The Sisyphus Medal

Dhiru Thadani has designed the Sisyphus Implementation Medal for CNU. The first recipient was Buff Chace, who received the award at CNU 33 in Providence in 2025, but there was no time to design the medal itself before its presentation.

Developer Buff Chace “was responsible over the last 35 years for the revival of downtown Providence,” according to Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany, two of CNU’s founders. Here was the text that was read by Plater-Zyberk to introduce the medal: 

Images of Sisyphus show a man condemned to push a boulder uphill. The story goes that when approaching the summit, the boulder rolls down and he must begin again. This is not unlike the experience of those New Urbanists who, to build a great community must climb a mountain of resistance again and again. 

The lesson of Sisyphus lies in understanding his transgression. Pushing the boulder uphill is not an arbitrary punishment. He was being punished for insulting the gods. Sisyphus chose his fate. To escape this fate, the urbanist need only to stop countering the conventional system, the boulder then rolls on level ground

The urbanist must engage skeptical neighbors, the certainties of the traffic engineers and the  fire marshals, the timidity of the elected officials, the loan standards of the bankers, the countervailing codes of the regulators. Conventional developers who obey these gods have a much easier time of it. 

We wish to establish this medal to reward those who implement New Urbanism. Their decision to do so is a heroic act.