From Seaside to Seahaven

HUM 3085: Florida CultureFall 2010

Dr. PerdigaoNovember 17, 2010

A stronger “sense of place”

New Urbanism and Sustainability

“Where’s Fiji?”

Real neighborhoods

“The Truman Show starring Jim Carrey was filmed in Seaside. Also Newsweek once stated, ‘with its cozy, narrow streets and its jumble of pastel-colored homes, Seaside is probably the most influential resort community since Versailles.’ It’s easy to see why Time magazine described Seaside as ‘the most astounding design achievement of its era’ - with nine quaint beach pavilions, cobblestone streets, beautiful and elegant cottages, surrounded by small white picket fences, and small parks and cozy storefronts, we think you’ll feel right at home in Seaside.”

http://www.seaside-homes-for-sale.com/

Or Martha’s Vineyard?

Christof, control, and Epcot?

Creating a legacy

Living Disney

Baudrillard anyone?

Another view

Dr. Braithwaite’s project

Another Distory?

Selling the mirror in your soul?

Preserving Walt

The pillars of the community

From easels to reality

Conformity and individuality

Spanish as Florida style?

Imagineering

How can we expect people to move in if they can’t even fit inside the houses?

Grand designs

Celebrate yourself

From dolls to the Garden

“In 1946, on one of the family's summer pilgrimages to the shore, Robert Davis' grandfather, J.S. Smolian, bought 80 acres near Seagrove Beach, on Florida's northwest coast. His intention was to build a summer camp for his employees, but his business partner wanted no part of what must have seemed like a worthless tract of sand. The Smolian family continued coming to that same shore every summer and occasionally J.S. would take young Robert to the fields at the western edge of Seagrove Beach and walk around the tract.

Robert Davis grew up to be a student of history as well as business, and became an award-winning builder/developer in Miami in the 70's When he considered making plans for the property near Seagrove, he naturally thought about idyllic family vacations along the same coast and the small cottages the family had stayed in. If he closed his eyes and let his mind wander back, he could almost feel gentle sea breezes evaporating the moisture on his skin as he sat on a porch rocker after a shower at the end of a day on the beach, absorbed in stories being told by grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins.

The idea of Seaside started with the notion of reviving Northwest Florida's building tradition, which had produced wood-frame cottages so well adapted to the climate that they enhanced the sensual pleasure of life by the sea, while accommodating generations of family members, kids, if they were good, got to sleep on the porch...

These cottages had deep roof overhangs, ample windows and cross ventilation in all rooms. They were built of wood and other time-tested materials and with reasonable maintenance, could last several generations. When Robert Davis asked Miami architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk to help him plan a community which could combine the traditions which had produced these buildings, it was soon clear that considerable research needed to be done. No one knew how to revive a building tradition. So a number of journeys were made through the South, and especially through Florida, with cameras and sketch pads and tape measures, until the architects and developer felt confident that the basic rules for making these buildings were understood. Most of the buildings were studied in the context of small towns, and gradually the idea evolved that the small town was the appropriate model to use in thinking about laying out streets and squares and locating the various elements of the community.”

http://www.seasidefl.com/communityHistory.asp

Developing

“What makes Seaside a better place to live? How can Seaside and other communities be refined and improved upon? The Seaside Institute studies and finds answers to these two dynamic questions. Through its forums and conferences on architecture, planning and urban affairs, The Institute is a resource for anyone interested in making communities better. Each year, the Fellows and Board of Governors and Directors of The Seaside Institute award the Seaside Prize to recognize individuals or organizations that have made significant contributions to the quality and character of our communities.

The cultural heart of Seaside, The Institute makes life better in Seaside by sponsoring world-class art events of all kinds for Seaside's residents and visitors.”

http://www.seasidefl.com/communityInstitute.asp

Studying Seaside

• “To create in the new age is inevitably to re-cycle, or simulate, signs of past cultures. Instead of some prior reality, art actually now deals in ‘myths of origin’ and Baudrillard locates his own sign of this in Disneyland—an artefact that so obviously announces its own fictiveness that it would seem to imply some counterbalancing reality.” (404)

• Successive phases of the image:• (1) It is the reflection of a basic reality.• (2) It masks and perverts a basic reality.• (3) It masks the absence of a basic reality.• (4) It bears no reality to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (405)

• “Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc.” (405).

