The first thing you notice in Biloxi and other places on the Mississippi Gulf Coast is the empty space.  Driving on Route 90 along the shore, there’s a strange mix of vacant lots, big trees and new, not especially good buildings.  And then you realize you’ve entered the Katrina zone.  While most of the outside world’s attention ten years ago was focussed on New Orleans, Biloxi (75 miles away) was hit with the same storm surge.  It didn’t kill as many people, and it didn’t inundate as large an area (as Biloxi is not below sea level, as is most of New Orleans), but it pretty much wiped out the blocks nearest the Gulf.  We passed many historical markers, but couldn’t see the subjects to which they referred – they turned out to be markers for historic buildings which were no longer there.  Waterfront property is a valuable and limited commodity, but In Biloxi and adjacent Ocean Springs, there’s still plenty available.

Away from the Gulf, the historic core of Biloxi survived, but it appears that it had previously succumbed to waves of economic abandonment, demolition, and ill-conceived urban renewal schemes.  Biloxi resembles Vegas or Atlantic City on a smaller scale, where the gambling construction moved to a different location, and the older downtown was left to shrivel up.  There are a few good buildings remaining,   

but overall it is a sad place, at best neglected, and at worst abused by the insensitive insertions. such as this dreadful pile of a hospital.  

Back on the waterfront, there is some new residential construction, by people who can afford beefed-up structures and floodable ground floors, 

but most of the rebuilding has been by institutions or corporations with deep pockets.  The casinos have been rebuilt, and they constitute a world apart, right on the water with their own parking structures, and not much connection to the city further inland.    

Some older structures withstood the hurricane in this area, mainly solid buildings, such as Our Lady of The Casinos.  

New waterfront buildings are raised above the flood level, and include this bar, which is about the only building I’ve ever seen which makes reasonable use of shipping containers.  

In an attempt to bring back the tourists and the economy, some new institutions have been built, such as Gehry’s Ohr-O’Keefe Museum (which I’ll detail in a later post), and a Maritime and Seafood Industry Museum (not to be confused with Fernandina’s Shrimping Museum.  I’ve never seen so many museums dedicated to specific industries as in the South.)    

The important historic houses were salvaged  and have been rebuilt.  Most significant is the Charley-Norwood house in Ocean Springs, which is thought to have been designed by FL Wright while he was working in Sullivan’s office,  It is a remarkably pristine and rigorous house for its period, one which shows influences from the Shingle Style, but which is rigidly symmetrical and utilizes pure, stripped-down forms.        

The other major house restoration is that of Beauvoir, the last house where Jefferson Davis lived, and where he wrote his memoirs.  It is the centerpiece of a large complex, which is owned by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who operated a Confederate veterans home there until the last veteran died.  When we entered the property we encountered a small group of Civil War War of Northern Aggression reenactors, who invited Greta to fire their cannon.

The house itself was badly damaged by Katrina, with water rising 18 inches above the floor of the raised living level, and the outbuildings were destroyed.  All has been restored, and the tour we were on was among the most comprehensive and professional we’ve encountered.  The house is of the raised plantation type, with a deep verandah on all sides,   a central hall,   and high-ceilinged parlors and bedrooms off the hall, with painted trompe-l’oeil detailing.    

Davis’s study has been rebuilt, a beautiful, simple, outbuilding,   looking out to the Gulf.  

The building that housed Davis’s archives and library was also destroyed, and it has been replaced by a new museum and library, which is amongst the most pretentious and ghastly buildings we’ve encountered in six months.  It is hard to imagine a less coherent collection of random motifs and irreconcilable forms.  The state of architecture in the South is even worse than I’d imagined – I expected banality, but nothing this aggressively awful.  It appears that all the good buildings in the area have been designed by outsiders.  

Leaving Biloxi we drove through Gulfport, where the most notable feature is a massive, rebuilt marina.  There are industrial elements we couldn’t quite figure out.  

A pavilion built to withstand the next hurricane.  

Public bathrooms strangely raised up above the flood level, with the world’s longest ramp to access them.  (If your city is being once again destroyed by a Category 4 hurricane, we don’t know why it is important to make sure the bathrooms survive.) 

And elegant marina buildings of unclear function, but which appear to have been designed by Leon Krier (or at least to evoke Seaside).  

