Scott Merrill: from ‘town architect’ at Seaside to winner of the Seaside Prize

When Scott Merrill, founder of Merrill, Pastor & Colgan Architects in Vero Beach, Florida, goes to Seaside on January 28 to accept the Seaside Prize from the Seaside Institute, he’ll be returning to the place where he first caught the attention of the architectural world.

In 1988, Merrill left Washington, DC, where he had been a young architect working for Patrick Pinnell. His destination: the Florida Panhandle, where he would be “town architect,” overseeing construction of Robert Davis’s 80-acre pedestrian-scale resort, Seaside.

The northeastern US had then, as it does now, a large number of talented architects competing for a limited number of commissions. Relocation to Seaside would give Merrill the job of ensuring that Davis’s development continued to fill out properly. Equally important, it would give him the opportunity to design on his own.

From those beginnings, Merrill, now 55 , has gone on to produce a remarkable series of buildings and designs—from Florida to San Francisco, to Abu Dhabi, to the Caribbean. Among them: houses, churches, town halls, hotels, plazas, ghardens, clubs, mixed-use blocks, courtyards, and a federal courthouse.

In Residential Architect magazine in 2005, editor S. Claire Conroy described Merrill as a card-carrying classicist who had become adept at “paring down familiar vocabularies to essential elements.” She characterized the results as “modern,” observing, “He adds some cool to the warmth of those familiar forms and materials.” Merrill’s gift for making lovely, humane patterns that learn from the past is surely part of the reason why he’s been selected for the Seaside Prize.

Early work

“Robert Davis gave me a small parcel of land” overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, Merrill, 55, recalled this week in a phone interview with New Urban Network. For that site, one of the few areas that Davis allowed to be developed on the Gulf side of Rt. 30-A, Merrill designed the “Honeymoon Cottages”—the name was a reference to a cottage that Thomas Jefferson lived in for two years while working on Monticello.

In the site chosen for the Honeymoon Cottages, Merrill saw the possibility for designing the cottages so that they would appear to be diminutive single-story dwellings when seen from the beach, but would present a rhythmic two-story wall to people driving or walking past on the road. As pointed out on the firm’s website, the cottages also “sought to ennoble necessary repetition.” That quest for beauty in restraint, combined with repetition, is evident in much of what’s been built by new urbanists. The cottages, Merrill’s first undertaking as a solo practitioner, won an American Institute of Architects Design Award in 1991.

After two years as town architect, Merrill picked up and moved again, this time to Vero Beach on the Atlantic coast, to work on a second community designed by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company—the 416-acre Windsor development. "I have been working in Lizz and Andres's slipstream forever," Merrill says.

There he played the same two roles as at Seaside: administering the design code and creating buildings on his own. He also served as architect of record (producing working drawings, among other tasks) for the Windsor Chapel designed by Leon Krier.

Accommodating public functions

The website of Merrill, Pastor & Colgan, a 12-member firm with offices in Vero Beach and Atlanta, says:

In designing multi-building projects there is a consistent emphasis on designing the project perimeter to make good city blocks, on designing the edge to create attractive points at which to enter the block, and on designing the block interiors to add appeal to less valuable exposures. A principal aim is to create buildings and spaces that make movement through the blocks interesting and enjoyable .... Because there are always too few public buildings, private buildings are used to enhance public spaces and to perform public functions.

Asked to explain how private buildings can be made to perform public functions, Merrill cited the Windsor Town Center. It is not a publicly owned structure; it’s a grouping of condominium units, in a development that architectural historian Vincent Scully has characterized as “less a town than a sort of transcendent hotel.”

The design solution for Windsor Town Center: “As the site was prominent, but the program contained little in the way of true public functions, we proposed that the buildings be sited to form public gardens. The cost of these gardens was recovered by the value attained with the apartment units in two of the buildings.” The ground floor was designed so that people can pass through it, Merrill emphasizes. “The atrium is a dedicated public element; it’s part of the walk from the residential neighborhood to the ocean. The passage belongs to everyone in the project.”

Building densely and well

The firm strives to develop building types and site planning that uses land more efficiently and intensely. “In the last few years, we’ve had a chance to study multifamily building types, oddly enough in the Middle East to a degree, and in San Francisco with [architect] Dan Solomon,” Merrill says. Sideyard houses and courtyard houses are among the building types the firm has focused on. Alys Beach, a new urbanist development on the Florida Panhandle where architects Mariane Khoury-Vogt, Erik Vogt, and others have worked,  has "pushed the courtyard house to the smallest lot sizes,” he says.

Along with carefully deployed density, Merrill has paid close attention to how to make buildings resilient, a quality that’s becoming ever more important as the weather becomes more erratic. Most of the firm’s work is done in hurricane wind zones. Certain profiles of roof, such as hip roofs, take winds better, Merrill says.

Conroy, in Residential Architect, captured part of what makes the firm’s work so mesmerizing. She wrote:

Looking at one of their houses evokes that experience we’ve all had: You think you see someone you know at a distance, but when you get up close you discover a stranger. ... The forms and references feel familiar, yet you can’t pinpoint the specific antecedent.

The Seaside Chapel, which was built in 2001, draws on both Classical and Gothic architecture. Classicism had originally been intended to be the style of all public buildings at Seaside, but by the time Merrill began designing the 200-person interfaith chapel in 1999, Seaside's houses had co-opted Classical architecture to such a degree that a somewhat different approach seemed to be called for. Merrill sees board-and-batten chapel as drawing from both the horizontal classical tradition that Duany and Plater-Zyberk had envisioned for the community and the Gothic tradition, evident especially in its verticality.

Besides the chapel and the Honeymoon Cottages, Merrill has designed the west swim club, the Motor Courts, and many residences at Seaside. Says Diane Dorney, executive director of the Seaside Institute: "It is amazing to me how much he has contributed in this one town."

For more in-depth coverage on this topic:

• Subscribe to New Urban News to read all of the articles (print+online) on implementation of greener, stronger, cities and towns.

• Get New Urbanism: Best Practices Guide, packed with more than 800 informative photos, plans, tables, and other illustrations, this book is the best single guide to implementing better cities and towns.