The Genius of Place

For architect Jaquelin Taylor Robertson, a distinguished career has taken him across continents, but always with local place and culture in mind.

by Philip Morris
photography by Colleen Duffley (WaterColor) and Paul Whicheloe (New York City)

I had rented a bicycle and pedaled the half mile from Seaside to this new development called WaterColor so I could see how it was shaping up. It was 2001, and WaterColor was materializing after years of planning. The elevated terrace at WaterColor Inn was nearly complete, and as I walked across it I heard someone call my name. There was Jaque Robertson, reviewing the development. After we greeted, he looked away from the beach toward the linear park stretching inland. “You know, it’s Canberra,” he said, confident I’d know he was speaking of the great axis in Walter Griffin’s celebrated 1913 plan for Australia’s capital.

So there we were, looking at a place emerging from Robertson’s master plan that was tailored to its setting: an engaging inn and beach club overlooking the blue-green water; a town center emerging to embrace the two-lane highway; and in the park a masterfully executed channel of water, lawn, and flowering plants civilizing a bit of nature for people’s comfort and use. A new town with shape, with edges, with ideas and conviction behind it. A sense of place.

The full impact of that plan—and the way the name “WaterColor” emphasized the development’s relationship to the surrounding environment—would come later. And only later, after having the chance to talk with Robertson at length, would it become clear how satisfying this project was to someone who had long championed regionalism as the driver in making places that value vernacular buildings and that respond to a specific landscape, culture, and climate.

There was nothing more natural than for this man to be engaged in shaping a singular new place. It was evident in his face, beaming as he waved his arm toward the distance. The stars had aligned just right for Robertson to help develop something exceptional in a part of the country that he says has taught him more about his life’s work than any other place in his storied career—a fact that takes on even greater import now as he and his firm enter the final stages of planning another coastal community for The St. Joe Company—WindMark Beach in Port St. Joe.

And so, by luck, I had renewed contact with one of the leading lights of American urbanism and been brought up to date on a career that has stretched across the globe but always managed to be rooted in place. For this project he worked as partner in the New York City-based Cooper, Robertson & Partners. But through a lifetime of varied challenges, he has always been the eloquent and thoughtful Jaquelin Taylor Robertson. One who’s constantly thinking, arguing, writing, and designing in favor of what, in many circles, sometimes seems a lost cause: the common good.

Some highlights of his career: founder of the New York City Urban Design Group in the 1960s; dean of architecture at the University of  Virginia (1980–1988); cofounder of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (1986), which later received the Presidential Award for Design Excellence; recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Medal in Architecture (1998) and the Seaside Prize (2002) for contributions to American urbanism.

Beyond these highlights, however, lies the story of a man finding a career and a cause that eventually led to his drawing a bold line in the Florida landscape that became WaterColor.

The Importance of Place
It is no surprise that someone who was born and raised in the Commonwealth of Virginia would develop a concernfor the common good and, specifically, an interest in politics. The state was overweighted with Founding Fathers, and to this day Robertson seems their direct descendant—a student of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. He’s proper yet warm, with a courteous manner that would seem to allow him to mix in any circle—a quality that would’ve served him well as a statesman. Politics was his first choice as a Yale undergraduate, and his Rhodes scholarship at Oxford was in politics, philosophy, and economics. His own father served in the state department, and as a boy Robertson lived in China where his father was U.S. ambassador in the Eisenhower administration. But along the way Robertson’s exposure to architectural historian Vincent Scully, architect Louis Kahn, and others triggered something.

“This is really interesting, and I know it,” Robertson remembers thinking. “I had assumed that things that came to you naturally were not serious in terms of a career. But ... my abilities in reading patterns and understanding architecture were not just an interest, but a talent, and therefore should be considered as a future.”

Robertson also began to understand how influences such as the “cultural gene pool,” as well as geography and climate, play a role in how people live and what they live in. Take the South: “It’s as varied as any other part of the world that I know of,” he says. “Virginia was influenced by its Anglo-Dutch settlers, coastal Louisiana and Mississippi by the French, and much of Florida by Spaniards. But you see this mixture of architectural languages that distinguish them from other places. The South, in architectural terms, is about how these various national styles came to the New World, were amended, and then crossbred with the national styles of the other countries that were fighting for control of the New World. It’s why our architecture is so different from Europe.”

