Palm Beach Daily News (Sunday, May 2, 2004) "Greenry, detail color legacy" by Stephanie Murphy Architecture was the topic and Palm Beach the tableau when two designers and a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic recently discussed urban trends, the unique qualities of Palm Beach and design challenges of historic sites. An audience of 45 attended the Coudert Institute's two-day forum featuring Paul Goldberger of The New York Times; Robert A.M. Stern, dean of architecture at Yale University; and New York-based architect Harry Elson. The setting shifted among design styles as the group visited local homes and gardens that are Contemporary, Plantation and Mediterranean - Classic, Revival and Pompeian. Founder Dale Coudert hosted sessions at Villa dei Fiori, a landmark Addison Mizner house. Architect Richard Kaplan arranged field trips to 441 N. Lake Way, a 6-acre series of gardens; 180 Cocoanut Row, Elson's redesign for his parents, Susie and Edward Elson, former United States ambassador to Denmark; 974 S. Ocean Blvd., Bill Koch's ocean-to-lake compound; and 40 Blossom Way, to see the work landscape architect Morgan Wheelock, member of the town's Architectural Review Commission. Stern, who has been "dying to design a Palm Beach house for 40 years," said, "The scale of Palm Beach is the ideal. The nice thing is that it doesn't change, even though some of the great houses are torn down or redone badly. It's the landscaping that makes it unique." Mizner enabled being close to nature even with a small garden, he said: "It's not always about the Grand Tetons or having 40 acres to qualify as nature." Goldberger contrasted this island with Nantucket, which is "very rigid in its traditionalism. It's also unending good taste and total respect for the past, to a point that it becomes deadening." That result revives an old debate, he said: "Can we plan our way to where we want to go, or is our civility partly accidental?" Excessive, totally rigid planning is not the answer, any more than 'letting it happen' is the answer." The sense of place in Palm Beach derives from "the extraordinary relationship of nature to architecture," Goldberger said. "The powerful private realm creates a public realm without meaning to. It's a by-product of the houses and hedges. I'm not a shopper, but I sort of like Worth Avenue, because it doesn't feel like anyplace else. I'm grateful for that alone." Worth Avenue is "swamped with cars because it's a magical place to shop and stroll," Stern said. "You can't keep people out. It's a tribute to its quality." He credits Mizner and his patron Paris Singer for achieving such urbanism in only a decade, but said it's misguided to depend on that alone. "Mizner made Palm Beach. Every day, people should kiss a picture of him, because without him, it would be name your town." But new houses are not designed to the same level of detail. It's not the style, it's the detail," said Stern. "Some architects have the magic of detail and some don't.' Goldberger agreed: "Palm Beach relies too heavily on history. True, it was invented with tremendous imagination, but today, houses are larger and with less imagination attached to them." The Elson project illustrates interesting historic references "which are never used literally," he said. "By taking a wide-ranging reference abstractly, Harry Elson achieved authenticity and a house with integrity." Elson said his parents chose the site after shopping among 30 to 40 others. The "modern villa" mirrors their travels, with nods to a French hotel, a palazzo in Italy, sites in Stockholm and the French Quarter in New Orleans: "When you open the doors at the street, you have these magical worlds past the hedges." "I'm always interested in what's behind those anonymous hedgerows. This house was very unpretentious, yet very comfortable where the back opened to the garden," said William Mech, dean of the Florida Atlantic University Honors College. Sigi Berwin's oceanfront home at 40 Blossom Way was a crowd-pleaser, as guests threaded their way up a tree-lined path along the dunes and into the villa. A houseguest "barely" escaped an audience, dashing into a dressing area, after the group's arrival cut short his beach dip. "Being here is pervasively magical. It's not like another century, it's like another millennium because of the ancient roots in the design," Granville Toogood said. Berwin, a native of Germany, and her then-husband, oil industrialist Graham Berwin, designed the house 16 years ago, working with a designer in Washington, D.C. They wanted it "radically different" from their home in Bryn Mawr, PA. "We wanted no resemblance to an English cottage or garden, and no Oriental rugs. Hw wanted independent quarters for his children, and he had Pompeii very much in mind," Berwin said. Bill Strawbridge, a Palm Beach resident, asked if the island is an anomaly, with its frenzy of redevelopment dominated by "faux-Mediterranean," hundreds of building permits a year and property taxes that make up the lion's share of town revenue - currently 67 percent of the general fund, based on town records. "Palm Beach shares that feature with a handful of other communities. It's a nice problem to have," Goldberger said.