Seaside Revisited

The little town of Seaside, a resort on the Florida panhandle that was founded in 1982, has had a remarkably big impact on the American landscape. The community features traditional architecture and a compact layout—central components of a planning philosophy that has come to be known as new urbanism—and its example has since changed the way that many new communities are designed. On the town's 25^th anniversary, I went back to see how the pioneering project has fared. The popular image of Seaside is best evoked by one of its first buildings: a beach pavilion. Pretty, picturesque, and romantic, it speaks of summer holidays of days gone by—perhaps not the holidays you actually had at Virginia Beach or on the Jersey shore, but the ones you wish you'd had.
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Although Seaside is a vacation community, its makers, the developer Robert Davis and the planners Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, intended it to be a model for suburban design. Conventional suburbs, which had developed in the '50s, were planned around the automobile, with houses on spacious lots, set well back from wide streets. The streets at Seaside were intentionally kept narrow, the lots small, the houses close to the street. The aim was to create a place in which walking around would be as pleasant as driving around—which, in a nutshell, is a definition of new urbanism.
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What captivated the media and the public about Seaside was its architecture. A design code encouraged homeowners to build front porches and lookout towers, which gave a view of the Gulf and quickly became a Seaside trademark. The colorful cottages were fronted by old-fashioned picket fences. Old-fashioned was a big part of the appeal. This was not the tasteful, generic country-club architecture that characterized many planned vacation communities in the '80s; it was more like the funky houses of Nantucket or Key West. It certainly wasn't "modern," which caused the architectural mainstream to mutter darkly about Disneyfication. Of course, the public loved it.
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In 1982, when Seaside began, the Florida panhandle was not a real-estate hot spot. Lots sold for about $15,000, and the homes were priced accordingly. The first houses—such as this one, designed by Deborah Berke—were modest, attractive versions of the sort of bungalows that were once common in Florida, and they cost about $60,000 to build. The biggest change that has occurred in Seaside in the intervening 25 years is a spectacular increase in prices, caused partly by a local property boom and partly by the appeal of the place itself. A house two doors down from this bungalow is currently on the market for $2 million.
Correction, March 1: Architect Deborah Berke's name was originally misspelled.
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Real-estate success has affected Seaside in several ways. As evidenced by the expensive cars parked in the street, this is no longer a funky beach community. With Gulf-front houses in the development now selling for more than $5 million, people don't build modest bungalows anymore. New buildings tend to be larger, more imposing, and more extravagantly designed. Nor have the original buildings been left untouched—there has already been one tear-down, as well as several major renovations. Robert A. M. Stern Architects, which normally builds sprawling country mansions, has built a tightly controlled, and surprisingly small, jewel of a house, facing the beach—Friedrich Schinkel-by-the-sea.
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Seaside, now almost fully built out, has more than 630 residential units, and with more people have come community facilities, including a children's camp, a meeting hall, a repertory theater, and a handsome nondenominational chapel. Not everything has evolved according to plan, however. Although Seaside incorporates the ideal of walkability, as in other new-urbanist communities, the American love affair with motor vehicles is not so easily suppressed. Here, mobility has reasserted itself in the form of electric golf carts. Since vacationers don't take their carts home with them, and since the houses generally don't have garages, the carts are left on the street. They resemble oversized, shrouded gas grills.
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Seaside has few permanent residents. The houses are primarily second homes, and many of the occupants are short-term visitors (there is an active rental program). Thus, this is a small town in the same way that a dude ranch is a ranch, or a bed-and-breakfast is a home that just happens to have guest rooms. Nevertheless, like most small towns, Seaside has a school. The Seaside Neighborhood School is a public charter school that is attended by more than 100 children from the county. It is an unusual amenity for a resort. Instead of the sounds of bouncing tennis balls and Jet Skis, you hear the shouts of playing children.
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The town center contains a variety of stores: a restaurant, a bar, and a bookstore. Some of the shops have apartments above. Yet, despite the presence of buildings by celebrated architects such as Steven Holl and Machado & Silvetti, the town center is a bit of a visual mess. The newest building, designed by Dan Solomon of WRT/Solomon, is bombastic and out of scale with the rest of the village. New urbanists often look abroad for their design models, and this has sometimes produced planning that seems more European than American, with axial boulevards, semicircular housing terraces (a la Bath), and piazzas. The latest addition to Seaside gives the impression of a fragment of an Italian town, shoehorned into Nantucket.
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Next door to Seaside is the too-cutely named WaterColor. Developed by the St. Joe Company, one of the largest landowners and developers in the state, the 500-acre resort community contains houses (eventually more than 1,000), as well as a town center. WaterColor is a grown-up, commercialized version of its quirky and charming bohemian neighbor. Cars are accommodated in rear garages, the landscaping is more sophisticated, and the lots are a little larger. With deeper pockets, St. Joe was able to build a town center more quickly than Seaside was, and the result is architecturally more coherent and functionally more diversified, with shops, apartments, offices, and a hotel.
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The ripple effect of Seaside, which is felt up and down the Gulf coast, is sometimes unexpected. In Destin, 25 miles away, a shopping mall sprouts lookout towers, although it is actually far from the water, and as far as I could tell, the turrets are not accessible to the public. Within the mall is an open-air shopping street that resembles a Capraesque small town. In American real-estate development, no good idea goes uncopied, although original intentions are sometimes misunderstood or overlooked. Twenty-five years on, it is evident that the influence of Seaside has been both profound and trivial: higher density, more walkability, more porches and towers—and many more cute picket fences.
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