In a colloquium that took place during the 2016 Driehaus Prize ceremonies in Chicago, Andrés Duany made an interesting observation. He pointed out that Florida Panhandle resort towns such as Seaside, Rosemary Beach, and Alys Beach—all planned by his firm DPZ—were actually urban experimental testbeds with potentially long-term effects. “Americans are willing in the circumscription of a resort experience to try anything,” he said. He speculated that the people who holidayed in these walkable, dense, traditionally designed resort towns—so different from their everyday suburban communities—were affected, that is changed, by the experience. Now, I’m a great admirer of the Seaside prototype, which introduced a new model to holiday real estate: the resort as an actual village. Although the idea had earlier surfaced in Europe—Portmeirion in Wales and Port Grimaud in France—it was new to the U.S. But an urban testbed? I remember an incident, long ago, when my wife and I spent a holiday week in Martinique. We were in a good mood and while there Shirley bought a floral dress and I a tropical shirt. After we returned home to Canada we unpacked. We stared at the colorful clothes. What had we been thinking? They had looked so attractive in the French Antilles, but here they looked entirely out of place. That’s the trouble with vacations; they are an escape, from routine, from the everyday, from the mundane.
