Change of heart: Torti Gallas and Partners helped invent sprawl. Now they're leading the charge against it

Residential Architect, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Meghan Drueding

plan of attack

CHK's new setup wouldn't matter much if the firm couldn't sell itself to the new client types it wanted so badly. That was where John Torti's conversion to New Urbanism came in. Having grown up in a front-stoop-and-corner-store neighborhood in the Bronx, N.Y., he knew well the charms and benefits of urban living. But he hadn't considered the marketability of old strategies in new neighborhoods until he heard the charismatic New Urbanist pioneer Andres Duany, FAIA, speak at Catholic University's summer lecture series. "I began to listen to him in the '80s," Torti says. "It tapped into my own discontent with what I was doing in the suburbs, compared with my goals as a young architect."

Listening to Duany's ideas moved Torti to educate himself about Traditional town planning, and then to decide that CHK should become a completely New Urbanist firm. He didn't approach that goal halfheartedly. He learned the movement's principles inside and out, joining the Congress for the New Urbanism and eventually becoming an influential member. And he aggressively recruited talent from the worlds of academia and practice, seeking out others who shared his desire to create pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use communities.

As they'd agreed, he and Gallas redirected their energies toward public and national private clients. They used New Urbanism to market themselves, trying to convince potential customers they could offer something different from standard developments. The going was tough at first. Because CHK had no experience working on the kinds of projects it now wanted to do, developers harbored understandable skepticism. The film's background seemed so unsuited for public-sector work that the Navy actually asked Torti and Gallas to stop applying for work on its bases, telling them (mistakenly, as it turned out) it would never hire them.

But they'd already committed themselves to pursuing new client types and to New Urbanism, and they weren't turning back. In 1994 they had two breakthroughs--a commission for public housing in Baltimore under HUD's HOPE VI program, and a Progressive Architecture award in urban design for the plan of South Riding, a Traditional Neighborhood Development in Virginia. Shrewdly, Torti and Gallas talked up these successes into other opportunities. Spinning them as examples of their firm's ability to create thriving neighborhoods, they began to land key commissions--Army base housing at Fort Meade, Md.; a TND called King Farm in Rockville, Md.; more and further-flung HOPE VI commissions. Persuaded by Torti's convincing rhetoric, one gifted architect after another joined the firm. "Our work, especially the HOPE VI work, is an exact mirror of my interests in architecture and urban design," says principal Cheryl O'Neill, Associate AIA. "It's rare to find that."

turning point

By 1995, it began to look as if Torti, Gallas, and their rapidly growing staff were going to pull off the transformation of CHK. But their very success worried Torti. He feared that a firm taking on so many new jobs and employees would lose its hard-won focus. So he instituted a "Design Discourse"--a two-year series of debates and lectures on urban design given by in-house architects and attended by everyone from principals to administrative staff. "The Design Discourse sent a signal out that we believed in something," says Payton. "It said we were committed to a value system."