Enduring and beloved places, landscapes, and buildings like the city of Charleston, New York’s Central Park, the United States Capitol, or the bungalows of Denver’s Capitol Hill are indelibly recorded in our hearts and minds. We treasure them and they define us. Whether city, park, or building, the best places we have created are rooted in millennia of human experience of how to build well. This b
ody of knowledge constitutes a tradition rich with cultural memory, incremental adaptation, and radical invention. Embodied in these design traditions are essential lessons for resolving many of the challenges we face today, including how to build more sustainable, healthy, economically robust, just, and beautiful places that we can cherish, both today and tomorrow. And yet, despite the valuable lessons of traditional design, those involved in the design and making of today’s built environment are largely uneducated in its theory and practice. Due to its removal from the curricula of nearly all schools of architecture after the Second World War in response to the then-prevailing fashion for Modernism, the cultural, economic, environmental, practical, and psychological benefits of traditional design remain nearly entirely unstudied today. Comprehensive studies in this field can be found only at the University of Notre Dame and the non-degree granting Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. In recent years, many practitioners and academics have come to recognize the higher quality of life we once created in our towns and neighborhoods in contrast to the sprawling suburbs and glass boxes resulting from 20th century theories of planning and architecture. As we confront the challenges of ongoing population growth, the critical need to conserve natural resources, our dehumanizing patterns of development, the increasing loss of unique cultural landscapes, and a general lack of interest in beauty, many practitioners today are seeking to understand traditional design so they can create new places that are more socially responsible and enduring. The demand for graduates knowledgeable in traditional design theory and practice has never been greater. A leader in this rapidly emerging field, the University of Colorado Denver’s College of Architecture and Planning (CAP) intends to further the renewed study of traditional architecture, building crafts, landscape architecture, and urban design by creating the Center for Advanced Research in Traditional Architecture (CARTA). Through research, outreach, education, and scholarship this new center will bring together years of experience by CAP faculty who have been studying and teaching aspects of traditional design. By creating CARTA, CU Denver will conserve and progress the theory and practice of traditional design and safeguard the memory of experience for all subsequent generations.