All of this had the look of federal money being spent on restoration and economic revival after Katrina.  In fact, the South is full of federally-funded establishments everywhere you look.  More military bases than anywhere else, and all the major pieces of the space program, strewn from Florida to Texas.  So fittingly, as we were about to depart Mississippi for Louisiana, Roadside America came through with another winner – a lunar module trainer used by the Apollo 13 astronauts, and now installed in a rest area on I-10.  

When Seaside, Florida was built on the Florida Panhandle in the 1980s, it was the groundbreaking demonstration of what later became known as New Urbanism.  The architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (DPZ) worked with the developer Robert Davis to create a beachfront resort town that would harken back to an earlier era, before Americans starting lining the coastlines with condos that segmented and privatized all contact with the sea.  While still in architecture school at Yale in the 70s, Duany and Plater-Zyberk saw through the pieties of modernist town planning, and pointed out how well the neighborhoods of 19th-century American cities worked;  they also drew inspiration from the extraordinary planning of the pre-war era (such as at Radburn:  https://peregrine-nation.com/2015/12/22/radburn-new-jersey).  While Postmodernism was in the ascendancy in the 1980s, making a case against doctrinaire modernist architecture that was strong theoretically but terribly compromised in practice, DPZ led the much more successful and enduring movement to change the way cities and neighborhoods were planned.  DPZ built upon theorists such as Leon Krier and Aldo Rossi, and were able to adapt these ideas to the American context, and even more amazingly, work with developers to put these ideas into practice.  The property for Seaside had been owned by Robert Davis’s family for decades, and luckily by the time he came to develop it, their design practice had caught up with his vision for a traditional town.

This is another blog post which parallels one of my pre-existing lectures.  In explaining the reactions to modernism in the late 20th-century, I use Seaside as an illustration, as it is very clear how the ideas were put into practice.  I visited Seaside for the first time in 1994, and on this trip I was most interested in seeing how it had evolved and changed in the intervening years.  I found that most of the original architectural and planning ideas had stood the test of time quite well, but at the same time I felt that the earlier promise and innocence of Seaside had been lost.  I don’t think the fault is with the design, but rather mainly reflects the direction in which our society has moved in the past thirty years.

The first innovation at Seaside is the Plan.  It shows some of the major ideas:  a central commercial area on the state highway which runs along the shore, a combination of gridded and radial streets out into the neighborhoods, clear locations for the community, civic and other sacred uses, a hierarchy of street types which determines which building types go where, and a relative lack of buildings between the highway and the Gulf, allowing public views and access to the water rather than walling it off for the few.  Residential streets are shared by cars and pedestrians, plus there are walkways at the rear of all the residential lots, which lead to beach pavilions across the highway.

The second innovation at Seaside was the Code, which was a radical revamping of zoning.  Instead of specifying all the things and places where and how you couldn’t build, in every district house location and type was spelled out, and architects had a clear direction to follow.  This differs markedly in different places in the town, the intention being that the building designs support the overall character of the various public spaces.  There are small-scale streets, grander streets, streets where the houses determine a street wall, streets where the ambience is more that of small bungalows.

The first wave of very good architects who worked here got it.  Their designs are simple, relatively small, and respond to the historical and climatic context.  They were good buildings, but they clearly cared more about contributing to the overall character of the town than to any architectural grandstanding.      

Both DPZ and Davis talked about the appropriateness of “cracker” buildings, with big screened porches, gables, picket fences, etc., and while the architects sometimes pushed the boundaries, they used these ideas as jumping-off point, as in this house by my classmate Victoria Casasco.  

or this one by Sam Mockbee (of Rural Studio fame).  

These neighborhoods have maintained their character, and have even improved, as the landscape has become mature.  The streets are beautifully-scaled and textured, functional for driving and a pleasure for walking.  

