The Architecture of Seaside Florida

This is my last look at Seaside Florida for awhile, I can imagine everyone is getting a little sick of looking/ hearing about it by now. All I wanted to do with today’s post is share some of the images I collected during my trip. Overall, I took just over 1,200 pictures with roughly half focusing on buildings, soffits, flashing details and material transitions. We have all heard it before but architects really do plan trips around architecture and I was simply adding to my image collection.

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This is a look down highway 30A, just above the cars. This highway is the lifeline to Seaside and the two lane undivided road that cuts through town. It’s hard to call it a highway since the fastest anyone can drive it in this area maxes out around 10 mph.

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A very large part of what makes Seaside work as a vacation destination is that the beaches here are beautiful. Clean, white sand and a family oriented environment. It just happens to be the birthplace of New Urbanism. Bonus for me!

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Seaside has several elements that set the vernacular; towers, picket fences, porches, roof pitches, etc. Some of the most recognizable are the pavilions set at the bottom of the streets that allow pedestrian foot traffic to pass through the protective dunes and get to the beaches. There are 8 in total, I’ve included four of my favorites. I believe that all but one are named for the street that is terminated at each pavilion. The one above is the Obe Pavilion by architect David Coleman – my favorite.

There used to be a set of monumental stairs and ramps coming down to the sand – this picture was taken in 2005. I’m not sure which hurricane from what year wiped these stairs out but they have been gone for a while so I don’t think they are coming back.

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West Ruskin Pavilion by architect Michael McDonough (which was my daughters favorite by a mile)

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Pensacola Pavilion by architect Tony Atkin

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Odessa Pavilion by architect Roger Ferri

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Towers are another omnipresent element throughout Seaside. If you could run out of film on a digital camera, trying to photograph all the towers here would probably do it. It is interesting to see how the different architects framed out the towers and worked them into the massing of the houses. Most of the homes here are quite small so towers figure in heavily to how the overall building is perceived.

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Might be hard to believe but Seaside has a school, appropriately named “Seaside Neighborhood School”. It is one of Florida’s first charter schools – established in 1996 – and serves sixth through eighth grade students. We have been in Seaside (when my daughter Kate was just a small baby) when school was still in session. At times, you would see the children wearing their uniforms come down to the beach (a 3 minute walk) and start collecting samples for some project. I think I would have liked that when I was in grade school.

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I covered the Seaside Chapel – designed by Scott Merrill – in Monday’s post. Mmmmmm, just as good today …

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This is the Nesbitt House designed by architects Robert A.M. Stern and Gary Brewer.

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This is “Birdie’s” house (originally the “Kennedy” House) designed by Samuel Mockbee and Coleman Coker. I covered this house in detail yesterday.

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This house was designed by traditional architect and theorist Leon Krier. This was actually the first project I ever saw published in Seaside. Of course it was white back then – this ochre color is new. This house – from a photo documenting standpoint, represent the main challenge to getting pictures of anything at Seaside. You can’t back up far enough to avoid distortion with your wide angle lens, and the foliage is so dense that there isn’t anything to take a picture of for the first 15′ off the ground. At least the Krier house is on a corner so you can get some of it in the picture.

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This house is only famous because it recently housed an architect of world renown (if you read architecture blogs that is)… Yes, this is where we stayed on our trip.

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Frost Bites is the air stream trailer that site across the road from the Obe Pavilion and does a crazy amount of business selling sno-cones. Between me, my daughter, and the 5 other folks on this trip, I’m pretty sure they can expand the size of their trailer with all my money they now have. That is cultural prodigy Kate Borson on the right and she is standing underneath a sign that announces a new flavor – Kate’s Berry Berry Blue. She came up with this concoction and it was so delicious that it’s going up on the board permanently. I told you she is a visionary…

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So I will leave you with one final observation about Seaside … kids like digging holes in the sand. While I would like to applaud my daughters dedication to digging a hole large enough for a 50″ tall 7 year old to burrow underground, all children dig holes like this. They were everywhere you looked – like a giant sand version of whack-a-mole.

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