Preface:
In the preface, Dhiru A. Thadani recounts his personal engagement with Seaside, when he met Andre Duany at his lecture at the Catholic University of America, where Duany “discussed the idea of making a town whose constituent parts included a mix of uses that commonly support daily lives – housing, office, retail, and civic institutions such as schools, churches, post office, and community meeting hall – arranged in a memorable block structure with walkable streets where pedestrians were given priority over cars.” Inspired by the plan, Thadani and his students had worked on a 5-weeks studio, using the master plan and form-based code to analyze the project. At the end they produced a scaled model of the entire town as well as every single building.
What is striking about Thadani’s research is that he traced the “invisible” rather the visible, namely the unbuilt projects and their significant meanings as well as the lost opportunities that they might have contributed. The extremely long observation (of over 30 years) of the town made it clear for him the kind of lessons that Seaside hold, most importantly the signs of the three-step ‘smart change’ according to Peter Palchinsky, which are a new way to develop coastal property, trial of idea on a small scale without incurrin debt, and a feedback mechanism to “inform themselves on failures, successes, and the reasons why.”
As opposed to today’s fast production of urban projects, Thadani advocates for slow development, in his own word: “In this day of high-speed action, intense population growth, threatening climate change, and monotonous mass production, Seaside stands as evidence that good things take time, small is beautiful, democratic freedom can be achieved within a set of rules, and beauty is essential to uplift the human spirit.”
Foreword
Introduction
The book is organized in 6 chapters, which are:
- Foundation
- Evolution
- Built Architecture
- Unbuilt Projects
- Imagination
- Postcript
1. Foundation
The essay on The Craft of Community Making by Daryl Rose Davis shows the importance of community making through activities of members. From Walton County to Northwest Florida. Daryl recalled of the lack of community services in Walton County. Her role was summed up as to “show what life at Seaside could offer by demonstrating the possibilities of an evolving Seaside style – clothing, dinners, decor, and the many activities that communities can create.” The increamental development was showed in 8 steps. With her involvments in organizing events and helping local businesses, Seaside went beyond just a town and became a destination of cultural and educational events and for shopping and dining. Moreover, Dayryl also came up with a Blueprint for Community Building that contains 13 specific points.
Robert A.M. Stern talked about the concept of Invented Towns while praising Seaside as a compelling case for a “resort town,” and that Seside is not only an example of town-making but also the “future of conurbation.” In rejecting the “assembling line” method of most developers and town planners from the 1930s to 1960s in America, Stern argues for the richness in tradition that Seaside possesses and even considered it a “viable work of art.” An invented town, according to him, is a development that combines “high idealism with bottom-line pragmatism,” and responds to social needs. By citing Seaside as such, he lined it up with other towns that were built between the Civil War and the Great Depression: Riverside in Illinois. which was developed in the Railroad Age, was a successful model for land subdivision that worked well with the natural landscape, and Mariemont (Cicinnati, Ohio), being an example of the automobile era, with a carefully designed hierarchy of streets and a formal central square. The latter actually became a role model for many Florida cities later on. The developer Denman Fink and the architect Phineas Paist later established another town in Florida named Coral Gables, which featured a sereis of canals and plazas that populated the flat site. Seadie, according to Stern, is the return to the American urban invention of the pre-World War II era. He expresses his shock on the continuing urban srpawl development currently with full of new uniformed new towns. We can clearly relate this phenomenon to the current situation of urbanization in developing countries like Vietnam today. Stern recalls his collaboration with Andres Duany on Subway Suburb for the Venice Bienale, and especially his pleasure of getting to design a whole new town of Celebration in Florida. The town of Celebration (4,900 acres, 200,000 residents) itself takes root on previous successful towns, either “naturally evolved” (East Hampton, Long Island, Charleston, South Carolina) or built anew (Savannah, Georgia, Forest Hills Gardens, New York). Beside the masterplanning, the Stern’s office also provide architectural design guidelines for the town center, which radiates towards the neighborhoods. They also came up with a “pattern book” in order to work on the town archtiectural identity of the Southern architecture, that “extended to the smallest details, inlcuding the town’s signage.” Stern’s argument is that suburbs might be the opportunity to reinvent cities, and that actions would begin in neglected land in cities such as Brownsville or East New York in New York, downtown Detroit and St. Louis and so on. His dream is that there would be strong-willed developers who would be willing to transform urban decay areas into thriving communities. And that would be done with the spirit of the Invented Towns.