By the mid-1990s, this had already started to go awry.  Seaside was a victim of its own success.  It was so different from standard practice, and such a beautiful overall environment that it was splashed across the media and attracted the attention of the upper middle classes from places like Atlanta.  They arrived with money, ideas and intentions that didn’t reflect the initial ideas about simplicity.  They followed the explicit rules, but when they pushed the boundaries, it wasn’t in the direction of interesting architecture, it was in the direction of trying to build something as close to a suburban Atlanta McMansion as they could get away with (with a lot more historicist detail glued on).  The east side of town has most of the early, elegant buildings, while on the west side, the newer, more ostentatious houses appeared:    

As happens to most innovative movements in this country, eventually Seaside became a style.  (This can be seen very clearly in newer developments on the Panhandle, such as “WaterColor” next door, where Seaside-style details and building forms are present, with very few of the ideas about making a town.)  Even within Seaside, in the past twenty years, the trend towards gigantism has prevailed.  New houses on the periphery are humongous (by Seaside standards), and the architects now have to mainly focus on how to mitigate their bulk, which just can’t be done very elegantly.    The balance between architecture and the landscape has been lost in these areas.  They don’t resemble an older beachfront town, they most resemble 21st century Edge City suburbs for the upper middle class, where ever bigger houses are shoehorned onto ever smaller lots.  

To be fair, if I’d been living in Bar Harbor or Newport in the late 19th century, I probably would have railed against the new, giant, ostentatious Shingle Style mansions which dwarfed the earlier, simpler cottages.  But in those places there is still a correspondence between the scale of the site and the house.  In Seaside, the town was planned with much smaller houses in mind, and somehow these new behemoths have appeared, overwhelming the streets.

Other architectural trends have caught up with Seaside, such as starchitecture.  Early Seaside buildings were often designed by famous architects, but you usually couldn’t tell;  they worked together to create a coherent whole.  But in our brand-conscious era, these earlier buildings have now been routed.  Leon Krier designed the first house of his career in Seaside, which few of the residents back then seemed to know.  It has now been sold, and is known as the Krier House, and has its own exclusive garbage can.  

And in a major irony in this iconic pedestrian-oriented town, the house has been expanded, the entry porch enclosed, and a garage added.  Perhaps this was intentional – a demonstration of how in America every theoretical innovation will be subsumed and co-opted by the Invisible Hand of the Market.  

An Aldo Rossi house has been built the highway, and is currently on the market for $11 million.  

It has Aldo Rossi carports:

and a pergola backing up to the dunes, that while quite lovely, seems to have more to do with La Dolce Vita than Panhandle cracker architecture.  

This last element points out another major change.  Even into the 1990s, there were very few buildings on the sea-side of the highway.  As you looked out from this lovely beach pavilion built by Steve Badanes, you saw other pavilions, dunes, a tiny beachfront restaurant, and a few small guest cottages.    

Now the area between the highway and the dunes has been subdivided and built up.  You can’t ever see the Gulf as you drive or walk by.  The houses may not be all that bad, but the seascape is gone, and the little classical cottages have been swallowed up. 

The downtown has undergone drastic changes.  In the 1990s there was a tiny Post Office, and one mixed-use building, one of the first major commissions for Steven Holl.  It was on the east side of the town green, while the west side was largely undeveloped.    

The green is now ringed with commercial and mixed-use buildings, seen in this panorama from a newly-elaborated plinth and amphitheater-thingie.  

Having more activity, more people, and more businesses in the center is certainly a good thing, and the buildings are sometimes a little weird and sometimes fine.    

But the downtown is clearly now out-of-scale with the town.  Seaside must have become the restaurant-and-shopping destination for nearby developments, and the transition from the small-scaled residential districts to this downtown is jarring.  It’s not a casual place, it feels somewhat like the Panhandle version of South Beach.

But what it really feels like is a “town center” in Edge City, a strip shopping center which has been tarted up to look like traditional main street.  In the past, Seaside was accused of being a fake evocation of the past, a Disneyfied version of a town.  I didn’t think those criticisms were fair – it wasn’t about copying the image of an old town, it was about understanding the underlying structural relationships of a good town and building a new one.  The older residential neighborhoods still feel this way.  But the downtown feels off, and I think it’s due to the cars.  Seaside wasn’t designed for an influx of outsiders coming to shop and eat.  It now has them, and it now has their giant SUVs.  

