Seaside, Florida: what’s possible when vision, tradition, creativity, adaptation, and, yes, time converge in ways that allow for careful study and consideration.
"If memory serves, it was twenty years ago this year that Seaside, Florida, first showed up on my radar. That’s fairly early if you use the typical southeastern beach goer as your guide but not so early if your measure is the people who actually made Seaside happen. Their window was considerably different. In fact, by the time I clued in in 1995, they’d been at the task for almost 15 years."
"Over the course of the past two decades, I’ve had the immense good fortune of having met many of those people — the developer, the planners, architects who’ve designed buildings there, and people involved in the ongoing sales and marketing operation. In some cases, these meetings have been fleeting but, in others, they’ve involved walking tours around Seaside, complete with commentary on not just the community’s many successes but also its weaknesses and — dare I say it — even its failures."
"That provides a terrific lens when considering one’s own thoughts on Seaside. Today I’m just coming off a return visit there where I had nothing on my plate but a week’s worth of wandering and pondering. Today’s blog presents a small collection of those thoughts."
Read the full story: Thoughts on Seaside at 35
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