In another essay, Robert Campbell talked about an inititative by Robert Davis: the Seaside Pienza Institute (now Seaside Institute), whose functions was to gather professionals and enthusiasts together to exchange ideas on creating better cities and towns. The name of the institute clearly suggests the inflence of the town Pienza in Tuscany, Italy, which shares its similarity with Seaside on its human scaled pattern of the village and its “boldly shaped public realm.” However, Pienza is not the ultimate role model for Seaside, especially from the economic perspective, or even social. It’s been running the risk of being its own image of the past, and that tourists don’t usually spend much for the services are not contributing to its local economy. Campbell reasons for the theatrical quality of Seaside as viable asset for New Town as tourist destination, and compares the imaginative “Seaside play” with the story of Pope Pius II in Pienza, in his words “In each town, the story is an invisible aura that enhances the physical place.” But he also warned about the risks of the place being one of the “touristic celebrities,” that, pretty much like a theater, divide its population into performers and audiences, and that the town would become itself a fiction, “a storyboard about itself and its life.” Indeed, Seaside was already a “star” as it serves as the background story for the movie The Truman Show. In conclusion, Campbell argues for a need to keep the balance between imagination and reality of Seaside as a place, by quoting the poet Wallace Stevens‘ remark on “living in a description of a place and not place itself,” and the warning from the philosopher George Santayana, that “Imagination needs a soil in history, tradition, or human institutions, else its random growths are not significant enough and, like trivial melodies, go immediately out of fashion.”
In a writing that spans 30 years named “Organon,” Patrick Pinnell even see Seaside as an attempt towards ‘Ethical Urbanism,’ showing the evidence in Duany and Platter-Zyberk’s principle of designing local orders and “frayed patchwork grids” in their many plans across scales (neighborhood, town and regional plans), namely Deerfield (40 acres), Mashpee Commons (450 acres), and Wellington (more than 1,600 acres). In particularly, he noticed a kind of “ad-hoc and fractional” patterns of the town-scale plans found in these projects, that are hard to read as overall pattern but very legible and navigable on the ground. Strikingly, the 30 years span observation is just a tiny fraction in comparison to the reasoning behind it, being Aristotle’s Organon, which is used to validate the intentions of the planners. For example, Aristotle’s resistance to the “absolute didactic insistence on the presence of any pure thing or form” is reflected in the architects’ working of the block within a given landscape topography: “the blocks are bent, squeezed, stretched, chopped, or inflected expediently to suit terrain, orientation, or what have you in the way of local circumstances.” Behind all these formal approaches actually are, according to Pinnell, the “underlying social and political attitudes in the case of collective-use structures.” Over the course of 30 years, the inflected formed monuments designed by Duany and Platter-Zyberk, like their blocks, coincides with the contemporary change in the use of institutions, especially the two oposite trends of the mega-mall and the activities of the public life themselves. However, the independence of the individuals from the insitutions is, by no means, the disapperance of their engagement in public life, Pinnell had argued for this in his earlier writing but then was able to show relevant examples years later, such as the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movement, both largly used the power of the internet in order to reactiviate or reclaim public spaces. This independence and local orders, advocated by the architects, has the potential to empower the town’s residents to be less dependent on the corporate industries (especially the automobile, oil, and gas consortia) and instead, favors local savings and investments. This seems to justify the Aristotle’s judge in Ethics that “no single political state should exceed a certain size.”
Finally, Andres Duany writes an overall article about New Urbanism (Ground Zero of New Urbanism), in which he specifies the four phases of development of the group of New Urbanists and what made them relevant in the field and in the market. Seaside actually marked an early success, following by the uninteded consequence of the suburb lifestyle – NYMBYs. The third phase relates the “suburb diseases” such as obesity and the ethical side of New Urbanism. And finally the fourth one shows the environmental aspect of New Urbanism being adopted in the wider agendas such as the LEED system (LEED-ND), which affects many local planning codes. On the other hand, Duany also points out some of the failures of the group, specifically ones that relate to the issue of ‘Styles’ and the unnection with architectural education. Perhaps, just like the “natural evolution” of a New Town, New Urbanism is different from other “isms” in that it is more pragmatic rather than ideological. It evolves by embracing other “good ideas” (as Alex Krieger would put it) in order to perfect itself.
