The history of Seaside.

Seaside is the town that started it all. The 80-acre parcel on the south side of what is now Scenic Highway 30A was bought in 1946 by a Birmingham, Alabama, department-store owner named J. S. Smolian as a family vacation compound. Smolian died before he built on it. His grandson inherited it in 1978. The grandson, Robert Davis, hired two young Miami architects named Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk to draw a master plan. They began that work in 1980. Construction began in 1981. The town that grew out of that collaboration is the most influential American planned community of the twentieth century — the place that proved an entire American town could be designed, coded, and built from a written architectural rulebook, and the place that ignited the movement known as New Urbanism.

The story of Seaside is a story about a family inheritance, a 1980 road trip in a Honda Civic, a county commission meeting on a summer afternoon in 1981, a Luxembourg-born architect who took his fee in land, nine beach pavilions designed by nine different architects, a 1988 Italian-Sicilian grocery store, and a 1998 Paramount feature film that gave the town a cultural register it had not asked for. It is also, more than anything, a story about how patiently a single place can be built when the people building it are willing to take forty-five years to do it.

01 — Before the townThe 1946 land purchase

The 80 acres on which Seaside now stands were bought in 1946 by Joseph Smolian, a Birmingham, Alabama, department-store owner who summered with his family on the Florida Gulf coast. The land sat immediately adjacent to the older Seagrove Beach community. The Smolian intention was a family compound — a place for children and grandchildren to come down for school holidays in the manner of southern families of that generation. Joseph Smolian did not build the compound. He owned the land for the rest of his life, and at his death it passed in time to his grandson, Robert S. Davis.

The cultural context of the 1946 purchase is worth noting. The Florida panhandle in the 1940s and 1950s was a quieter coast than either the Atlantic side of Florida or the southwestern Florida coast. It had been, since the late nineteenth century, the destination of choice for upper-middle-class families from Birmingham, Atlanta, Montgomery, Memphis, and Nashville — the “Redneck Riviera,” as the half-affectionate regional nickname had it — rather than the destination of the moneyed Northeast. The South Walton coast in particular was dotted with informal cottages and family compounds, most of them built in the regional vernacular of board-and-batten siding, tin roofs, deep porches, and pier-and-beam foundations sitting above the dunes. The Florida Cracker style. When Robert Davis came back to the land in the late 1970s, that vernacular was the architectural memory he was bringing with him.

02 — 1978The grandson inherits

Robert Davis inherited the 80 acres in 1978. He was, at the time, a successful Miami real estate developer with a track record in urban infill projects. He had married Daryl Rose, a child psychologist; the two of them shared an intuition that the standard American postwar pattern of beachfront condominium towers and strip-mall commercial frontage was not what should happen to the Smolian land. Davis's memory of childhood summers at Seagrove and the family cottage culture of the South Walton coast was the source of an alternative: a small town, built at the dimensional scale of a pre-1940s southern community, with houses small enough to walk between, a town square, a post office, a grocer, an inn.

Davis spent two years looking for architects who could draw this. He met Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk in Miami. The two of them, then in their early thirties, had just left a high-modernist practice called Arquitectonica to start their own firm; Seaside became the new firm's first major commission and the project that, in retrospect, would define everything they did for the next forty years.

What Davis and DPZ did over the course of 1980 was, by today's standards, a peculiar and admirable piece of fieldwork. The three of them spent the better part of the year driving the back roads of the American South in a Honda Civic, photographing porches, town squares, picket fences, street widths, courthouse lawns, and the rhythms of vernacular small-town building in places like Apalachicola, Savannah, Charleston, and Mount Airy. They were looking for what worked. They measured. They counted. They built up, slowly, a dimensional and material vocabulary of the small American southern town, before the road network and the federal housing programmes of the postwar era had reorganised that town out of recognisable existence. That fieldwork became the basis for the Seaside master plan.

03 — June 9, 1981The county commission and the first two houses

On 9 June 1981, Robert Davis appeared before the Walton County Commission to make a request that, in retrospect, marks the official beginning of the town. He asked the commission for the permits and zoning variances that would allow him to build, on his 80 acres of land, a community organised around a written architectural code rather than the standard subdivision pattern that prevailed in late-twentieth-century Florida development. He named the proposed town Seaside.

The commission approved. Construction began later that summer. The Davises started with two houses on Tupelo Street. One of them served as the sales office. The other served as Robert and Daryl's residence during the week, and as the Sunday model home that prospective buyers could walk through on the weekends. The first two houses also served as a working test of the dimensional choices the DPZ master plan was making: the small lots, the deep front porches, the picket-fenced front yards, the short setback from the street. The houses sold. More followed. The town began to grow.

