The plan of Seaside is near perfect, but not without a design flaw here and there. And one of the most glaring ones is to be found at Quincy Circle and Quincy Place, the combination of streets that line the back of the Central Square buildings. For these buildings, Quincy Circle and Quincy Place is a service alley. But, for the potential buildings on the half blocks fronting them, the Quincy twins need to be designed as streets to front onto.

This motor court replacement project is located on Quincy Circle. By its central location, size, relationship to the beach and access to Highway 30 alone, Quincy Circle deserves to become a full-fledged thoroughfare. This esquisse delivers it as such, by placing the front of the new building squarely against the back of the Holl building across the way. The next move would be for the Holl building’s ground floor to be redesigned as a more open and hospitable space on Quincy Place. Such is the process by which towns and their buildings grow to maturity.

The development program for our project included approximately thirty one- and two-bedroom condominium units, the replacement of the Seaside Rental Agency and a bicycle rental center, all over subterranean parking. The development strategy was to offer condominiums to the market that were smaller in size and less expensive then typical Seaside houses. But in a form and with amenities that reinforce the overall character of a beach town.

By their nature, double-loaded, stacked-flat housing buildings are generally incompatible with single-family houses adjacent to them. Since the 1950s, this kind of adjacency, poorly handled in design, has reduced the character and value of many worthy neighborhoods throughout the country. To overcome this design challenge, the massing of the new building was fragmented into four three-story building blocks. Each one of these blocks was of the scale and form of a large single-family house, while in this case each house contained six to nine condominiums. Three of these building blocks were arranged facing Quincy Place and the fourth facing Highway 30. The gap between them became the principal entrance for the project, including a courtyard, interior lobby and elevator.

The final composition mitigated the typical massiveness of stacked-flat buildings. It also safeguarded the views, light and air of neighboring houses to the north and east, while engaging and complementing the dimensional and typological characteristics of the existing housing to the south and west. Three of the four building blocks were placed in the center of the site. They were laterally offset to generate an outdoor space for a central garden and lap pool. The fourth block was placed parallel to Highway 30 to simulate the scale and dimensional envelope of the buildings across the street.

Two tower rooms were also introduced into the massing to further connect the project to the typical house fabric of Seaside. Metal roofs were configured both to support the form of each of the five building blocks and to keep the overall building form reading as one. The offset plan pattern allowed all circulation to be open-air, and all elevations relating to corridors and lobbies to be composed in wood siding and slats without using windows or glass in any way.

The choice of frontages both delivered Quincy Circle as a street and reinforced the civilized character of Highway 30 as it traverses Seaside. All the condominium units were given large exterior balconies for their residents to enjoy beach views and sea breezes. The balconies were organized into vertical stacks on Quincy Circle and into cantilevered balconies on Highway 30. The vertical rhythm of these frontages transformed the inevitable horizontality of the stacked flats and became a formal signature for the project.

Scaled down to its specific place on the Seaside plan, the new building mediates between the mixed-use commercial blocks of the central square and the single-family neighborhood houses of the neighborhoods.

The Seaside Code was a pioneering document of its kind. Almost thirty years old, it regulates urban form by reference to various repeating building types on each of Seaside’s streets. It was adequate for establishing the foundation form of the town. But it is now inadequate as a tool to control its emerging successional urbanism, particularly when such redevelopment involves tearing down existing buildings to introduce larger and more complex ones. The original code clearly needs to be revisited.

In order to deliver this project as presented here, the existing entitlement envelope had to be modified in a variety of minor but crucial ways: The stepped setback against the houses to the east had to be enlarged. The right-of-way of Quincy Circle had to be reduced to improve the section of the street, to accommodate the width of a double-loaded housing project, and to allow for proper frontages to mediate the relationship of the new building to the street. Frontages had to encroach into the new setbacks. The height limit of the project had to be calculated to the mid-point of the roof slope, not to the ridge.

The project was eventually abandoned, in part because all of these potential exceptions from or variances to the Seaside Code, which complicated the entitlement process.