Each of these regions began to exhibit its own culture and architecture, and this uniqueness showed in the way villages and buildings developed. Climate too had an impact. The hot climate of the South led to deep, shaded porches with large overhanging roofs to keep torrents of rain away from homes. Such an understanding of region has guided Robertson throughout his career. At WaterColor, the influences of cultural heritage, climate, and landscape can be seen in every home, street, and park.

On the Frontier of Urban Design
This effort to create places that emphasize locale got a jump start in 1967, when Robertson joined Jonathan Barnett, Richard Weinstein, and former classmate Alexander Cooper and founded the New York City Urban Design Group under Mayor John Lindsay. Robertson and his colleagues were at the right time and place to innovate how a city might be shaped and set new precedents as they began not just to design buildings but to design livable, workable spaces—another theme that would continue throughout Robertson’s career.

As the first director of the Office of Midtown Planning and Development for the mayor, he oversaw the seminal Midtown plan. This included ideas about the place, not just individual buildings. The plan prohibited the windy, unused plazas that existing zoning encouraged. It also mandated that Fifth Avenue be lined with retail uses. How to get it done? Greed, not force. Developers were given extra floors to provide retail and related amenities, and even more floors if they were residential. The field of urban design was jump-started right there. The holistic approach—not just architecture, but how streets and buildings animate a place and how things can be accomplished through incentives—was a new idea, but it was rooted in common sense.

“Architecture and urbanism, always together,” Robertson intones like a mantra. “It’s not the individual buildings but the aggregation of buildings, the urban setting, that really defines great architectural cultures. And that includes planning and landscape architecture, as well as preservation and history.” Again, the understanding of how something is to be used now and in the future sets the tone for functionality, while an understanding of the area’s past helps set it apart and create something special. “It doesn’t matter if the plan is for a truly urban area like Midtown Manhattan or a coastal community like WaterColor; the issues are largely the same—creating a setting that people can use that also takes into account the landscape, climate, and unique architectural and cultural heritage of the place.”

The Teacher Learns
From the start of his career, Robertson had taught, first at Yale and Columbia. But when he took the position of dean of architecture at the University of  Virginia in 1980, it was partly so he could be the student. “I had not been interested in running a school of architecture, but when they asked I decided I needed to learn more about the DNA of American architecture. And one of the best ways to learn is to try and teach.

“American architecture and urbanism have produced some fabulous stuff, but to understand it you can’t just look on the surface; you have to understand the culture that it came out of and how it evolved,” Robertson says. “And I took the occasion to do that. It was ‘going to ground,’ as they say in the intelligence business.” The University of  Virginia was the right place for several reasons. For one, it had planning, history of architecture, preservation, landscape architecture, and architecture all under one roof. It also encompassed Jefferson’s original campus, the academic village that inspired others across the country.

Here again, in his native Virginia, at its most famous seat of learning, his regionalism was reinforced. “Jefferson has influenced me in so many ways, but the most important was thinking through the unique aspects of any given place and trying to find them,” Robertson says. “What we call a sense of place. The Romans said every site has a genius loci—the genius of the place—and it is your job to figure out what the setting is telling you. And the setting is not just physical and geographical and climactic; it is also cultural. How do people live? What kind of symbols are important to them?”

A Discovery
While at the University of  Virginia, Robertson maintained an architectural practice in New York and Charlottesville. What began as a moderate pace with selected projects blossomed into a major urban-design practice when he left the university in 1988, returned to New York, and formed a partnership with Cooper, his old classmate and colleague with whom he worked on the Midtown plan.

The new firm of Cooper, Robertson & Partners did the master plan for Disney’s Celebration community near Orlando in the mid-1990s. On this project, Robertson and Cooper began working with Peter Rummell, then chairman of  Walt Disney Imagineering who later became CEO of The St. Joe Company—an association that led to WaterColor and what Robertson now considers one of the most fulfilling projects of his nearly fifty-year career.

“On our first visit to the WaterColor site, we walked through thickets to Western Lake,” Robertson recalls. “I was with my partners. It was really exotic, with egrets, cranes, herons, lush undergrowth. It looked like the backgrounds in Audubon’s prints of Florida birds or Winslow Homer’s and J. S. Sargent’s watercolors.”