2. Evolution
Andres Duany charted the evolution of the Seaside plan, not only on its own phases but also on its influence and connectivity with the later developments in the region, such as Water Color, Rosemary Beach or Alys Beach. Early criticism includes the negation of Seaside as a “real town,” and is just another resort. But Duany has pointed out that this resort program actually makes the influence of Seaside more widespread, since more people can experience its operation by living in it, even for short stays, thanks to its rental program. And as a resort, he continues, Seaside excel the ideal, or even utopian vision of new urbanism, as it would portraits not just any “daily life,” but the dream life. For Duany and the other architects who involved with Seaside, the town actually changes their professional lives as well. One of the examples is his experience with “the process of sequential building design enabled by the code,” which certainly left good impact for young professionals and design students.
In ‘The Seaside Code,’ Emily Talen gives a brief overview of rules and its applications in town planning in America, from John Nolen’s zoning act for Washington D.C to the “performance standards” in Chicago in 1957 (applied to manufacturing districts), the many technical inventions like the planned unit development (PUD) and the Floor Area Ratio (FAR), to the 1961’s New York Zoning Code. Throughout this history is the attempt to increase flexibility in utilzing the codes. But it is exactly because of this flexiblity that the code became less and less relevant, and became the cause of bad planning. The Seaside Code in 1982, in contrary, was an attempt to make rules relevant to form, pattern, and places. This tendance to relate codes to forms has been shared by professionals over the years. Talen cited examples such as Traditional Neighborhood Development ordinances, Mixed-Use and Live/Work codes, TOD ordinances, Transit Area Codes, transect-based codes, Smart Growth codes, Sustainable codes, Transit-supportive codes, Urbanist codes, Green Building Codes and so on. Talen also noticed that although “flexibilities” in codes often lead to corruption or failure in planning, designers are surprisingly reluctant to adopt form-based codes sush as Seaside’s. The reason for it is that they would think such codes would block their imagination in form-making and place making, which have been a procedure of competition over collaboration. The integration of top-down and bottom-up approaches in planning has been a great problem since a hundred of years. The Seaside code is an attempt to reconcile the “top-down” and the “bottom-up” decisions and balance the design flexibility with predictable formal approach. It thus entails specific urban regulations for all building types and lots as well as an architectural code for every architectural elements based on their applied materials, configurations, and techniques.
Dhiru A. Thadani attributes Seaside success partly to its evolution of diagrams, from the very first existing site diagram to the categorized diagrams of public and private lands and buildings, vehicular and pedestrian network and so on. He argues for the clarity of diagrams that would not only help architects communicating ideas better with developers but also analyzing their own design schemes, even in the later design process. According to Thadani, The Seaside Diagrams are even useful in the post occupancy phase, where concerns of residents can be negotiated by using diagrams during conversations.
Thadani also gives a detailed analysis on the Street section drawings, which helps not only to understand the building volume but more importantly the enclosure of the space in between the buildings. Together, the plan and the section helps reveal the logic of a place, or in his own words “In resurrecting the art of placemaking it is essential to restore the role of the section drawing to its place in the planner’s everyday toolkit. To truly understand the public realm of a hamlet, village, town, or city, one must study the section drawings of the streets and public spaces. The quality of enclosure of a space can only be understood by reviewing plan and section drawings together – studying one without the other reaveals only half the story.”
3. Built Architecture
The built architecture section includes public spaces (public and private realm: Central Square, Ruskin Place, Perspicacity, Motor Court, Natchez Park) and seclted buildings (Hodges Residence and Modica Market by Deborah Berke, Tupelo Pavliion by Ernestor Buch, Appelle Residence by Victoria Casasco, Dogtrot House and Pugin House by Walter Chatham, Truman House, Seaside Avenue Residence and Hudson Residence by Cooper Johnson Smith, Post Office Building and Seaside Avenue House by Robert Davis, Eclipse and Stairway to Heaven by Alexander Gorlin, Dreamland Heights by Stven Holl, Krier House by Leon Krier, Mixed-use Building by Machado Silvetti, Dogtrot Sales & Rental Office, Honeymoon Cottage and Seaside Chapel by Scott Merrill, Birdie by Mockbee Coker, Natchez House by Robert Orr, Variance by Aldo Rossi, Seasabella by Sabella Nunn Troxel Massey, Pool Pavilion by Derrick Smith, Beachfront Cottage by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, 210 Ruskin Place by Trelles Cabarrocas Architects, Dahlgren Residence and Seawell Residence by Charles Warren) along with other elements like Pavilons and Fences.
4. Unbuilt Architecture
The vision of Seaside can only be fully comprehended by assessing its unbuilt architecture.
Seaside
