A small resort town on the Gulf of Mexico built to a one-page code: cottages with porches and picket fences on streets running to the sea, arcaded buildings on a central square, a temple-fronted post office, and a pavilion closing the end of every street.
Seaside, on the Florida panhandle, was planned from 1978 by Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk for the developer Robert Davis on eighty acres of dune scrub. Its planners did not design the buildings; they wrote a code. A single chart gives each lot a building type and, for each type, where the house stands, how high it may be, where its porch and outbuilding go and whether it may have a tower; a short architectural code asks for wood, pitched metal roofs and a white picket fence along every street, each unlike its neighbours.
The plan is small enough to cross on foot in five minutes. Streets run north from the coast road to the town’s edge, and diagonal avenues radiate from the central square, which opens south to the road and the beach; civic buildings take the important sites: the post office in the square, the chapel at the head of the avenue, and a pavilion over the dunes at the foot of every street. Along the highway, sheds carry their signs in front, as Venturi had recommended.
Seaside became the prototype of the New Urbanism, whose Charter (1996) turned its lessons into principles: compact, walkable, mixed-use neighbourhoods and civic buildings on important sites. The layout here follows the principles of the real plan but is simplified.