Narrator: Major funding for "Architect Scott Merrill: The Power of Simplicity" is provided by The University of Notre Dame School of Architecture through the generous support from the Richard H. Driehaus Charitable Lead Trust.

(MUSIC) Scott Merrill: Whenever I had gas money and a little bit of free time I would take these trips.

MUSIC So we're now on Old Dixie Highway.

Within a period of a year and a half or so out of school I would take cross country trips at a whim.

Geoffrey Baer: Why were you drawn to traveling?

Scott Merrill: Well, I don't think it unfolds.

I don't think you say, "I'm gonna take one or two years and do a lot of traveling across the country."

Geoffrey Baer: You weren't intending to see all forty-eight states.

Scott Merrill: No, no.

I mean you do these short things, like you say you wanna go hop a train.

That's more or less an impulse rather than a plan.

Check this place out here.

It's really a weird building type.

Geoffrey Baer: Oh man.

Wow.

Where are you taking me to?

Scott Merrill: I'm gonna sss-show you a sad remnant of something called a grapefruit sorter.

This is grapefruit country here, Indian River grapefruit.

This is partly the cockiness of youth, right?

In this case I was driving my uh, old beat up car.

Datsun 510.

It had blue smoke coming out of it constantly.

Geoffrey Baer: Ugh.

Scott Merrill: And I'm not sure what kind of uh, you know, health effects it had on me.

Also the car had a tendency to overheat, so if I was gonna go across the uh, if I was gonna go across Death Valley I would have to wait for dark and then I would have to turn the heat on in order to ... Geoffrey Baer: Yeah, draw the heat off.

Scott Merrill: ... draw heat off the engine to keep the car from overheating.

Geoffrey Baer: What did you learn from all of this?

Scott Merrill: I really learned to love the country.

I mean it didn't matter whether you were in Richmond seeing the tobacco warehouses or if you were in New Orleans looking at shotguns or in Tennessee looking at dog trot houses, or here our own agricultural tradition has uh, grapefruit sorters.

It didn't matter which part of the country it was.

Every part of the country has some kind of building culture that made it distinct from the rest of the country.

We're gonna take a look here at this grapefruit sorter up here on the left.

A little apologetic about the state of it but I mean this is almost true of every part of the country where structures are starting to be derelict.

(MUSIC) Geoffrey Baer: What do you see when you look at this, what am I supposed to understand about it that inspires you?

Scott Merrill: It's a good example of a building type that could only be in a small part of the world and yet, at the same time I'm also interested in them because they have an uncanny resemblance to, let's say, grain elevators in the north central plains.

There's something about every particularity of that assembly that's rational and makes sense and what's really interesting to think about is how people all over the world facing the same problems arrive to such similar solutions, that's what's really interesting to me about it.

Geoffrey Baer: Scott Merrill is an architect who loves a good vernacular building , those ordinary, local structures that give a place its unique character, and that are hard to find these days.

Scott Merrill: I felt like I was seeing a lot of places at a point in time where things that distinguished them were perhaps disappearing.

Geoffrey Baer: Merrill's architecture might not immediately call to mind a decaying agricultural building on a South Florida backroad.

But his two years of wandering the United States in the late 1970s profoundly influenced his work.

And part of a home he designed included details directly inspired by the grapefruit sorter.

And it's not just about appearances.

It's about preserving a sense of place.

MUSIC Scott Merrill was a Midwestern boy from the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Even as a kid, he knew good design when he saw it.

Scott Merrill: There were some very interesting suburbs that were close by, Glendale was one of them.

I loved Glendale.

I knew it was appealing, but I didn't really completely understand why it was so much fun to be there.

Geoffrey Baer: Turns out Glendale was one of America's first planned suburbs, dating back to 1851.

Scott Merrill: Then off in another corner of where I lived was Green Hills.

Geoffrey Baer: Green Hills is a pioneering Depression era town built by the Federal government during a housing crisis.

Merrill's college campus was a living museum of classical architecture - the University of Virginia, designed by Thomas Jefferson.

After graduating, Merrill went to work at a firm in Washington D.C., but quickly became frustrated.

Scott Merrill: In Washington for example you had a lot of talented people who were competing for relatively small jobs.