• Disneyland as third-order simulation: “Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real America, which is Disneyland. . . .Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.” (406)

Perverting the real

• “Los Angeles is encircled by these ‘imaginary stations’ which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation: a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions.” (406)

• Salmon’s “entrepreneurial city” compared to boomburb, megalopolis

• Entrepreneurialism and imagineering (108)

• Late 1980s, “emphasis on image and cultural representation” marking urban development (107); 1990s developments with globalization, new industries (finance, high technology and information fields) (108)

• “By creating simulated tradition, the commodified spectacle, studded with all available artifacts and relics, obscures the city’s real history as well as its contemporary reality” (Salmon 110): St. Augustine, Linden Hills, Seaside, Celebration

• “urban regeneration”: Miami, Jacksonville

• “emphasizes nostalgia and the virtues of localism”: idea of the Southern in Dubey’s piece

Reconstruction

• Baltimore Inner Harbor Project—connection to Boston’s Faneuil Hall, opened in 1976, in historic building; Harborplace in 1980 (112)

• the way in which “the local becomes global” (113), attracting visitors worldwide

• Melbourne Beach—discovered by Ponce de Leon?

• 1844 Brevard County established as Florida’s 25th county

• Cocoa Beach Town incorporated in 1925; “officially incorporated” on June 29, 1957; population jumps 1000 percent between 1950 and 1960

• Cape Canaveral incorporated on May 16, 1963

• Melbourne incorporated in 1888, merges with Eau Gallie in 1969

• Melbourne—Eau Gallie Bridge opened in 1926

• 1921—graduating class in Eau Gallie in 1921; 1949, combines Eau Gallie High School and Melbourne High School

Establishments

• Harmony, Eden, Experiment, and Amity American towns (Ross 2)

• New Urbanism “vowed to reintroduce suburban Americans to the civic virtues of active community involvement” (5).

• Toll on wetland and lake ecosystems, hatching rate of alligators plummeting (7)

• Boca Raton, Tampa, Orlando, Gainesville, West Palm, Jacksonville, all “forged and adopted planning principles that stress mixed land use, compact residential and commercial density, pedestrian or mass-transit orientation, and, where it still exists, greenfield preservation” (8).

• 1985 growth management legislation passed

• Ross as writer of new utopian travelogue—Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, William Morris, Edward Bellamy, H. G. Wells, and Ursula Le Guin (9)

• Celebration—Founders Day (November 18, 1995), 350 sites up for lottery (17)

• “Progressive education, high technology, unequaled health facilities, and quality homes, but the fantasy glue that sealed the package was a story about going home again” (19).

Designing utopia

• “dating” Celebration, providing a “themed backstory”: “the town was built by survivors of a shipwrecked Spanish galleon, and the residents had an elaborate monument in the town square by which to remember their heroic ancestors”; “Celebration had been built anew out of the rubble left by General Sherman’s ruinous march through the South” (Ross 22).

• Instead, neotraditonal town, “recreating the past while preserving their modernity” (22).

• “dollar-poor purgatory of Central Florida” (24)

• Modern versus traditional

Heritage

• “We are now developing an entirely new social climate in this country. . . . This new approach to life, which we call Neotraditionalitsm, is not a rejection of what came before, as the ‘Me Generation’ values were. Rather, it is a synthesis of the best parts of the two previous values systems, combining the security and responsibility of the 50s with the individual freedoms and personal choice of the ‘Me Generation.’ Consumers seem to be seeking a state of equilibrium, a balance between these extremes” (27).

• “the task of re-creating traditional housing designs in an industry that had forgotten how to build them was fraught with obvious pitfalls, especially in a town being thrown up so quickly” (47).

• George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and mall culture (Ross 50)

• Ideas of public space, pedestrian communities

• Sprawl and mall

Financing space