A Fresh Take on Old Florida

Authenticity and architecture define this new waterfront setting.

by Paul Goldberger
photography by Brian Robbins

A Dialogue with the Past
SweetTea Journal (Summer/Winter 2007) – It may be that the true theme of American architecture is not the search for a way to express the new, but a kind of lover's quarrel with the old. We want to be inventive, and yet we also want to wallow in the pleasures of what we have seen before. We want to celebrate what we have always known, and we want to break away from it to make the world anew. We know that these inclinations do not naturally go together, and for much of our history we have been trying to reconcile them. For Americans, the architecture of the past is both inspiration and inhibition, both source and limitation.

It's not just the great buildings of the past that hold allure for us—the cathedrals and the temples and the villas and the manor houses. It's also the ordinary, everyday structures that give towns and villages their identity. What we think of as "the past" is made up of cabins and farms and shops and barns and silos and factories, and of every kind of house. And of the spaces in between these buildings, too, the streets and piazzas and town squares. Together, all of this creates vernacular, or common architectural language. These are the places of memory, the places of imagination, and it is from them as much as from cathedrals that new architecture is made.

If a dialogue with the past is one consistent theme of American architecture—and at its best, it is a dialogue—then a quest for a sense of place is another. The two are closely intertwined, defining each other. On one hand, the topography, the climate, and locally available materials help define the architecture. The identity of a place or a region often is determined by its historical buildings, and by the architectural language that has been used to build its structures. Sense of place is as deeply connected to tradition as is the concept of taking inspiration from the great architectural styles of the past.

A lot of things contribute to a local identity, but distinction is key: a feeling that the place you are in is like no other, that it has special qualities that separate it from other places. Sometimes distinction can come from a significant landmark, such as a clock tower or a monument in a town square. Sometimes it can come from a public place such as the town square itself, or a New England green, or a park or piazza. And sometimes it can come from a kind of architecture, such as the shingled houses of Nantucket or the Victorian houses of San Francisco—or the simple wood-frame cottages that once filled the northwestern coast of Florida. These plain, understated houses are among the best examples anywhere of an architectural vernacular having the power to define a place. And, even though many of these originals are gone, their influence on the region's architectural identity still can be keenly felt.

Evolving Architecture
Indeed, that profound, if understated, influence endures today, primarily due to the minimalism of these early Florida homes. Necessity breeds simplicity, especially in the case of those north-central Florida pioneers who ventured into what was, in the early 1800s, untamed Spanish-occupied territory. As distinct from the Spanish colonial influence of St. Augustine, many of the "Cracker" pioneers were of Scotch-Irish stock and brought with them a distinctly different approach to their dwellings, such as a tendency to build unadorned structures that seemed all the more plain when compared to the wrought iron–ornamented edifices that dotted the Spanish East Coast.

The term "Cracker" itself alluded to humble origins as it came to identify the ordinary country folk in Georgia and Florida who "cracked" their corn to make meal. A staple in their diet, the corn was used to make calorie-rich sustenance for these settlers. The rudimentary Cracker cottages that the original settlers of this part of Florida built were first and foremost products of the environment.

As those familiar with Florida's climate will attest, the heat and humidity can be a powerful combination at the thirtieth parallel, especially before the advent of air-conditioning. And because the first settlers were homesteaders making a life in the remote and harsh Florida scrub, their dwellings were built to minimize heat and maximize air circulation. Consequently, these practical structures typically were built just off the ground with enough space to allow cooler air to circulate beneath and then rise through the floorboards and out a roof vent.

Porches, often in both front and back, provided much-needed shade and allowed light into the home, especially important in the days before electricity became available. Yet as the region's population grew and more of the homes began to be built nearer to each other in towns and cities, front porches also encouraged a sense of community and served as a place where neighbors could gather. A porch gave even the smallest house a welcoming, almost ceremonial entrance.

The original Old Florida cottages, as they are often called, were built in many variations—but in each case the key element was a simple square room, or "single pen," where families slept, cooked, and ate. When more space was needed, homesteaders typically would add another room onto the home, separated from the first with a breezeway or "dogtrot," a name eventually used to describe a house with this design. In such a dogtrot, the rooms each had four exterior walls but shared a roof that extended over the entire structure, including the breezeway and the front porch. This served to focus and circulate cooling air through the dogtrot in the center of the house.

"The dogtrot is probably the image most people have of the ideal Old Florida house,' says Ronald Haase, a former professor of architecture at the University of Florida and author of Classic Cracker: Florida's Wood-Frame Vernacular Architecture. "In an evolution over time, the settlers would have built the simplest shelter first; and then as time passed and the family grew, they expanded. The simplest way was to build another log building and join it to the existing building with a covered porch between."

Over time, the single-pen continued to evolve and eventually became the "shotgun," consisting of a pair of square rooms, one behind the other, with a porch in front. (These structures got their name because one could shoot a shotgun through the front door and the shot would theoretically pass through the lined-up doors of each room and out the back.)

"I-houses" were typically two-story versions of the dogtrot that consisted of square rooms around an enclosed center hall. (This design actually resembled those frequently found in the Midwest, their name coming from the "I" states of Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa where they were most popular.) And the Georgian "four-square house" was made up of four rooms arranged symmetrically around a central, enclosed hall. In many cases, expanded dogtrots were closed in to make interior hallways, while mill-sawn siding was added to the exterior to improve the home. Many an elegant I-house and gussied-up Georgian four-square can trace their origins to a single-pen, and then dogtrot structure.