There was a reason for that connection, Robertson and his companions realized. “All three of these great American artists had actually painted in this area, and it had a huge influence on their work. And this place in particular, where the black tannin waters of the dune lake are juxtaposed with the white sands of the Emerald Coast. It is a wondrous natural world, which is itself a work of art.”

But there was something else that made this area a perfect setting for Robertson, who had built much of his professional philosophy studying this country’s architectural DNA. “All of those influences can be seen right there in Northwest Florida,” he says with the enthusiasm of someone who’s discovered the architectural equivalent of the Holy Grail. “Here you find the fingerprint of all four of this country’s architectural gene banks. It’s a region with architectural ties to Spain and France, as well as an Anglo-Dutch influence. In short, there exists a crossbred DNA that is authentic and unique in my experience.

“There is an undeniable sense of place here. It has all the right ingredients,” Robertson says. “It has a cultural gene pool that created a unique architectural heritage. And there was the landscape itself, so beautiful. We knew shortly into that first trip we had the makings of a spectacular place.”

Planning a Paradise
As they discovered on that first exploration, such a uniquely diverse natural setting—beach, marsh, pine forest, and freshwater dune lagoons found nowhere else but in South Africa—would set the place apart if used carefully. “We knew we had a natural setting that was the star of the show. So the challenge came in trying to keep the wild Audubonesque aspects and create, at the center, a green savanna banked with flowers like a paradise,” Robertson explains.

This “paradise” became Cerulean Park, itself at the center of the community, which connects its two signature ecosystems: the pine forest and thickets on the shores of  Western Lake and the white sands and spare grasses of the beach. Further emphasizing these differences, but also acting as a transition, is the community’s color palette. It’s what Robertson calls “slices of difference” that are tuned to the various aspects of the landscape, ranging from brighter, high-key colors at the beach to softer hues around the lakes and in the woods.

“Today, perhaps the name ‘WaterColor’ seems so obvious,” Robertson chuckles. “We’d always had early Florida watercolors in mind. We had developed color coding for neighborhoods. We even decided that all the illustrations should be done by a fine watercolor artist, but we still hadn’t come up with a name.

“Then I got a call from Peter, maybe six months after my first trip there. ‘What about the name WaterColor?’ he asked. After a brief silence, I said, ‘Perfect!’ It really is amazing how the colors affect the place, from the black tannic water of the lakes reflecting the sky to the blues and greens of the Gulf. It also applies to how WaterColor is about all things water and how you go from the Emerald Coast to fountains, the running water channels in parks to the dark water of the lake.”

As for the design of  WaterColor’s more practical aspects—its streets, businesses, and houses—there was already something of a model next door. Like Seaside immediately to the east, which launched the New Urbanism movement in the early 1980s, a walkable, sociable environment would be established in the WaterColor landscape. Members of Cooper, Robertson & Partners had been engaged in a revival of town planning from the start, and Robertson admits it was appealing to build around Seaside but make WaterColor its own place. Playing up the nuanced landscape was key, but designing a mixed-use town center to tame the two-lane 30-A was another major move.

Throughout WaterColor, buildings help shape streets and open space. Streets, even in the town center, are intimate and alive. Parks and squares are comfortable because they are like rooms with houses serving as walls. Everywhere, the landscape and the buildings work together. And the attention to the dimension makes walking anywhere in WaterColor an interesting experience.

Given that so many of Robertson’s interests and passions seem to intersect in this corner of Northwest Florida, it’s not surprising that he speaks so glowingly of the region. Like each project before WaterColor and now WindMark Beach, his efforts here have been about learning, only more so.

“I’ve learned more about the things that I’m most interested in from working in Northwest Florida,” he says. “Even though geographically they’re so close together, I’ve learned so much from working on WaterColor and WindMark Beach because they are so different. WaterColor has a refined feel to it, while WindMark Beach has a sense of wilderness.”

Northwest Florida is, Robertson says, “a singular American place. It’s different from anything else. It influenced three of the greatest American painters, and it’s where all four of this country’s architectural gene pools came together.

“I know the central South and Virginia,” he continues. “I know New England, New York, parts of California, and the Rockies. I’ve lived in England, China, and the Middle East. But in the northwestern part of Florida, I learned things that I didn’t know. It’s been exciting.

“It’s a place that, had I known how rich it was, I would’ve gone sooner.”