This isn’t really the designers’ fault.  Back in the early 1980s, no one anticipated that the vehicles of the future would dwarf all those of the past – we thought they’d continue to get smaller and more efficient.  In fact, one of the tenets of New Urbanism was that on-street parking was a good thing – it slowed down traffic, and it separated pedestrians on sidewalks from speeding cars.  But the huge vehicles of the present have overwhelmed the spatial design of the public sphere – when you look across the green at the center of town, you mainly see a wall of cars, and as you walk down the sidewalk, you feel boxed in by cars.  Perhaps this isn’t bad on a four-lane avenue in LA, but in what used to be a pedestrian-oriented town center in Seaside, it’s unpleasant.  It’s not a center or a street, it’s a parking lot.  

And the side of the green along the highway not only has cars, but it has the obligatory row of Airstream food carts, the sign of urban hipsterism.  

Most of Seaside still is great – if you get out of the center, avoid the newer houses and don’t try to get to the beach, the older streets still have the integrity they were meant to have  – they stand with the best residential districts of any era I’ve seen in the past six months.  And while some of the failings of the newer construction may be architectural, they are mainly social.  We live in an Age of Trump – everything should be big and ostentatious, showing the world how successful and rich we are.  Perhaps the most notable failing of Seaside’s codes was that they weren’t able to resist the same waves of pretension that can be seen in all wealthier developments of the past thirty years.  We’ve become a coarser and more boastful people, more focussed on our private needs – the hell with the public realm – and we seem to be unable to appreciate simplicity or elegance.

I was struck by the contrast between Cape Cod and Seaside.  When we visited Chatham, where we vacationed when I was a kid, it seemed that almost nothing had changed in in the past fifty years in this 18th-century town.  (https://peregrine-nation.com/2015/11/08/cape-cod/)  Many pieces of the past remained, and most new construction was carefully designed to fit in with the old.  But as I left Seaside, a town that is about thirty years old, I felt nostalgic for what it had been, and what has already been lost.

A critical index for appreciating a city on our trip is the cuisine / architecture ratio;  when it gets too low, Greta is miserable.  Charleston is a place where we might have run into serious trouble, as the first day we were there I dragged her all over the historic district looking at housing.  (Housing is even worse in her view than Architecture, as Architecture might involve museums which will have exhibits or art that might interest her.)  Luckily the food quality in Charleston was very high, so it kept the whining to a minimum while I made her look at housing.  And the intellectual payoff is that Greta now has a deeper understanding of typology than most architecture students do. 

As we moved deeper into the South, certain cultural characteristics become ever more evident.  The discussion of any place or building revolved ever more around the history of what happened there, or even the intricacies of the family histories of the people who lived there.  We toured the Edmonston-Alston House, and the docent spent most of her time elaborating the interconnections of the various families who had owned it.  We didn’t care – we just wanted to see the house.

Charleston does have a long and interesting history – most famously as the place the Civil War started, but perhaps more important, it was the largest port for the slave trade in the country, with probably 40% of the enslaved people moving though it.  That fact is not emphasized or very visible in the preserved fabric of the city, which as in most places, showcases the buildings of the rich.  There are magnificent churches and public buildings.  The pavilion at the end of the public market now serves a museum of the Confederacy.

The main shopping street is King Street, which has fine commercial buildings from different eras and styles filled with boutiques for the well-off retirees who seem to form a lot of the populace.  (Charleston is also the best-dressed city we have visited, with the most men in suits and ties.)   

The street that organizes the map of Charleston is Broad:  the major east-west street.  Below it is the historic district, an almost perfectly-preserved area that is exclusively residential – no restaurants (and no public bathrooms).  

The churches of Charleston are widely varied in style too, and quite prominent.  There are not many cities I can think of where the dominant elements on the skyline are the spires – Charleston has a few tall hotels and office buildings, but they are mostly kept away from the historic core.  St. Philip’s Church is sited wonderfully – poking out into Church St., so it punctuates the vista from two directions.  

The Catholic cathedral is brownstone from Connecticut, something not seen often in the South. Fantastic masonry forms, I believe the spire was reconstructed later.    

Most buildings are brick with stucco, which sometimes wears off.

But for most architects, the main point of Charleston architecture is the housing – especially the single house, the type that was developed and used extensively in Charleston, being well-adapted to the hot, humid climate.  A narrow house built right out to the street.  Usually one room wide, with every room opening onto a porch, to facilitate cross-ventilation (an idea that probably migrated from the plantation house).  The porch almost always faces south, to shade the rooms, and opens to a side yard, which varies from minimal to grand.

