The one-sheet code that governs every building at Seaside: a chart of building types by location, each with its rules for yards, porches, heights, outbuildings and parking, plus short architectural rules for materials, roofs and fences.
Robert Davis inherited eighty acres of Gulf-coast scrub from his grandfather and, with the Miami architects Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, planned a small town on it from 1978, modelled on the old towns of the American South. Instead of designing the buildings, the planners wrote a code: a single chart assigning each lot one of a handful of building types and, for each type, where the building stands on its lot, how high it may be, where the porch and the outbuilding go and whether a tower is allowed. A separate architectural code covers materials (wood, pitched metal roofs, vertically proportioned windows) and the white picket fence along every street.
Within the code, owners could hire any architect, and many did (Léon Krier, Aldo Rossi, Steven Holl, Robert A. M. Stern and others), so that the town is at once uniform and varied. Seaside became the founding example of the New Urbanism.
The book, part by part
I The code
Building types by lot; porches, fences, towers, roofs.
Rules: A code by building type · Porches near the street, fences unlike each other