Photograph by Carlos Morales

Jeff Speck, the 39-year-old director of town planning at the Miami firm of Duany Plater-Zyberk (DPZ), wasn’t looking for a new job, especially one as director of design at the NEA. In fact, he was happily ensconced at the New Urbanist firm, fighting sprawl and urban disinvestment and directing and managing projects worldwide. Still, once he was in the running and had the blessings of his employers, it seemed the perfect match. After 10 years with DPZ, and having coauthored the so-called “New Urbanist bible,” Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, Speck may have just the right amount of experience, enthusiasm, and ideas to give American design a shot in the arm.

Q:Why were you chosen?

The chairman is a poet, not a bureaucrat. I think it was important to him to have a practicing designer, and someone who approached design in terms of its relationship to quality of life. While I have a tremendous interest in aesthetic and theoretical issues, my work as a city planner requires that I make every design decision in light of its possible benefit or detriment to the community. Will it bring people together or isolate them? Will it create more pedestrians or couch potatoes? Will it reduce or increase our energy use and pollution?

How will your theories about architecture, and New Urbanism, affect your role at the NEA?

My main role is to identify the experts who will serve on our grant-giving panels and beg these very busy people to read dozens of applications when they could otherwise be catching up on their sleep. I was not hired to impose a New Urban agenda. But if you read the Charter of the New Urbanism, there is little in there that any socially responsible designer would dispute. It is not antimodern, and nor am I. Just as the New Urbanism is not about style, I don’t see it as my role to promote either traditional or avant-garde architecture. However, it is important to distinguish between Modernist architecture and Modernist urbanism, the latter of which replaced social goals with aesthetic ones at too large a scale.

How will you do this job differently than the previous director, Mark Robbins ?

Mark directed the Mayors Institute in Urban Design and the University/Community Design Partnerships Program, both of which I hope to continue. Once I get a better sense of my resources, I will propose other initiatives. I share with Mark a deep concern about what he refers to as the gulf between professional discourse and popular culture. There is an incredible amount of good design in America, yet little of it finds its way to the American people. This becomes more the case as one increases scale, such that product design, housewares, and furniture have been doing pretty darn well—think about the iMac and the Beetle—but mass-market architecture, landscapes, suburbs, and regions do not reflect the best that we have to offer. The saddest thing is that the larger the scale, the greater the effect on quality of life. So, the gap I now see is not about taste, but about access.

How will you ensure results?

I don’t see how we can fail. Designers are problem solvers. The only question is how many designers we can introduce to how many problems. I have a lot of ideas I’m excited about, but all I can say right now is Watch This Space. The NEA is an organization that I am just beginning to understand. Once I have a better grasp of its orientation and capacities, I will begin to edit my far-flung collection of ideas into something that can be accomplished.