Artist Academy and Cooperative
Santa Rosa Beach, Florida
Undergraduate Thesis
Spring 2024
As the culmination of my undergraduate education, I questioned how architecture could directly impact a community I have become personally connected to: the artists of Santa Rosa Beach, Florida.
In a small town located on the Choctawhatchee Bay, just three miles north of the Gulf Coast, rapid development and climate change present great challenges. This project is an opportunity to envision a comprehensive home for the Cultural Arts Alliance of Walton County including studios, galleries, residences, and public park space. The campus will simultaneously repair the public realm of Santa Rosa Beach by making bay access a true public amenity and cultivating communal participation in cultural activities.
"Good architecture should be a force of repair for its surrounding community through responding to its local natural environment, creating lasting neighborhood centers for human activity, and sustaining positive social engagement in cultural activity."
At the neighborhood scale, the driving goals for this site were to 1) create a needed mix of uses to improve walkability, 2) create defined public space, and 3) to utilize these components to create an active neighborhood center.
A small commercial quarter in the town's main intersection makes a walkable amenity for surrounding residents. A public square on the main road creates defined public space and bridges over the main road into the artist campus, continuing with the building's entry court, ground floor market, and gardens. The building includes specific connections to a surrounding pedestrian network that extends through the sculpture walk on the site's perimeter and into the surrounding neighborhood.
The building is organized into three levels. As a careful consideration of building within a flood zone and the Florida Building Code, the ground level becomes sacrificial including open market stalls for art fairs, an open-air sculptor's studio, storage, and service functions (See on the site plan above). The second level becomes the piano nobile including a 3-gallery public sequence culminating in an outdoor terrace that overlooks the bay, as well as communal artist study spaces and a woodshop. The third level has the remainder of studio space including 12 private studios, a painting studio, drawing studio, and full ceramics studio.
The organization allows a natural flow to the back garden terrace that overlooks the best views and leads down to the gardens. Simultaneously, artist and public patron spaces become separable yet overlapping, providing both privacy and encouraged interaction.
Character was driven by climate conditions, local materials, and historic precedents. Precedents were focused on both contemporary examples including the work of Scott Merrill as well as historic precedents in the colonial homes of St. Augustine. Details including high sloping cedar shingle roofs, operable sash windows, broad overhanging eaves, wooden porches for solar shading and breezes, and resilient concrete block with stucco all respond to the hot-humid climate.