04 — The 80-acre planA radial-orthogonal town

The Seaside master plan, finalised in 1985 after several years of iterative refinement, is one of the most studied diagrams in twentieth-century American urban design. It is at first glance a simple thing: a roughly orthogonal grid of streets occupying the 80-acre site, with a central radial square at the centre of the town from which several diagonal axes fan out toward the perimeter. Houses are arranged on narrow lots along the streets. A series of pedestrian footpaths runs parallel to the streets, shortcutting between blocks. The principal commercial buildings are clustered around the central square. The beach is reached through a series of dedicated pedestrian pavilions, each at the end of a street that runs perpendicular to the dune line, so that every street in the town terminates in either the central square or a view of the Gulf.

The plan is not perfectly orthogonal. The diagonals from the central square pull the grid out of right angles in interesting ways; the pedestrian footpaths, which were the contribution of the consulting planner Léon Krier, complicate the street network with a parallel system that does not match the street network. The result is a plan that reads, on foot, as dimensionally legible — you always know where you are in relation to the central square and to the Gulf — but that carries the small surprises and short-cuts that distinguish a designed town from a subdivision.

05 — Léon KrierThe consultant who took his fee in land

Léon Krier is a Luxembourg-born architect and urban theorist who, by the early 1980s, was the most influential European voice in the conversation about traditional town planning that DPZ was beginning to lead in the United States. Davis and DPZ brought Krier into the Seaside planning process as a consultant. He visited; he sketched; he argued for things; and he proposed the network of sand footpaths that became one of the most distinctive features of the plan.

Krier's payment for the consulting work was, by his own arrangement with Davis, a small parcel of land in the town itself. He built a small cottage on it. The Krier House, designed by Krier for himself and finished in the late 1980s, was his first built work as an architect — up to that point his career had been almost entirely theoretical and pedagogical. The cottage is a small, two-storey, tower-like building with a steep tiled roof, a tightly composed plan, and the studied formality of his drawings. It still stands in Seaside, on Tupelo Street, and is now a designated feature of the town's architectural inventory.

06 — The Town ArchitectAn invention of Seaside

The role of “Town Architect” — a single architect or small architectural firm retained by a planned community to review every set of construction plans for compliance with the design code, and to authorise the issuance of building permits accordingly — was, as a formal institutional role, invented at Seaside. Robert Davis and DPZ drafted the role into the town's charter. Richard Gibbs, the Rhode Island School of Design–trained architect who became Seaside's Town Architect in 1990, was the first to occupy the role full-time, and went on (as documented in this series's Rosemary Beach article) to take the same role at Rosemary Beach in 1996.

The Town Architect role has since been imported into hundreds of planned communities across the United States and abroad. It is now a standard piece of New Urbanist project organisation. Its purpose, then and now, is to provide a single design authority capable of reading the architectural code, interpreting it through the lens of an individual building proposal, and rendering a permit decision that holds the code intact across the lifetime of the project. The role replaces the conventional municipal building official, who reviews for code compliance but not for architectural compatibility, with a design professional who reviews for both.

07 — The Seaside StyleCracker, Key West, and the pattern book

The Seaside design code was deliberately less prescriptive than either the Rosemary code or the Alys Beach code that would follow it. Rather than fixing a set of specific lot types and a single architectural reference, the Seaside code specifies a dimensional envelope — setback, height, lot coverage, orientation — and a relatively open palette of acceptable materials, leaving the architectural style of individual houses substantially to the discretion of their architects and owners. What holds the town together is not stylistic uniformity but dimensional and material consistency: every house has a deep front porch; every house faces the street; every front yard is fenced with a picket fence; every paved street is the same width; every metal roof is the same kind of metal.

The architectural register that has resulted is what is now called the “Seaside Style.” It is a hybrid of two older Florida vernaculars: the Florida Cracker style of board- and-batten siding, deep verandas, tin roofs, and elevated pier-and-beam foundations; and the Key West style of clapboard siding, gabled roofs, and louvered shutters. To these two regional vernaculars the code adds a handful of stylistic extensions — Victorian gingerbread trim, Greek Revival columns, Carpenter Gothic detailing — that individual architects have been free to use. The visual register is pastel: soft pinks, blues, yellows, mint greens. The roofs are almost always silver-painted metal. The result, when seen at eye level walking the streets, is a town that reads as the remembered version of a 1925 Florida coastal village — which is more or less what Davis and DPZ went looking for in 1980.

