Leaders of New Urbanism Movement Win $200,000

CHICAGO—Miami architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the husband-and-wife team leading the controversial New Urbanism movement, were announced winners of 2008's $200,000 Richard H. Driehaus Prize on Tuesday, the Chicago Tribune reports.

The couple has made a name for the traditional town-planning movement employed in locations such as Seaside, Florida, the setting for the movie The Truman Show, which opened in the early 1980s and features back-street grids, front porches, town squares, and other pedestrian-friendly elements that counter urban sprawl, suburban subdivisions, and cul-de-sacs.

Richard Driehaus, a Chicago investor, established the annual prize in 2003 as an alternative to the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which is endowed by the Pritzker family of Chicago and typically goes to a leading modernist. Driehaus recently doubled the prize money, which had matched the Pritzker prize at $100,000, in part to attract attention to his annual award for tradition-minded designers.

Duany and Plater-Zyberk, the most well-known architects to be awarded the Driehaus, will receive the prize on March 29, 2008, in Chicago.