Seaside, Florida is well known as the proving grounds for new urbanism, the place where Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk made a development into a town. Dhiru Thadani documents the early experiments and unbuilt designs in a new book.
Though it's become a touchstone for the New Urbanist movement, Seaside was a radical experiment for its day, rejecting the cookie-cutter, auto-oriented development of the time and driven by the idea of creating a real town.
Dhiru Thadani talks about the creation of Seaside in an interview with CNU: "When Andrés first came up with the idea to design a new town, he talked about that it [sic] a lecture he gave at The Catholic University, where I was teaching. My teaching partner and I decided that it would be a wonderful studio project to give to the students. The result was kind of the infancy of what is now called form-based codes."
The students' designs, and those of many other architects, form the backbone of Visions of Seaside, Thadani's new book.
"Some of the lessons that we have talked about in new urbanism, of distance, location, geography, how we can actually have a prominent site, all of those things come into play," explains Thadani in the interview.
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