08 — The pavilionsNine architects, nine gateways to the Gulf

Every street in Seaside that runs perpendicular to the Gulf terminates, at the southern edge of the town, in a beach pavilion: a small architecturally distinct gateway structure that marks the public access point through the dune line to the beach. There are nine such pavilions. Each was designed by a different architect. Together they constitute one of the most deliberately curated collections of small public buildings anywhere in American architecture.

The styles range across the field. The pavilions include works in the Neoclassical, Tuscan, Postmodern, Carpenter Gothic, and Deconstructivist traditions; the architects retained to design them include some of the most prominent American architects of the late twentieth century. The pavilions function as both working public infrastructure (they are the only authorised beach-access points for the entire community) and as a kind of open-air gallery of late-twentieth-century architectural thought. Walking the perimeter of Seaside from west to east and looking at each pavilion in turn is, in effect, a guided tour through the architectural debates of the 1980s and 1990s.

09 — The town centreSteven Holl, Stern, Rossi, Mockbee

The principal commercial and civic buildings of Seaside cluster around the central square and along the short stretch of CR 30A that bisects the town. As with the pavilions, Davis and DPZ retained a deliberately heterogeneous group of architects to design these buildings. The result is a town centre in which several major figures of late-twentieth-century architecture have built something.

Steven Holl, whose international reputation was still nascent in the late 1980s, designed the Hybrid Building, a mixed-use commercial structure on the central square. The Hybrid Building was, by Holl's own subsequent account, one of his first significant built commissions; he has gone on to become one of the most internationally awarded architects of his generation, with major museum and academic commissions across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Robert A. M. Stern, the post-modern classicist whose firm has produced libraries and academic buildings across the Ivy League, designed an early Seaside residence. Aldo Rossi, the Pritzker Prize–winning Italian architect, contributed a small commercial structure. Samuel Mockbee, who founded the Rural Studio at Auburn University and built that studio into one of the most celebrated socially-engaged architecture programmes in the United States, designed an early residence as well.

The decision to invite this kind of architectural variety into a single coded town was Davis's, and was unusual at the time. Most American planned communities of the 1980s and 1990s favoured a single architect or a single small firm for the sake of stylistic uniformity. Seaside ran the opposite experiment: a tight dimensional code, a tight material palette, and a deliberately open invitation to architects of widely different aesthetic positions to work within those constraints. Forty years later, the experiment is the part that historians of American architecture most often cite.

10 — Modica MarketThe day-to-day town

The architectural and theoretical sophistication of Seaside is well documented; the day-to-day texture of the town, less so. Modica Market, the small grocery store on the central square, is the right place to look for the latter. The market was opened in 1988, seven years after the first houses were built, by Charlie and Sarah Modica, a Sicilian-American couple from New York who relocated to South Walton specifically to operate a grocer in the new town. The market still operates under the same family ownership in 2026.

Modica Market is, in master-plan terms, the building that made Seaside a town rather than a planned vacation community. A town requires the means of daily living: a grocer, a post office, a dry cleaner, a place to buy a newspaper. Without those, what the master plan would have produced is a beach-rental subdivision with a town square. With them, what it produced is a working town in which a small number of residents live year-round and a much larger number of visitors and seasonal residents conduct something close to ordinary daily life during their stays. The fact that the Modica family was willing to commit to operating a small grocer in 1988, when the town was still mostly a half-built construction site, is a piece of the Seaside story that does not get the architectural-press attention the pavilions and the Hybrid Building do but is at least as important to what the town actually became.

10b — Bud & Alley's and the AirstreamsRestaurants, food trucks, and the daily texture

Bud & Alley's Waterfront Restaurant opened in 1986 on the Gulf-facing edge of the town and has operated continuously on the same site since. It is named for the founder's dog (Bud) and cat (Alley). Like Modica Market, it predates almost all of the architectural reputation Seaside subsequently accumulated, and like Modica Market it is one of the buildings that makes the town read as a town rather than as an architectural exhibit. Its rooftop bar, with an open view of the Gulf and the dune line, is one of the most photographed places on the 30A corridor.

