Category: Tradition

Florida, Tradition1 Comment

A Tradition of inspired design

Westsideaction

Did you get the clue in yesterday’s (and today’s) story titles? It’s all about the houses at Tradition. Here is the back patio of a home being built by a local builder. Notice the large shaded patio, plus some un-roofed patio area. The utility plugs in the wall to the right are for an outdoor wall-mounted TV.   The ceilings in these houses tend to be nine or ten feet high, and the patio sliders are equally oversize, which fills the rooms with light. In this new area, wild life was still around, and curious:   Moving on around the … Continue reading A Tradition of inspired design

Florida, Tradition

Inspired Design at Tradition

Westsideaction

Tradition has long “parkway like” access roads to the housing clusters, as shown here:   There is a bicycle lane marked on the right, and a sidewalk visible on the far left. These roads could have been designed by the NCC – they are circuitous, scenic, manipulate vistas, and thoroughly boring to try to walk or ride along. Adjacent subdivisions back onto the road right of way. Think Jeanne d’Arc in Orleans or Spratt Road in Riverside south, but on steroids. Periodically, there are side roads into housing clusters. Each is announced by a large “gatehouse”, none of which appeared … Continue reading Inspired Design at Tradition

Florida, Ottawa, Tradition1 Comment

Tradition, cont’d

Westsideaction

Just a very short distance from the Tradition village centre with its new urbanist nostalgia-infused vibe, we discovered the real reason for its high vacancy rate. A big box mall. Straight out of Nepean or Gloucester or Kanata, but with more landscaping in the parking lots:   There was the obligatory big box pet store, a large supermarket, department store, home furnishings store, etc. [remember now it is pronounced Tar-jay, in faux French  to mock the higher design pretensions of Target].  Now to be fair it is rather difficult to fit these large format businesses into a walkable village centre. Loblaws in Westboro … Continue reading Tradition, cont’d

Florida, Ottawa, Tradition4 Comments

Tradition new town

Westsideaction

On a recent Florida vacation-with-a-urbanist-theme, I made a point of visiting some “famous” examples of planned towns. Some were from the early 1900’s (eg Winter Park City, covered previously; and Coral Gables, maybe to be covered in the future) and two were new towns launched in the last decades specifically to provide an alternative to conventional lollipop cul-de-sacs of garage-fronted car-dependent suburbia. Celebration I liked. It actually seemed to have “launched” itself into a growth pattern and developed a genuine sense of place. Definitely a better suburb. The second new urbanist townsite was Tradition, near Port St Lucie, near the Atlantic coast of Florida … Continue reading Tradition new town