Windsor Town Center
1994-1996

Vince Scully memorably says of Windsor that it is less a town than a sort of transcendent hotel. If that is the case, this project is the lobby. We were the fourth firm to work on this site. Previous designs had come to grief, we felt, owing to unsuitably formal site planning diagrams, building diagrams that made phasing difficult, a road configuration that created an elliptical site antithetical to the geometry of the surrounding blocks, and the encumbrance of an ill advised ground floor office program, absent any real demand for such space.

While saddled with an existing entrance road from state highway A1A and blessed with an existing alley of live oaks, we squared off the east edge of the site. We proposed a site plan with a number of different buildings that could be phased. 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. Finally, we forced prominently sited private buildings to perform public functions. The site is at the entrance to a neighborhood of about three hundred houses, at the convergence of five roads. The site has four prominent exposures, and nowhere to hide services. Our proposal was a complex of separate structures that enclose and describe the public gardens. The site is at that point where the countryside gives way to the informal urbanism of the neighborhood's streets. The buildings form the perimeter of a block, even as they provide means for pedestrians to move from the perimeter of the block into the interior gardens.

The program was distributed among eight structures. There are two apartment buildings, a small store, a small post office, a fitness club, a clock and observation tower, and three gardens, one for civic use, one for the store, and one for gardens off the ground floor apartments.

The buildings represent basic classical plan types. They are sited in part to capture views upon approach, in part to mark entrances from the perimeter of the block to the interior gardens, and in part to form groups of buildings that make movement through the site fun and interesting.