MIAMI BEACH, Fla.
SITTING in the shadow of this resort city's "condo canyon," a new development called Aqua is being designed as an alternative to long rows of towering high-rises. Planned by the urban-design firm of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Aqua is to be a 166-unit development of midrise apartment buildings and town houses offering high-end residences in a traditional neighborhood setting and a pedestrian-friendly environment.

The project's developer, Craig Robins, hopes to make Aqua a showcase of both urban-planning principles and design. To this end, he has hired a number of New York's prominent modernists along with a number of young and up-and-coming Miami architects to design both houses and apartment buildings, which are expected to sell for a total of just under $200 million. "I've long been interested in taking traditional urban principles and applying the ideas to modern design," Mr. Robins said.

He is no stranger to innovative planning. Mr. Robins's company, Dacra, has been influential in the renovation of Miami Beach's Art Deco District and more recently has been deeply involved in bringing new life to Miami's beleaguered Design District, a neighborhood of shops and showrooms that had suffered in recent years in part from shifting population and also from competition from newer design centers.

Aqua's plan comes from the firm of Mr. Duany and Ms. Plater-Zyberk, who are known as the parents of a movement known as the New Urbanism. Their firm, generally known as DPZ, for the initials of their last names, designed Seaside, Fla., a town that - with its nostalgic cottage architecture and picket fences - provided the idealized setting for the 1999 film "The Truman Show." Other DPZ towns include Windsor, Fla., near Vero Beach and Kentlands in suburban Maryland; both have traditional neighborhood plans and derive their architecture from historic regional examples.

In some quarters, however, the New Urbanism has come under fire for its reliance on history, because it is not modern.

At Aqua, the architecture is intended as an ode to Miami Beach's high-style years, from the era of jazzy, streamlined Art Deco hotels to the years in which such architects as Morris Lapidus produced such comparatively flamboyant offerings as the Fontainebleu Hotel.

Typically, Mr. Duany and Ms. Plater-Zyberk plan new towns but do not design the buildings in them, as a way of encouraging the kind of diversity found in older suburban and urban neighborhoods. Among the architects hired to design buildings at Aqua are the New Yorkers Walter Chatham, Alex Gorlin and Emanuela Frattini Magnusson and the Iranian-born sisters Gisue and Mojgan Hariri.

Even more critically, Mr. Robins said, the planning for Aqua provided the opportunity to proffer an alternative to the high-rises that cast their long shadows up and down the South Florida coastline. "Everybody wants to build a 40-story building and sell you your shoebox in the sky without taking any responsibility for what effect a high-rise has on its surroundings," he said.

At Aqua, no structure will rise higher than 11 stories. There will be three midrise buildings with a total of 120 apartments and 46 town houses. The original zoning of the eight and a half acre site placed no cap on building height and allowed a density more than twice the eventual design density. Dacra voluntarily offered to reduce both height and density, believing that "less is more," Mr. Robins said.

Apartment units range from two-story duplex style units at the ground level to four-story skyloft penthouse suites, with more-typical layouts in between. The architecture relies heavily on the use of glass to maximize both the immediate view of Indian Creek and the longer views that will variously take in Collins Avenue, nearby residential neighborhoods and the Atlantic Ocean, which is just two blocks away.

The apartments, on average 2,000 square feet, will start at $400,000 and rise to prices of, Mr. Robins said, "several million." The town houses, which are in eight structures, will be three stories tall with roof gardens and tower "lookout" rooms, typically 4,000 square feet. Prices will start at $800,000 and top out around $3 million.

Demolition of hospital buildings that occupied the site has begun and construction is expected to start by June. Mr. Robins hopes to complete the entire project by early 2003.

The site for Aqua is Allison Island, a private residential enclave in the middle of Indian Creek, which is also the Intracoastal Waterway. Miami Beach, which is actually a barrier reef island itself, was made habitable at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century by dredging, which in turn created a series of small islands, almost all of which are now exclusive gated residential areas.

Ms. Plater-Zyberk, who is also dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture, offered up a plan in many ways atypical of the usual South Florida waterfront development. First, the periphery of the island would be left as common space, affording all residents access to the water.

Further, Ms. Plater-Zyberk laid out Aqua "using the principle that if the streets are perpendicular to the water, you not only have waterfront houses but everyone on the street can participate in the view." Thus, each street ends at the water.

On most waterfront streets in Miami Beach, the houses close off the public view to the water with high walls along the street. "Everyone at Aqua," Mr. Robins said, "will have the sense of being on an island. Wherever you are, there is a life-enhancing view."

Ms. Plater-Zyberk is quick to point out that this is a small, private, gated residential development, "not a New Urbanist community." A prime tenet of New Urbanism is that neighborhoods be left open instead of being gated. However, she said: "There are a number of New Urbanist principles at work here. First, we wanted to make a community that was walkable and that would have a sense of place. Second, we wanted to have a variety of dwellings as well as other activities, a mix."

Too, the prime property at the southern tip of the development is being left as common space, which includes the neighborhood swimming pool. Scattered throughout the development are pocket parks, tiny landscaped green spaces. Such parks are a New Urbanist notion, as well.

An early impulse was to try to save and transform the old hospital buildings, but conversion proved too difficult. The 330-car garage, the newest building of the hospital complex, is being saved and adapted by the New York architect Walter Chatham who has designed a "liner building" of apartments - basically a building attached to the side of the garage that is big enough to accommodate a row of apartments.

The other two midrise apartment buildings were designed by Alison Spear, who lives in Miami but practices largely in New York, and Mr. Gorlin. The town houses have been assigned to nine New York and Miami architects known for their affinity to the modern.

Every apartment has at least two exposures, to allow the ocean-driven breezes to flow through. The town houses sit close to the street and have courtyards. Most of the designs hark back to the early years of modernism, reflecting the aesthetic of the early years of the Bauhaus and the decades up through the 1950's.

"Each house is very strong," Ms. Plater-Zyberk said, "but they are connected - it's as if they were in a parade together. Style is not the issue here. It's the urban spaces that are important." And Aqua does fulfill another New Urbanist mandate, which is to work in smaller tracts within cities, to rebuild old neighborhoods and offer new ones in an existing urban context.

Mr. Robins sees this as his greatest goal. "I hope we're going to do something extraordinary here," he said. "This is not a development. It is a neighborhood."