Like a lot
of you, I’m sure, my wife and I did some traveling over the break. While we often stay in town, we spent a long
weekend at Rosemary Beach—a community like many along 30A where a lot of our
families vacation. Claire, our
three-year-old, naturally loves the beach and would rather be there than just
about any other place in the world. One
of the draws of Rosemary or Seaside for us is that it reminds us of our first
home in Franklin—Westhaven. As our
travels have confirmed, Westhaven is certainly not unique. It follows a growing trend of community
planning that some architectural critics have dubbed “New Urbanism” or
“Neo-Traditional Communities.” Those are
big words to describe a simple concept—the return to front porch communities.
A lot of folks would trace the
founding of that movement to Seaside, though there are many examples across the
South today--Water Color, Alys Beach, Celebration, Daniel’s Island, and I’On—to
name a few. In the 1980’s a husband and wife architectural team designed
Seaside with the conscious aim of reproducing small towns all across America,
with squares and parks, back alleys so that houses were not separated by long
drives, and, especially, front porches. These features are what drew Dana and me to
Westhaven and why we love Seaside and Rosemary. Virtually every house in these
communities focuses on porches and patios.
Of course, architects created these designs for environmental
reasons—the sea breezes and ceiling fans cut down on energy bills. Soon they learned, though, that they had
created or recreated the front porch effect.
By getting more people out into the streets and onto their porches, they
believed they could create and sustain a sense of community. . . that casual
interactions would nurture stronger bonds.
What the architects reacted against were the ranch houses and
communities that sprung up in America after World War II. During that time, as a recent segment on
National Public Radio put it, “The front porch took a back seat to the back
yard.”
What does
any of this have to do with BGA? We need
routinely to ask ourselves: How do we work to create the kind of community that
we want to have? As I have said before,
of all the schools I have been associated with, I think BGA stands the best
chance of being a front porch school.”
For BGA to become what it could be, a truly warm community where
everyone feels welcomed, we must think carefully about putting structures in
place to encourage the kind of community we want to be. We must work to create the expectations and
design the culture we want. The summers
in the South last a lot longer than they do in New Hampshire, where I grew up—even
into October. I hope that we can still
find a little time for the front porch and for discussions of the community we
want to create.
