Ah, summer by the sea. The sweet smell of tanning oil. The wide-open vistas of sparkling water. And for those who can afford it, an escape to second homes so isolated from their surroundings they resemble medieval castles protected by moats.
Beachwalk, a fledgling development of Victorian cottages in this northwest Indiana city of 33,800 people, has a different vision of what a vacation getaway can be.
Its underlying premise, borrowed from the picturesque Florida resort town of Seaside, is that architecture and city planning can play a major role in creating a sense of community absent from walled residential enclaves-not only those on the beach, but those in suburbia.
By laying out streets and squares, houses and front porches in a way that closely follows the example of pre-World War II American towns, the thinking goes, architects can reintroduce the world in which families surveyed the passing parade from the front porch and the street was a place for kids to romp, not a drag strip for automobiles.
Since the first houses were constructed at Seaside in 1981, that notion has proved as controversial as it is influential. It has produced heated debate over whether the resort town represents what its creators intended it to be: a model for addressing suburban sprawl and concomitant woes including traffic congestion, air pollution and a pervasive sense of placelessness.
Seaside also has spurred discussion of a more fundamental question: To what extent can building influence behavior?
Beachwalk’s developer, Chicagoan Thomas Moss, is building his answer on a 106-acre parcel across a two-lane road from Lake Michigan. The property is a former sand mine from which General Motors and Chrysler once extracted material to make molds for engine blocks. The mine closed in the late 1980s and Michigan City officials solicited proposals for development, hoping that whatever materialized would fit in with lakeside cottages and hilltop homes adjacent to the site.
Enter Moss, a former vice chairman of community affairs at First Chicago Corp. and a fervent admirer of Seaside. He hired four architects who designed homes in the Florida Panhandle resort town, brought in the St. Joseph, Mich. firm of Allegretti Architects to prepare the overall plan for Beachwalk and-presto!-the Chicago area had its first Seaside-style town.
Only seven Victorian cottages have been constructed so far, but more than 250 homes are planned, ranging in size from 1,700 to 3,500 square feet. Some will be atop sand dunes with views of the lake, with the rest in a low-lying area along an inland lake. As at Seaside, which has 80 acres, just about everything is being arranged in a way that is markedly different from the standard American subdivision, with its spaghetti-like network of wide, winding roads and homes set well back from the street.
Beachwalk will have narrow straight streets lined with picket fences and cottages with front porches, creating a chance for neighbors to visit with each other as they stroll through the development. (There will be some curved streets so as not to disturb the contours of sand dunes on the property.) Commercial buildings will be located within easy walking distance of homes, allowing homeowners to keep their car keys in their pocket if they need to go to the store for a carton of milk.
Instead of passing their leisure time on private beaches, residents will share a 700-foot-long boardwalk that links Beachwalk to a public beach along Lake Michigan. There will be no gatehouses protecting Beachwalk from the outside world, as is typically the case in posh resorts or subdivisions. The public will be free to shop in Beachwalk’s stores, stroll its streets and walk on its boardwalk.
Much of this effort to create a sense of community is occurring by design-or, more precisely, by code. Before they planned Seaside, Miami architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk visited cozy towns such as Cape May, N.J., Key West, Fla. and Charleston, S.C. to discern exactly what contributed to their pedestrian-friendly feel. The result was a series of urban and architectural regulations that govern-often, down to the very inch-what can be built at Seaside.
Beachwalk seeks to follows this model with its own set of codes, developed by Allegretti Architects.
A few examples of the rules: Houses must be set back from the street by 25 feet. Side yards are to be just 7 feet wide. Half of the front side of a house must be a covered porch. Fences are to be painted white and located along the property line. Siding is to be wood, not aluminium. Adjacent houses cannot have the same color.
As at Seaside, different architects will follow the codes as they design separate houses; Duany and Plater-Zyberk do not believe a single architect, following his or her own plan, can achieve the sort of diversity that is customary in American towns.
But there are key differences. Unlike Seaside, Beachwalk will have alleys and its houses are permitted to have garages, a pragmatic concession to the car that could draw activity away from the street. Perhaps more important, Seaside is a resort town unto itself; Beachwalk is a resort development being inserted into a town. Outside attractions in Michigan City-from the Wal-Mart on the commercial strip to the Lighthouse Place outlet mall-will beckon. And almost certainly, those attractions will undermine the volume of pedestrian traffic at Beachwalk, making it all the more difficult to create a sense of community.
To be sure, it is easier to achieve that goal in a resort than in a work-a-day suburb. Time moves more slowly than in the 9-to-5 world. Mom and Dad can stroll along main street after breakfast instead of driving to a suburban office building. That distinction has led critics to wonder whether Seaside is a utopia that bears little relationship to the society it is trying to reform.
The question is worth expanding with respect to Beachwalk: Can the world of the front porch be reborn in the age of air-conditioning, bathroom Jacuzzis, superhighways and suburban shopping malls-in short, everything that sucks human activity out of the public realm of the street and into the private confines of the house or car?
And if a sense of community can be built at Beachwalk, whom will that community be for-only the rich and the upper-middle-class, or people of more modest means as well? With combined home and lot prices ranging from $189,000 to $389,000, Beachwalk’s prices are beyond the reach of all but a few Chicago-area buyers.
This is, to some extent, a byproduct of its exacting building codes, which add at least 15 percent to the cost of each home. And if Seaside offers any indication, rental prices at Beachwalk will be too high to encourage middle-class people to spend a weekend there.
Another question: How convincing will Beachwalk be as a work of architecture and city planning? Will it blend seamlessly with the cottages and larger homes surrounding it, or will it have the patina of a planned community: Disneyland-by-the-Lake?
At this stage, it’s too early to tell if this town-planning transplant will take. More houses have to be built and trees have to grow before Beachwalk loses the desolate look of a shoot-’em-up town in the Wild West.
Still, Beachwalk’s emphasis on pedestrian-friendly public spaces already has produced some admirable results. The 700-foot boardwalk that links the development to the lake passes gracefully over dune grasses and provides a ceremonial, but not overly formal, entrance to the beach.
Built on city property, paid for by Moss and designed by Allegretti Architects, the boardwalk powerfully distinguishes Beachwalk from the isolated urban stance taken by a nearby 11-story beachfront condominium.
Not only does the tombstone-like tower interrupt a ridge of trees that borders the dunes, it’s the sort of vista-hogging high-rise whose occupants get their own view of the lake at the expense of their neighbors.
It is, in short, a development where private, rather than public, values predominate-a design that makes no attempt, as at Beachwalk, to create the architecture of community.
What remains to be seen about Beachwalk is whether it can fashion that static architectural framework into a living, breathing, economically-diverse place. Such a democratic utopia may be the best way to send the urban design of horse-and-buggy towns rocketing into the 21st Century.
