Smirking at Truman

We’d like to thank Architecture magazine for explaining The Truman Show, Peter Weir’s blockbuster 1998 movie. We saw it, and thought it was about a megalomaniac television producer who keeps the fictional show’s star, Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey), imprisoned in a town called Seahaven, which is really an elaborate stage set. Apparently the movie was actually about evil new urbanist town planners and developers who conspire to imprison the U.S. in nostalgic sentimentality. That’s according to editor-in-chief Reed Kroloff, who sees The Truman Show as an overt Hollywood joke on Seaside, Florida, where the movie was filmed. “Architects … will immediately recognize that Sea Haven (sic) is not illusory,” Kroloff says in the August issue editorial. “It is, in fact, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany’s famed Seaside, the New Urbanist Mecca in Florida’s panhandle. Architects, and even modest admirers of New Urbanism’s goals, can laugh at Hollywood’s deadpan rendition of Seaside’s most persistent criticism, that it is too perfect; marvel at the real town’s willingness to serve as the butt of its own jokes; and enjoy the movie as a devilish send up of New Urbanism’s preening self-righteousness.” further surprises Thus enlightened, we thumbed through the rest of the magazine, and discovered that, like Seahaven, things aren’t always what they appear. Architecture glowingly reviews what looks like a glass and concrete warehouse damaged by an earthquake, but this is, in fact, a theater. Also profiled is, at first glance, a petroleum refinery. But no, that’s a warehouse. The greatest achievement is an 8,000 square foot mansion disguised as a colony of outhouses. If Seahaven had consisted of such buildings, one wonders whether Truman would have been content to live out his days, never wondering what was beyond his little borders. Or would he just have gone insane? Kroloff believes that the New Urbanism would strip people of their freedoms — ensnaring them like so many Trumans in a web of front porches, pretty streetscapes and town squares. Meanwhile, modernist and deconstructivist architects would set the world free by making people feel uncomfortable and creating sculptures for the rich. The problem with this view is that real new urbanist communities, unlike Seahaven, embrace the outside world. People in well-designed new urbanist places do not feel trapped — they are relieved to be in civilized surroundings that do not consist of cookie-cutter subdivisions, strip commercial centers, urban blight, or even the egotistic visions glorified in Architecture. Ultimately, it is freedom that Kroloff fears — that people will choose an architecture disciplined within an overall context of place over heroic individualism that turns its back on the degraded everyday environment.