Robertson, Scully honored with Athena Medals
At CNU 18’s Friday evening plenary, CNU board member Dhiru Thadani presented the top award that CNU bestows on individuals to Jaquelin T. Robertson (FAIA, FAICP), principal of Cooper, Robertson and Partners and “one of his generation’s most consistent and effective advocates and practitioners of traditional design and urbanism,” according to CNU board member Douglas Kelbaugh.
Thadani’s tribute drew raves for eloquently revealing in both words and photos Robertson’s connections to top figures in architecture, development, and politics from his long era of influence and his role in challenging the prevailing faith in modernist planning ideas.
As dean of the University of Virginia School of Architecture in the 1980s, Robertson taught, practiced, and published influential articles on American urbanism, and organized symposia that brought together leading traditionalists such as Léon Krier and Robert A.M. Stern with top contemporary architects such as Rem Koolhaas and Richard Meier for historic discussions that pushed beyond the usual ideological boundaries.
“It is a privilege for me indeed to be a recipient of the Athena Medal named for the Goddess ‘defender of the city and the weaver of fabrics,’” said Robertson in accepting the medal. “And to join past recipients most of whom I know and admire — all colleagues in the ongoing search for a more responsible and humane urbanism.”
At CNU 18’s Saturday morning plenary, CNU co-founder Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk presented an Athena Medal to Vincent Scully, one of the most prominent architectural historians and educators of our time. Although travel restrictions forced the 90-year-old Scully to miss the event, he will be able to witness by video the deeply appreciative remarks of Plater-Zyberk, one of the many distinguished architects, developers, and political leaders taught by Scully at both Yale University and the University of Miami. In a moving embodiment of Plater-Zyberk’s observation that “we the new urbanists are heirs to his work,” she was joined onstage after her remarks by dozens of his former students from several generations who were in the audience as CNU 18 attendees.
“Through seven decades of energetic and inspired scholarship Vincent Scully has transformed the way we conceive of urbanism. He helped us understand the value of design that transcends any one time or single building,” said Plater-Zyberk.
New Urbanism “is coming close to bringing to fruition the most important contemporary movement in architecture,” Scully has said, “the revival of the vernacular and classical traditions and their reintegration in to the mainstream of modern architecture in its fundamental aspect — the structure of communities, the building of towns.”
