Krier Plaza opens to fulfill part of Seaside’s master plan

Krier Plaza is the latest addition to Seaside.

Seaside Prize recipient Dhiru Thadani is the master planner for the Central Beach Vision plan and the architect for the Bud & Alley’s Waterfront Restaurant Enhancement Project.

Bud & Alley’s, which is in the final stages of its enhancement project, shares the staging ground for Krier Tower.

An important component of preserving the beloved history of the original Bud & Alley’s, the main building remains, while the design of a new building houses the Pizza Bar, and includes outdoor, roadside and central promenade seating. The project brings an addition of nearly 1,000 square feet on the Bud & Alley’s roof deck, famous for its daily sunset celebrations. The roof deck enhancement includes elevator access and bathrooms that directly serve the roof deck. The addition of a beach walkover directly off the gazebo provides beachgoers direct access to Bud & Alley’s.

Seaside’s newly formed “Piazzetta” connects Central Square to the gulf. “Piazzetta refers to the smaller of two plazas that are connected,” Thadani says. “We changed the brick floor color of the plaza to distinguish it from all the other spaces in Seaside, hence the built version is white and charcoal brick.”

Thadani, author of “Visions of Seaside” and his most recent work, “Reflections on Seaside,” shares details of the Krier Plaza project.

Excerpt from “Reflections on Seaside”:

In early 2000, a group of esteemed architects and planners convened in Seaside to discuss the maturation of the commercial Gulf Coast district south of Highway 30A. Many schematic ideas emerged. The most notable was to make a much stronger visual link between the gulf and Central Square. But how?

Learning from historical precedents has been among the most constant themes in the development of Seaside. This time, by way of analogy, lessons were drawn from Venice’s primary piazza, Saint Mark’s Square. Seaside’s primary space is removed from the gulf, as Saint Mark’s Square is removed from the Grand Canal. At Saint Mark’s the big piazza is visually linked to the water by a smaller Piazzetta, and marking the juncture of the two spaces is a tower, the Campanile.