Geoffrey Baer: An important urban planner, Andres Duany, would change all that.

Duany knew Merrill's boss, and on a visit to the office heard good things about the young architect.

Andres Duany: And I went up to him and I said, "How'd you like to go to Seaside and be the next Town Architect" and he said, "Well, I'll think about it."

That was the full extent of the interview.

Because I work on instinct.

(MUSIC) Geoffrey Baer: Seaside, along Florida's Gulf Coast, was the place Merrill had dreamed of working.

Scott Merrill: This is a little bit like saying, "Oh, Scott wants to go into outer space, he wants to be an astronaut."

Geoffrey Baer: That's because Seaside was at the forefront of new ideas in urban planning.

It's now a thriving resort town, but it was little more than a patch of barren waterfront land when Merrill was invited to go there.

Seaside began as the dream of developer Robert Davis and his wife Daryl.

They wanted a place that resembled traditional towns before the age of suburban sprawl.

It was designed for walkability, putting people and community before cars.

The plan was by Duany and his partner Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, with input from European architect Leon Krier.

While Merrill was elated, he had reservations.

He was engaged to a Capitol Hill staffer.

Scott Merrill: We were relocating to a part of the country where nei-; neither one of us had personal or familial roots.

Um, my wife is a Yankee; I was taking her to the south.

Zo Anne Merrill: He was gonna say no and I said, "Scott, that's not acceptable."

Scott Merrill: I was very concerned about the fact that there wasn't, at that time, great healthcare, great schools.

Zo Anne Merrill: Scott so much wanted to build.

He'd come home at night from work and he'd work on his own projects and this was his opportunity.

Scott Merrill: The first day we got there someone said, "Well, it's not the end of the earth but you can see it from here," right, very cute right.

Zo Anne Merrill: I basically left a job where I read ten national newspapers a day and knew exactly what was going on in the world to the other end of the world where I was very isolated and we had to drive twenty miles to get a New York Times on Sundays.

Scott Merrill: When you're young, you make sacrifices in order to get things built.

Geoffrey Baer: Merrill became Seaside's new Town Architect.

He promised his wife they'd return to D.C. within six months, maybe a year.

Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk: I think to move there and want to be the Town Architect, uh, took some great foresight.

There were many people who were, in a sense, stepping into the abyss, doing things that they had never done before that were not tested, that weren't part of the mainstream.

Robert Davis: We had carpenters as well as architects and more traditional intellectuals coming.

He brought a calmness to the design of houses that we thought was really important at that point.

Geoffrey Baer: Davis had an instinct for emerging talent like Merrill's.

All of the buildings in Seaside's center are by architects who are now high profile, like the stylistically bold Steven Holl.

And Deborah Berke.

Scott Merrill: Deborah Berke did the Modica Market, Deborah was just named as Dean at the Yale School of Architecture, and then I did the building which is right here.

Robert Davis: They were young and hungry and we were young and didn't have any money, but we could afford to give them an opportunity to build.

Geoffrey Baer: But it's the more modest buildings of Merrill's that tell the most about his beliefs and gifts.

Leon Krier: Well, his first really masterpiece was the, was the small hotel court, the motor court it was called.

Scott Merrill: It was mini storage, if you can imagine anything less glamorous than mini storage.

Robert Davis: Midway through construction we said, "Well, the land's too valuable, let's turn it into the No-Tell Motel."

(MUSIC) Scott Merrill: Zo Anne loves the sense that she planted in Robert's mind that he could make more money, you know, if he turned them into motor courts.

Geoffrey Baer: Do you remember that or not?

Scott Merrill: Well, Zo Anne's story is Zo Anne's story.

Geoffrey Baer: Merrill's love of roadside architecture provided an excellent model.

Scott Merrill: One of the types that I'm fond of is these motor cabins you see in little clusters that you might see on the old U.S. highway system.

They were little individual units that were often in rows.

Leon Krier: It was absolutely extraordinary in its discipline and composition.

There was like a main building, which was like the, the monument, then there was the square, which was with very modest uh, overhangs and arcades.

Scott Merrill: I always knew that they would get torn down, right?

And I've been incredibly surprised at how protective the town is of structures that at this point look derelict to me.