These traditional structures were far more than plain boxes, then—they were a whole building system, responsive to climate, budget, family size, and every other factor that goes into planning a house. As seen in the original Cracker cottages that still appear around Apalachicola, Perry, and some of the smaller communities near St. Joseph Bay, even the largest of them were matter-of-fact buildings, utterly lacking in pretension. To use Haase's excellent phrase, these were "plantations without white pillars." They were built to make life easier for the pioneer settlers who lived in them, who seemed able to think of comfort and sustainability and clarity as natural elements of building.

Toward a New Florida Vernacular: A Modern Florida Cottage
Not surprisingly for a style of architecture so intuitively suited to its climate and surroundings, these original wood-frame vernacular cottages have turned out to be a good model for reinterpretation in a contemporary vein. Haase himself has designed many such reinterpretations for clients—both private and public endeavors—and has clear conventions that he follows when trying to stay true to an Old Florida vernacular he clearly respects.

"There are a few older architectural attributes that I think have to be part of a modern Old Florida house," Haase explains. "It has to be up on piers or at least maintain that visual illusion of being up off the ground. It has to be a wood-frame structure and maximize the use of porches. And—though this doesn't address the original settlers, exactly—it should have a metal roof, which came into play at the turn of the nineteenth century. It should also possess a simplicity of details and direct use of materials." Again, what these characteristics address are our desire to create sense of place by borrowing the best from our architectural vernacular while we create an entirely new architectural identity.

WindMark Beach in Port St. Joe was conceived as a project that would engage with these themes. Of course, the environment of the Gulf Coast itself and the wilderness of woodlands and wetlands to the north have already helped determine WindMark Beach's identity, but plenty of other communities share that landscape. What would be WindMark Beach's own? The answer, so obvious and readily at hand is—like those early Florida cabins —a legacy of unique history, vernacular architecture, and the native culture of the region. The quest for something that would distinguish WindMark Beach led the designers and architects to the wood-frame vernacular cottage that is so synonymous with the region's history.

And so it was the vernacular style of these cottages that set the tone for the architectural language of WindMark Beach. Jaquelin T. Robertson of the firm of Cooper, Robertson & Partners, who designed the overall plan for the 2,020-acre WindMark Beach along with the landscape and planning firm of EDAW, took charge of figuring out how to adapt the wood-frame vernacular cottages into houses that worked for a twenty-first-century village.

"How do you keep fresh? You can only do so many resorts the same way," Robertson says in his office in Midtown Manhattan, the conference room walls pinned with drawings of new towns he has designed from central Ohio to outside of Paris. "It can't be too design-y. We know that the best resorts are old towns that became resorts over time."

Robertson had no interest in turning WindMark Beach into a theme park of imitative historical buildings—he liked the Cracker cottages not because he wanted to copy them, but because their simplicity and clarity inspired modern interpretations. Robertson also had no desire to design all the houses himself. He brought together a team of architects from around the United States that he thought would be sympathetic to the ideas behind WindMark Beach—respect for the rich legacy of the region's architectural history, simplicity of design, and a responsiveness to local setting—and asked them to create a range of house designs inspired by the original Cracker cottages, but reinterpreted for contemporary use.

Ross Anderson, Margaret McCurry, Ted Flato, Peter Dominick, and Scott Merrill, among others, were invited to meet as a group with Robertson and executives of The St. Joe Company—creators of the community—to talk through their ideas for the town. "We wanted different designers designing around one constant, which is the boardwalk," Robertson says. "We did not want everything to look the same, but we wanted everything to have some connection to the traditions of the area, to the Old Florida cottages."

To this end, Robertson arranged the building lots in clusters and placed houses so that their fronts would face not roads but a series of boardwalks and trails, to encourage residents to walk. Cars will be tucked behind the houses, so there will be, in effect, two separate circulation systems: a road system for automobiles and a boardwalk system for pedestrians. The "local" boardwalks will connect to a beachfront boardwalk and trail system that will run the entire length of the town—the longest boardwalk in the world, Robertson says.

The prototypes for WindMark Beach—as well as for the larger buildings being designed by Cooper, Robertson; Ross Anderson; and others—suggest the comfort of familiar forms: gabled roofs, porches, generous overhangs, and the like, simplified and abstracted to look more modern.

Some of the larger civic buildings are more modern still, but there is nothing sleek or corporate about them; this is a modernism of clarity, texture, and warmth. The buildings weave together to make a village fabric, not by being identical—there is in fact going to be tremendous variation from house to house, and among the civic buildings in the village center—but by being similar and consistent in materials, in scale, and in tone. "These dwellings—while minimal—were imbued with an economy of means that has struck a chord in this century with people who seek to lead purposeful lives, but in an informal fashion," McCurry has said. If WindMark Beach works as it should—and the first few cottages are just being completed—it will feel as if it could be nowhere other than at the edge of St. Joseph Bay.

Authenticity is a trait that places only truly earn over time, of course, and the real test of a community isn't how it feels when it is sparkling and new, but how it feels a generation later, when the freshness has worn off and the place gives the impression that it is settled and natural, or it doesn't. Places with authenticity tend to get better with time, by establishing deeper connections to their natural surroundings and forming a kind of patina that seems warmed by age rather than worn out. Only time will tell about WindMark Beach. But all the ingredients are there for a place that will transcend the moment of its development and be a lasting presence beside the bay: a village with a fresh take on Old Florida, a place that will have its roots in the past but its life in the present, and will resonate more deeply with each passing year.

These homes, indeed this Old Florida past, still have something to offer the present: distinction, that feeling of knowing that this place is like no other.