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Yes, but is it art?

Neotraditionalist, or “New Urbanist,” architecture is popping up in Baton Rouge a couple of decades after beginning to rear its head elsewhere. Take a stroll around Perkins Rowe and you’ll see it: new structures whose facades borrow from design elements of the past to create a quaint, aesthetically pleasing homage to other days and styles.

French Quarter architecture has become a well of inspiration for designers hired by developers. You’ll see the neotraditionalist tilt also in renderings for the redevelopment of Acadian Village at Perkins Road and Acadian Thruway: It’s new, but it looks old—aesthetically speaking.

Nothing ages better than the ageless—that may be part of the appeal. Also, New Urbanist is comfortable, based on architectural precedents that might look neat but don’t challenge, much less offend.

Ask an architect, however, and be prepared for a critique. New Urbanism is not universally loved. And in Baton Rouge, it has more to do with commerce than creativity, according to critics.

Andrés Duany, one of the principal architects of the New Urbanist movement, has described his work as emulating “historical successes” as opposed to what modern architects are up to, which is trying to break new ground, whatever the results.

Duany was the chief designer in what led to Plan Baton Rouge, the redevelopment blueprint for downtown. Peter Calthorpe, a California architect, is another name forever associated with neotraditionalist architecture.

It’s the kind of design you’re likely to find in a traditional neighborhood development concept, which seeks to recreate the self-contained mix of residential, retail, schools and other amenities that evoke the way urban neighborhoods used to be.

Architect Ken Tipton, managing principal and senior partner of Tipton Associates, says the trend also takes its cues from the past.

“All this mixed-use development happening really is going back to our small-town roots, where people lived and worked and shopped all in the same district.”

Aesthetically, the look of developments like Perkins Rowe are a reflection of what the developer believes the markets conditions to be in terms of attracting people vs. scaring them away. With few exceptions, traditional, as opposed to groundbreaking, is what sells in Baton Rouge.

It’s long been evident in the city’s residential market, which leans heavily toward the traditional, Tipton says. It’s true that faux-Acadian houses aren’t hard to find in Baton Rouge. It’s about creating something that “feels like it fits in this place,” he says, noting that neotraditional architecture in other markets won’t look like Baton Rouge.

“You’re not asking your potential tenants and customers to take too many leaps of faith,” he says.

Tipton says architecture has always involved a tension between holding onto what’s tried and true vs. exploring the new and avant-garde.

“That pendulum swings back and forth,” he says “All of us, as we practice, try to find the right place to be. Different people have different feelings about it.”

Tipton says his practice looks for “contemporary solutions to contemporary problems” rather than relying only on classical or traditional architecture, though he thinks traditional will continue to work here.

“It will be very successful for this market,” he says. “If we had done it, I don’t know how we would have attacked it.”

Michael Desmond, an architecture professor at LSU, says this type of design has been gaining ground elsewhere in the country and is relatively late coming to Baton Rouge. The Plan Baton Rouge of a decade ago marked the first time “historicist images” from New Orleans and elsewhere were used in proposed designs for buildings here, he says.

“It seems to me primarily a marketing strategy, meant to invoke associations with someone’s idea of our local culture as a way to sell things,” Desmond says. “However, in the chaotic mess that our cities have become, it is not difficult to see how many people can relate to such a nostalgic view.”

Desmond, a preservationist and teacher of architectural history, admires the innovations apparent in historic buildings, an indicator of how architects of the past dealt with problems of their time. While historic buildings—LSU’s early structures, for example—embodied familiar architectural traditions, they also “contributed to an advancing culture,” he says.

The originals were innovative, and the copies less so. Desmond likens it to borrowing someone else’s identity. Architecture always involves building on the past to some degree, though a little innovation mixed with tradition would be nice, he says.

“The only innovations in this kind of thing have to do with marketing and presentation,” Desmond says. “They are not really architectural in that way. But that is what sells and in our culture, and I guess you have to have some respect for that.”

Good contemporary architecture is gaining a foothold in Baton Rouge, and it should be supported, he says, adding, “you don’t get on the map by copying others.”

Robert Zwirn, another LSU architecture professor and owner of Metro Studio in New Orleans, offers the most critical assessment of what he calls “trickle-down New Urbanism,” and “nostalgic bull----.”

He doesn’t hate traditional architecture, which he says has been done well by architects like Allan Greenberg, who first earned fame in the 1980s for a house designed to resemble Mount Vernon—George Washington’s Virginia estate on the Potomac River south of Washington, D.C.—but with the rethought proportions and Greenberg’s own personal stamp. The University of Notre Dame has an entire program devoted to classical architecture, Zwirn notes. Lifestyle centers and TNDs aren’t that, he argues.

“When you do these phony facades, what is this?” Zwirn says. “This isn’t about preservation. This is about invented history that never existed. This is all a smoke screen. These are all strip malls. That is all they are.”

He concedes strip malls have gotten better looking over time. But for good architecture Zwirn recommends visiting the Shaw Center for the Arts—a gem whose image should be on every piece of promotional material for Baton Rouge, he says. Another example: the new Carver Branch Library in Old South Baton Rouge.

“Everything doesn’t have to look like somebody’s house,” he says. “A library should look like a library. It can be done. Private developers could be doing the same thing.”