They held weddings in that parking lot and I'm not kidding, if you would string the sycamore trees with small lights, you could have a party in there.

And it was just pure joy.

Geoffrey Baer: Seaside's popularity brought with it new people who had in mind grander schemes than the modest small town Davis had envisioned.

Robert Davis: People wanted to build bigger and fancier houses vying with each other to get people to pay attention to them.

Look at me, look at me.

Scott Merrill: If you want to build something that approximates a just city, it has to have buildings that are modest building types as well as the glamorous building types.

Geoffrey Baer: When it came time for Davis to develop some of his prime oceanfront property as rental units, he picked Merrill for his expertise with understated design.

And the architect obliged with six identical vacation homes, each just seven hundred square feet.

Scott Merrill: In New England, or Vermont where my wife is from, you might have a whole town that's made out of three or four different housing types and this is probably closer to what Robert imagined, than a town that was made out of a bunch of custom houses.

Andres Duany: What Scott did in those buildings with their single window size, their single roof pitch, their single kinds of columns over and over and over again, he reintroduced the classical beauty of repetition.

Robert Davis: That is his genius is that he's willing to do very modest, very simple, very understated and yet very elegant buildings.

Zo Anne Merrill : Then at the end of two years when we decided to leave, we had the opportunity to come here to Vero Beach to work on Windsor.

Geoffrey Baer: In 1990, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk were designing another new Florida town, this one on the Atlantic Coast.

They wanted Merrill to join them.

Zo Anne Merrill: Scott said "No," he said "I promised her we're going back to the D.C. area, you know, she's done her time."

Scott Merrill: My wife, Zo Anne actually made the argument that we should come here and work on a project that was just getting its, its legs and that she thought was very important.

Zo Anne Merrill: "We'll go back to Washington and you'll be doing the kitchen and bath renovations."

Scott Merrill: So uh, we, we came here twenty five years ago.

Zo Anne Merrill: Hey!

Scott Merrill: I'm not sure that any of us foresaw being here as long as we've been here.

Zo Anne Merrill: Will's downstairs.

Ooh, what you working on, Alys Beach?

Scott Merrill: Alys Beach.

Geoffrey Baer: Merrill Pastor and Colgan Architects is located above a boutique in Vero Beach.

Merrill's partners, George Pastor and David Colgan, both started working for Merrill just out of college.

George Pastor: It'll be twenty five years that I've been working here.

Scott Merrill: So you've got George Pastor: So there's two percent between the, the low bidder and the middle bidder and I just talked with the client Geoffrey Baer: David Colgan works out of an office in Atlanta.

David Colgan: Never done a house in Atlanta, but we work together and it's been great.

I don't know if he thinks that, but I think it's been really great.

Geoffrey Baer: The firm's staff architects are all recent graduates.

Scott Merrill: I want them to understand how complex a building process is from a technical standpoint, but also from a human standpoint.

How many people it takes to build the most modest structure, how complicated all those relationships are and all those roles are, just to even build a house, let alone a much larger building.

David Colgan: But he gives people enough rope to take ownership of things which is really great, right out of school.

Scott Merrill: We, we wouldn't have a profession if we didn't bring people along with us.

George Pastor: We've done stuff in Texas and uh, Massachusetts and Canada and, and even into the Bahamas.

Scott Merrill: Rebecca.

We're building a house in Jackson Hole.

We have the Tetons as a backdrop.

George Pastor: We get weekly drone shots.

We can see almost everything that they're seeing.

I've heard Scott looking at these, talking to the carpenters and the, and the contractor out there about specific uh, framing details because of these drone shots.

Scott Merrill: It is how we're still - we are getting the inch-and-a-half here that we want to get?

George Pastor: There was, I think thirty nine inches of snow in uh, just the month of January alone on a construction site.

Scott Merrill: Anyway, he got, he did a really good job of getting us shots of exactly what we needed to confirm.

Geoffrey Baer: But it's the work closer to home that keeps the Merrills, and the office, on the Florida coast.

(MUSIC) Windsor is a planned community surrounded by a golf course and polo grounds.

Unlike Seaside, it's gated.

Like Seaside, it puts homes close together to preserve the open space a typical sprawl development would have gobbled up.