The Airstream food court at the central square, a row of permanently-stationed silver Airstream trailers each operated as a small independent restaurant, was added in 2009. The trailers were a deliberate piece of master-plan thinking: the original Davis-DPZ plan had reserved the eastern flank of the central square for commercial uses but had not specified what form those uses would take. The Airstream installation occupies that ground without permanent construction, allows the town's commercial mix to evolve as individual operators come and go, and contributes a distinctive piece of post-1985 design vocabulary to the town. The Airstreams are now a recognised piece of the town's public image: they appear on souvenir merchandise, in travel features, and in the town's own marketing materials.

The combination of the Modica grocer, the Bud & Alley's restaurant, the Airstream food trucks, the post office at the centre of the square, the bookstore, the small cinema, and the handful of independent retailers along the central commercial strip is what makes Seaside, on a Tuesday morning in February, read as a working small town rather than as a seasonal beach resort. That distinction is the one Davis and DPZ were aiming for in the 1980 fieldwork, and it has held.

11 — The Truman Show1998 and the cultural register

In 1998 Paramount Pictures released a film called The Truman Show in which Jim Carrey plays a man who has lived his entire life inside a televised simulation broadcast from a giant domed studio set. Director Peter Weir, with visual consultant Wendy Stites, scouted for a town that would read on film as plausibly real but uncannily artificial — the kind of place that looks like every detail had been planned by someone. Stites suggested Seaside. Weir agreed. Almost every exterior scene in the film was shot on location at Seaside; the production did not build a set. Robert and Daryl Davis appear briefly in the film as the couple seated at an outdoor café table.

The film made Seaside internationally famous overnight. It also gave the town a cultural register it had not asked for and did not particularly want. For the next several years — and to some extent ever since — Seaside was discussed in architectural criticism and popular culture as much for what it represented (an uncanny manufactured paradise) as for what it actually was (a small coded town on the Gulf coast). The town's residents and operators have generally taken the association in stride. The Truman Show is now a tourism asset; the Davises' cameo is part of the town's lore.

The deeper effect of the film, however, was on the towns that would be built on 30A after Seaside. Both Rosemary Beach (1995) and Alys Beach (2003) have, in different ways, had to position themselves against the cultural register Seaside acquired through the film. The architectural choices both subsequent towns made — Rosemary's darker, more enclosed, Caribbean-stucco vocabulary, Alys's austere all-white courtyard typology — can be read in part as deliberate counter-arguments to Seaside's bright, sunlit, postcard quality.

12 — The Seaside InstituteThe spread of an idea

From the early years of the town, Robert and Daryl Davis treated Seaside as much as a research and educational project as a real estate venture. The Seaside Institute, founded by the Davises in the 1980s, has functioned as the town's academic and professional outreach arm. Its programmes include the annual Seaside Prize, awarded to figures who have made distinguished contributions to American town planning; an academic conference series; visiting fellowships; and a published archive of design documents, sketches, and code-drafting materials from the town's history.

The Institute's arguably more important role has been informal. From the late 1980s onward, Seaside was the place architects, planners, and developers from across the United States and abroad went to see what New Urbanism looked like actually built. The Congress for the New Urbanism, co-founded by Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and a handful of others in 1992, had its intellectual centre of gravity in Seaside for most of its first decade. Hundreds of subsequent American planned communities, in dozens of states, trace some piece of their design ancestry directly back to a visit to Seaside.

13 — The 2004 evolution planKrier returns to the town centre

By the early 2000s, Seaside's town centre had reached the point where the original 1985 plan needed an evolution. The retail mix had grown; the central square was attracting larger crowds than the original design had anticipated; the beachfront stretch needed reconsideration. Davis brought back Léon Krier, the consulting planner who had contributed the sand footpaths to the original master plan, and engaged the California-based planning firm Opticos Design, to produce an updated town-centre and beachfront master plan. The 2004 evolution plan refined the central square's circulation, updated the pavilion strategy, and integrated the new buildings that had accumulated along the central commercial strip into a coherent updated framework.

The 2004 work is also a useful demonstration of how the New Urbanist approach to planned communities differs from the conventional subdivision-build-out-and-walk-away model. Twenty years after the first house, the original master planner was brought back to refine the town the original master plan had produced. The relationship between the architects and the town they have drawn is, on the New Urbanist model, ongoing.

14 — What you can still seeA walking guide to the 1985 plan

The 1985 master plan is fully visible on the ground at Seaside today. The central square — with the post office at the centre, the amphitheatre stepped down on one side, Modica Market on the other — is the geometric heart of the plan and the natural starting point for a walk. The radial diagonals fanning out from the square are still legible underfoot. The parallel network of sand footpaths that Léon Krier contributed is still in place; many of them are now lined with oleander and saw palmetto. The Krier House — the small, steep-roofed cottage on Tupelo Street — is still recognisable from photographs of its completion in the late 1980s.

