You Make My Heart Go Pitter-Pat, My Love of Urban Design

I am taking an excellent class, which focuses on urban design, a subject that we haven't focused on to date in any of my other classes. My professor is an urban designer and architect, working for one of the most prolific, and one of the original new urbanist design firms, Moule + Polyzoides of Pasadena. Elizabeth Moule and Stephanos Polyzoides, are both founding members of the Congress for New Urbanism.

Urban design is what made me fall in love with urban planning to begin with. I was studying abroad in Italy and my undergrad professor took us around the streets of Florence, or fine Firenze, and showed us how one could interpret a city's history based on its layout, its building materials, how close the buildings were to one another, how tall were they, etc., This made the inner history nerd in me rise up and squeak with glee.

Ever since then I've had a keener awareness of buildings and open space, the types of materials used, the layouts of cities. I'm not as much a designer, who, I maintain are more technical than creative in their objectives, therefore I didn't go to urban design school. But as an artist, I look for visual harmony in the built environment- places where people want to be, buildings that are in harmony and scale, points of interest, either natural or manmade.

My current professor teaches with the same passion as the first professor who sparked my interest. He wants us to see the world the way he does, as pieces put together that can be beautiful with enough forethought and planning. We can create places that are welcoming, energizing, and inspiring, not slapped together and without much of a purpose or focus. I hope to have an opportunity to share such insights with others in the future too.