The entry from the street is into the porch zone, but there is usually a solid front door at this point for privacy.

Even when the porch itself might be open to the street.

The side yard is often screened with a high wall along the street, so it can function more as a private courtyard or garden (glimpsed here through the open carriage gate).  

That is the definition of the “type”, but as with all types, there are many variations on the theme, and for a typology geek such as me (and not Greta), the fun is in spotting the variants.  The basic type is fundamentally asymmetrical and skewed towards the southern orientation.  So what happens when architectural fashion favors symmetry?  You can add a bay on the north that balances the porch to the south:

or you could do that and disguise the porch altogether making the first bay in depth an enclosed room.

Or maybe enclose that bay without going symmetrical.

A stair is sometimes added in the porch zone, which allows the type to transform into a multi-family building of flats.

The desire for more space led to some houses becoming two rooms wide.

At what point does it stop being a single house?  When it is two rooms wide such as above, or when you do that and add a street entry into the house, and modify the linear nature of the porch?

Sometimes the urbanistic demands of the site led to a shift in orientation, such as here where the porch faces west, as the house addresses Broad St.

We were chatting with a builder one afternoon (there are builders and groundskeepers everywhere in Charleston – I’m not sure we ever saw an actual resident) – who directed us to Legare St. which has the most beautiful streetscape and the biggest houses.  (And the most pickups belonging to the contractors.)

Along the Battery there is a beautiful park.

And the houses facing this are not single houses.  Here the site demands change the type instead of the orientation (the porches still face south), and ventilation was probably adequate as the houses faced onto a large open space and waterfront.

The east side of the Battery has a seawall / promenade.

Lined with fantastic houses (such as this with a colossal order). and you can tour the Edmonston-Alston House, which shows an evolution in and out of type.  It started as a Federal style house, entered from the side yard into a central hall on the traverse axis.  However, an entry door off the street was a later modification (along with some truly ghastly pseudo-Empire interior detailing).  

The porch at the piano nobile level, however, is where I’d like to spend my retirement sitting.

The single house was not just for the rich – as you wander through other neighborhoods, you can see perfectly-preserved vernacular examples.

Which sometimes are modified to enclose more space;  this is always an issue for commodious porches – eventually someone decides to add another room, and the side porch is gone.  

This happens with rich folks too, and probably would have become more common in the air-conditioning era if it weren’t for historic preservation ordinances. 

And just as there are mansions which tried to finesse the symmetry issue, there are more modest houses that engaged it also.  

We visited Charleston on our way south, but when we headed north after Christmas, we decided to return for another couple of days.  I wanted to spend more time strolling the streets of this elegant and beautiful city, and Greta read the Washington Post article on America’s Ten Best Food Cities, and realized there was a place she had missed.

Less well known than Charleston or Savannah, Beaufort is an extraordinary historic town.  It’s much smaller than those two cities, and harder to reach, so although it has been gentrified by what seem to be well-off retirees all reading Southern Living, it doesn’t feel as overrun by tourists.  The small downtown is very spiffy, and some of the adjoining residential areas clearly have been getting a lot of attention. 

Streets end at the bay or looking out onto the salt marshes.

But what really struck us was the district known as The Point.  Many of the houses are large and spectacular, but it doesn’t seem that hedge fund managers have been pumping a few million into each one.  Perhaps they still belong to old families, or perhaps they are just too big and would cost too much to renovate.  Or maybe there aren’t any good golf courses nearby.  For whatever reason, the neighborhood exudes that atmosphere of Southern decay that we all know from black and white movies.  I kept expecting to see a fat old guy in a Panama hat and suspenders sitting on the porch drinking bourbon.      

The growth is unbelievable.  Giant live oaks everywhere, and Spanish moss practically down to the ground.            

As much as I loved Charleston, eventually you get tired of everything being so perfect.   Beaufort has some ruins and some neglect – it doesn’t have the armies of gardeners ready to pounce on every weed that appears, or painters with their three levels of trim paint ready to go.
    

