Agenda - 01-22-1991 - Laserfiche WebLink

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rk 113' Seaside's designers sought to make it a community in the original sense of the iaord. post office and future town hall down the road, the beach community would seem to be only a charming and nostalgic resort. But when Plater- Zyberk says "nothing was in- vented, " she is accurate, serious, and mes- sianic: the couple based the town's organi- zation on pre –World War Il southern towns, and wants to model new towns and retrofit existing towns after them. Outdoor space in these towns collects primarily people, rather than just cars. Res- idents of the new Seaside walk to the tennis club, the post office, the downtown stores, and the beach, on sapling -lined streets and pedestrian walkways. One wide avenue with grand three -story houses offers the sort of promenade on which a contemporary khett Butler could lean over to Scarlet[ O'Hara, as he tips his hat to a passing neigh- bor, and say that what he wants from this town is recognition of his respectability. With the every-which -way conversations and personal networks its planning encour- ages, Seaside, when it is fully built, prom- ises to be the type of town that is knit into a lively, tight community of opinion. ,. Although well -known architects such as Leon Krier, kobert Stern, Stuart Cohen, Deborah Berke, and Steven Holl are all de- signing buildings here, the issue is not merely one of style. The architecture itself is intended to facilitate the way people meet: 'The point is not to look like an old town but to operate like one," Plater - Zyberk says. At Seaside, the buildings are refined, but they need not be ---the quality of fife is in the fabric, and the fabric can be overlaid onto any existing suburb. Until six years ago, Duany and Plater - Zyberk were partners in the successful, high- splash Miami firm Arquitectonica, from which they separated in favor of doing small, human -scale towns as advocated by European architectural theoretician Leon Krier and New York architect Robert Stern. At Seaside, they essentially devel- oped a small -town code with rules about how far houses should be from each other and from the street, and how wide the street itself should measure. Nothing was left to chance, except where they wanted chance to occur. During the recession in Florida from 1978 to 1980, the couple and developer Robert Davis drove throughout the South, simply stepping on the brakes when they saw, for example, beautiful antebellum avenues. They codified seven different types of urban buildings for Seaside. "It was a very exis- tential process," Duany says. '"Phis way, there's no possibility of error because the streets and buildings are derived from exist- ing types that we have seen work." The couple believes the rules they evolved, which were tested in design studios she teaches at the University of Miarni, are ge- neric. They are putting the code into a com- puter for application to other communities. The code will be able to recognize not only old building types like the schoolhouse and post office, but new ones, such as parking structures and six -lane roadways. Suburbs have long been overlooked by architects fixed on designing the next stun- ning downtown building. But Duany and Plater - Zyberk recognize there are reasons people prefer suburbs. "There's an ease of movement," she says. 'There's the back- yard. " but they also see ways of improving them. "Ali suburbs contain within them the aspects of a town — houses, apartments, shopping centers, offices. That's all that is necessary," she says, noting that the way suburbs are assembled today usually per- mits no alternative to the car. "Even the willingness to be coded is there," says Duany, referring to existing building and planning codes. "If an architect starts with an idea of a parking lot, he's al- ready defeated --it's what you have in mind that counts. What the American city needs is to encode for different social J - 7 mechanisms. " Plater- Zyberk, who herself was raised in a small town outside Philadelphia, (her father and uncle were architects in Poland before the war and later in the U.S.), says that it's simply a question of adding more functions to existing buildings. She cites possibilities for Dadeland Mall as an example. Surround- ed by parking areas, the mall is adjacent to several office buildings that are also sur- rounded by parking. Nearby are garden apartments, and beyond that, individual houses. "You might start by incorporating housing for the elderly next to the mall, an a part of the parking lot," she says. 'Then there might be a child -care center. You might hook up this complex to another with public transportation, and soon the areas would start to 'center' what is a dispersed community." The Galleria in Houston, for example, has two large hotels and two office buildings that adjoin the mall. There is a track on the roof. It mixes uses. "Suddenly things are working together, not in isola- tion," she says. Plater - Zyberk teaches full time, and Duany frequently lectures. lie says that some of their students do not even know what a city street is, and that many people visit Disney World for its old -time urban- ism, for its sidewalks, shops, benches, trees. Many postwar suburbs dtroughout the United States, she notes, do not even have sidewalks. The couple believe that architecture and planning should not be divorced, that archi- tects must think of the larger picture rather than just the single building. "What you final- ly remember about the cities you like are not really the individual monuments but the spaces the tides form, the way buildings surround you," Plater- Zyberk says. In their own architectural projects, even small ones, they try to create an urban space, like a street corridor or a plaza within the site, when there is no surrounding "ur- banism" to incorporate. Where that is not possible, they design buildings to be a part of a city or town, fragments of a larger whole. At the least, this means that one of their suburban houses fronts the street squarely, holding the line suggested by oth- er houses, and is not allowed to amble off at a "creative" angle. "There has to be a line, " she says. The line could be as simple as an allee of trees regularly planted on both sides of a street. "What is fundamental is that a street or square be spatial, not a lot of unde- fined open space with buildings scattered in the landscape," Duany says. They have a blueprint —or rather a print- out --for reconstructing the city and suburb. The real design is the redesign of the code. "A lot of people are cynical and think the situation is hopeless," he says. "We think it can be brought under control and im- proved." Jm&w Gwvumm is an aerAuwtuee miu- isong in Neu York. 0wrleaf: Seaside. on the Gulf of Maim 113 E5tlUIkE1DE:CEM1iF1< lbrk,