California, Arizona, Florida and New Mexico. His experience includes the design of educational, institutional, commercial and civic buildings, historic rehabilitation, housing, campus planning, and urban design. He was Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Southern California and has been Visiting Professor at several prestigious schools of architecture and was on the Advisory Board for the School of Architecture at Princeton University. He is a cofounder of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a national organization reforming suburban sprawl, and is a member of its Board of Directors. Stefanos is the coauthor of Courtyard Housing in Los AngelesThe Plazas of New Mexico, and is the author of R.M. Schindler, Architect. His research has produced four distinguished exhibitions and catalogs: Caltech: 1910–1950, Myron Hunt: 1868–1952, Wallace Neff, and Johnson, Kaufmann and Coate.