Traveling across the South, it’s been discouraging to see how much it has become like the rest of the country – every little town has five fast food places that have displaced the bbq joints and old diners.  The new houses look the same as in New Jersey or Texas.  Either things are really poor and dilapidated and depressing, or they are brand new and character-less.  Beaufort had a strong presence of the past, and it looked old.  It helped prepare us for New Orleans.

Many of our readers have remarked that my blog posts are like architecture lectures.  Any of my students reading this can attest that what I have to say about Savannah already is a lecture.  I’ve been giving this lecture about Savannah for years, and on this trip we just returned there so I could get better photos.  Actually, we returned to Savannah four years after out last visit because it is one of our favorite cities – even Greta doesn’t get tired of walking through this beautiful and varied place.

If the character of Charleston depends largely on the building type of the single house, the character of Savannah is wholly dependent upon the brilliance of its plan.  It was laid out by James Oglethorpe in 1734 as a military camp, and it is incredible to think that his ideas on the hierarchy of a camp filled with huts could lead to perhaps the most sophisticated town plan in the country.  This is the famous print of Oglethorpe’s original layout:  

The basic module of Savannah’s plan is the “ward” – the repeating arrangement of streets that surround a square.  Most planned American cities are based upon a simple grid, where every street is the conceptual equivalent of any other, but in Savannah there is a hierarchy of major streets, through streets, formal streets, residential streets, and alleys. 

This hierarchy of streets dictates the qualities of the blocks and buildings, with the blocks to the east and west of the squares occupied by civic buildings and mansions.  The experience of being in the city is shaped by this hierarchy too – notice that the squares interrupt through traffic in both directions, so as a pedestrian you can stroll on these streets and though the squares, while the faster traffic moves on different streets.  

While the plan of each ward is the same, the development of the squares is very different.  Downtown squares, residential squares, rich neighborhoods, poor neighborhoods – they all have the same underlying pattern with an open space in the middle.  Most squares have a monument in the center, 

and we noticed that the person memorialized in the center is never the same person after whom the square is named;  this is not Wesley Square.

Some of the newer monuments are less formal, such as this statue of Savannah’s favorite son, the songwriter Johnny Mercer.

But it is really the spatial and experiential qualities of the squares that makes Savannah such a different place.  They are quiet and beautiful, and everyone in the center of the city is always with one block of an open space.  

This isn’t to say that the through-streets are awful – they too are gracious and welcoming, with the live oaks and Spanish moss giving much of the character.  

Savannah also has beautiful buildings surrounding these spaces.  There are a couple of squares that have been ruined by 1950s and 1960s buildings, but in reaction to these, Savannah was one of the birthplaces of the historic preservation movement, and the rest of the city core was spared the blight of bad buildings and bad city planning ideas.  There are excellent commercial buildings.warehouses by the river,

civic buildings (I don’t know the architect for this courthouse, but he was clearly influenced by Berlage and early European modernism).    

and of course beautiful houses.       

including some tiny old ones.  

Our favorite building in Savannah is the Alex Raskin antique store.  Housed in one of the largest townhouses in the city, it is gorgeously unrestored, owned by a former New Yorker, packed with furniture and cool stuff, and gives you a free glimpse of what such a house is like inside.  Partial as I am to Southern decay, I like seeing a house that isn’t all tastefully tricked-out, and where you have to listen to a guide drone on about genealogy.    

We also walked through many of the 19th-century neighborhoods which flank the large city park to the south of the historic core.  They don’t have the same ward system with squares, but they are good neighborhoods with a variety of styles of frame buildings.    Older housing is being restored in these neighborhoods (for those priced out of the core), and new buildings are being built in historicist styles.

Savannah isn’t completely frozen in time.  SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design, has purchased many old buildings throughout the city to house its scattered-site school, and the presence of the school really contributes to the vitality of the city (especially compared to all the other beautiful southern cities which seem to be inhabited solely by affluent retirees).

And new transportation technologies are competing with the old.  

Having covered the core of the city on several trips, we ventured out to the coast this time, to Tybee Island, an interesting beachfront town that used to be a prominent resort area.  The lighthouse at the mouth of the Savannah River seemed very tall to us Northwesterners, used to short lighthouses on tall cliffs.      

Our march through beautiful old Southern cities continues, with several more yet to come.