Urban Studio Students Hit the Beach

These excursions enrich their education by allowing them to experience buildings and urban environments in their own context. This immersive approach helps students gain a deeper understanding of how architecture shapes the public realm.

Over the years, students have explored Savannah (Georgia), Charleston and Beaufort (South Carolina), New York City and the Florida Panhandle. In New York, they delve into the dynamics of public spaces and the unique ways a city is experienced. Along the Atlantic coast, visits to some of the South’s oldest cities, such as Savannah and Charleston, offer opportunities to study their historical development and urban evolution.

This year, students headed south from Birmingham to spend the weekend experiencing four communities on the 30A corridor—Seaside, Rosemary Beach, Alys Beach and WaterColor. These communities show students how New Urbanism has evolved.

Urban Studio Director Alex Krumdieck ’86 organizes these trips with intentionality. The 30A corridor is an ideal way to experience the evolution of New Urbanism, starting with Seaside (established 1981), where the New Urbanism design movement began.

According to the Congress for New Urbanism, “New Urbanism is a planning and development approach based on the principles of how cities and towns had been built for the last several centuries: walkable blocks and streets, housing and shopping in close proximity and accessible public spaces. In other words: New Urbanism focuses on human-scaled urban design.”

This focus on human-scaled urban design was especially relevant to the fifth-years on the trip. They spent the fall semester developing a master plan to create a new Fourth Avenue North experience focused on using art and pedestrian experiences to reconnect neighborhoods and create a healthier city. It also influenced how they are looking at their individual thesis projects.

Tyler Layton explained how the field trip influenced his approach to design.

“I realized the importance of creating spaces that foster togetherness by being flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of events, lessons, meetings and hangouts,” he stated. “Such adaptability empowers people to reshape the space to meet their needs with minimal limitations.”

With the success of Seaside, the mid-1990s saw the development of Rosemary Beach and WaterColor. These additions marked a shift along 30A, transforming it from a more organically growing beach community into one defined by controlled, planned developments. Although similarly aged, Rosemary Beach resembles the charm of Seaside, whereas WaterColor has the feel of a more suburban take on New Urbanism. The close proximity of these developments provided students with a unique opportunity to explore both areas and observe how New Urbanism has evolved along the Panhandle.

Fellow fifth-year Han Li, who has been exploring transitional spaces, found that looking at Rosemary Beach helped her better understand how to design spaces that connect public and private areas. She was able to experience how pathways, courtyards and materials create smooth transitions between the public and private realms.

The final destination for the students’ New Urbanism experience was Alys Beach. Developed in 2004, Alys Beach is the most recently constructed and probably the most planned of the four communities they visited.

“I realized that the design priorities of a place often reflect the time it was built, which got me thinking about the importance of designing with the future in mind,” Li shared. “When a project is completed years after its design phase, it still needs to fit the environment and meet future needs. This insight has made me more aware of considering long-term adaptability and relevance in my designs.”

All four of these communities are both products of the time they were constructed as well as of how New Urbanism ideals are used when planning. These areas show how much designers have learned from the early days at Seaside to the 21^st century development at Alys Beach. These planned communities rely on thoughtful design and community organization.

“The field trip truly opened my eyes to the power of simplicity in design, especially in public spaces. Initially, I was skeptical about envisioning how people might use a space when there’s little to no structure in place,” Layton added. “However, I realized that leaving room for imagination allows people to shape the space according to their needs, without being constrained by predefined programming.”

By getting out of the Studio and into new communities, students are often challenged to bridge the gap between the theory of their studies and the reality of how people experience architecture, space and place. These trips reveal how thoughtfully designed environments can connect people and foster interaction. Students immerse themselves in the scale of planned environments, use of materials and creation of open neighborhoods and vibrant community spaces.

Want to learn more about the Urban Studio experience?