The nine beach pavilions are best walked east to west, in the order Davis and DPZ planned them, starting at Tupelo Street and working back toward the western edge of the town. Each one rewards a few minutes of attention. The Hybrid Building, Modica Market, and the small early houses on Tupelo and Savannah streets are the easiest concentrated walking tour of the town centre. The first two houses, on Tupelo Street, the ones Robert and Daryl Davis built and lived in starting in 1981 to test the master plan, are still standing.

Forty-five years after the master plan was first drawn, Seaside still reads, on foot, as a coherent designed town. The argument the 1980 fieldwork made — that pre-1940s American small towns worked, and could be rebuilt on the same dimensional logic — is plainly visible at street level.

15 — CodaThe town that started the conversation

Seaside is, in retrospect, the town that made everything else on this stretch of 30A possible. Rosemary Beach (1995) was Leucadia Financial's decision to commission a follow-up from the same firm that had drawn Seaside. Alys Beach (2003) was the Stephens family's decision to do the same. WaterColor (1999), to the west, was the St. Joe Company's. The planned-town corridor that now runs the south side of 30A from Watercolor through Seaside through Watersound through Alys Beach through Rosemary Beach exists because Seaside proved, in the 1980s, that an American beach town could be planned, coded, built, and inhabited at a small scale and a slow pace.

The town also reshaped the national conversation about how Americans build. The Congress for the New Urbanism, founded twelve years after the Seaside master plan was begun, has documented hundreds of planned communities across the United States that trace some piece of their design ancestry to Seaside. The Town Architect role, the form-based code, the pattern book, the deliberate use of a heterogeneous group of architects working within a tight dimensional code — all of these were either invented or refined to a working standard at Seaside in the 1980s. The forty-five years of operation since 1981 have produced a body of working evidence that almost no other American planned community can match, and that remains the principal reference point for the New Urbanist movement worldwide.

What started on the Walton County Commission floor on 9 June 1981, in other words, was not just a new beach town. It was an argument about how Americans build. Forty-five years later, that argument is still being made, one house at a time, on the same 80 acres of inherited family land.

Further readingOn this site

• The Seaside events calendar — what's happening this week at the central square, the amphitheatre, and the Airstream food court.
• The history of Rosemary Beach — DPZ's 1995 follow-up to Seaside, in the architectural vocabulary of the colonial Caribbean.
• The history of Alys Beach — the 2003 hybrid of Bermudian whitewash and Antiguan courtyard plan.
• All histories — the full series on the planned towns of 30A.

SourcesPrimary references for this article

• Seaside, Florida — About. Primary town source for the 1946 Smolian land purchase, the 1978 Davis inheritance, the 1981 construction start, and the Truman Show cameo.
• Seaside, Florida — Wikipedia. Cross-source for the 1985 master plan completion date and the canonical list of contributing architects (Krier, Holl, Stern, Rossi, Mockbee).
• Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company — Seaside project page. Master planner's record of the 80-acre site and the first-major-project status.
• Congress for the New Urbanism — Seaside. CNU's primary record of the town as the founding case study of the New Urbanism movement.
• Architect Magazine — How Seaside Helped Revive Urban Design. Long-form trade-press history of the master plan, the Town Architect role, and the influence of the project.
• The Destin Log — No town is ever finished. Source for the 9 June 1981 Walton County Commission meeting at which Davis presented the Seaside proposal.
• Seaside — Partners in Life and Business: Robert and Daryl Davis. Source for the Davis biographical context and the early Tupelo Street years.
• Opticos Design — Seaside Town Square and Beachfront Master Plan. Source for the 2004 evolution plan and Léon Krier's return engagement.
• Léon Krier — Wikipedia. Source for Krier's Luxembourg background, his consulting role at Seaside, and the cottage he built as his first executed work.
• Life of an Architect — The Architecture of Seaside Florida. Cross-source for the pavilion architects and the heterogeneous design strategy at the town centre.
• Seaside Institute — Richard Gibbs. Source for the 1990 Town Architect appointment of Richard Gibbs and the institutional role of the Seaside Institute.
• Architect Magazine — on Steven Holl's Hybrid Building. Source for the early-career significance of Holl's Seaside commission.
• Institute of Classical Architecture & Art — 30A New Urbanist Communities tour. Source for the inclusion of Seaside in the canonical 30A New Urbanism itinerary.

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