Scott Merrill: We went to Seaside at a point where we were still sort of denied the satisfaction of being there early enough to make the first mistakes.

And so Windsor was just getting its county permits.

Geoffrey Baer: Windsor is modeled on a Caribbean rural town Merrill designed the town center.

This is really about a whole ensemble, right, that works together?

Scott Merrill: Right, there are about seven buildings here and they're basically seven buildings that make gardens.

So, here, that building, for example, helps make the space to the amphitheater, but it also really helps to make the gardens that are just beyond this wall here.

MUSIC It's the sort of a paradox of site planning that if you divide it up, it actually makes the whole area seem a little bit bigger.

Geoffrey Baer: So you're designing something for the delight of everybody who is going to move through the space.

Scott Merrill: Right.

So one of the things that you have to do is you have to learn how to take private program, like apartments and condominiums and give them a sort of public function and so it's an apartment building with a hole in the middle of it, that comprises the sort of nominal gate to Windsor.

Geoffrey Baer: One building in the Town Center looks like a Greek temple.

But it's actually the post office!

Leon Krier: It's spectacular and he chose that, a very small building, mass wise, can have enormous importance in creating an interesting focus in the townscape.

Andres Duany: He intensified the architecture so that there's no question that this tiny building is much, much more important than the largest mansion nearby.

Scott Merrill: You have a windowless ground floor where all the post office boxes can uh, be loaded.

And then you have a narrow top-lit space that is, suffuses the whole lower level with a great deal of light.

Leon Krier: And it's an absolute pleasure to walk in there and, and pick up your, your letters.

Geoffrey Baer: Windsor's homes are less eclectic than Seaside's.

There are only five types, including the courtyard house.

It's modeled on similar colonial buildings up the coast in St. Augustine, Florida.

It's a whole inner world!

Scott Merrill: This is the atrium around which most of the house is organized.

It is another means by which you can give people immaculate privacy on a relatively small lot.

Geoffrey Baer: Merrill has also designed some of Windsor's row houses.

MUSIC Windsor's Town Hall was designed by European architect Leon Krier, with Merrill serving as the local architect on site.

The two met at Seaside.

Scott Merrill: Leon was a neighbor and um, our cat was always in his house.

David Colgan: When I first started work, Leon Krier was swirling around, it was like wow, Leon Krier, he, his book, his monograph, at Notre Dame we call it the 'answer book' cause it has every- everything is just so beautiful.

Geoffrey Baer: Krier was famous for his ideas about making towns and for having almost no built work.

Leon Krier: I said "I don't build because I'm interested in architecture" or "I'm doing architecture because I don't build" because all the architects have to make excuses and I didn't want to make buildings which I had to be, uh, sorry about or, a- apologize for.

Scott Merrill: I've had occasion as a friend to sort of gently kid him about that.

Geoffrey Baer: Merrill's office tried to help Krier.

But it wasn't easy.

David Colgan: That was like a ten-year project.

Leon Krier: I did so many alternatives that I finally resigned because there were so many people who wanted different things that I said "I can't go on, I've, no, done enough of this."

David Colgan: I mean it went on for years.

Leon Krier: I said "I do one more attempt."

Scott Merrill: Part of my job was to help Leon navigate permitting and codes and trades and all these sorts of things.

Leon Krier: Scott has this enormous patience that he really studies all the preconditions to design and integrates them.

Geoffrey Baer : For the planners of Windsor, creating a new town that puts houses close to a town center residents can walk to is a matter of smart land use.

Scott Merrill: Windsor's success will be, in part, its influence on other places, more real, real places with more difficult problems than this.

Geoffrey Baer: Merrill's work at Windsor is for wealthy private clients.

But he hopes to build more public buildings, accessible to everyone and serving a wider community.

David Colgan: You know, Scott's been doing houses for twenty, twenty-six years and he wants to "spread his wings" is not the right word to say about a fifty-five - how old is Scott?

We did a competition for a library in West Palm Beach, Florida.

And he talked about people climbing all over this building.

I think in his mind he had a vision of he and his kids going to the library and having a ball.

Geoffrey Baer: The federal courthouse in Ft. Pierce, Florida, is Merrill's largest building.

(MUSIC) An opportunity to design another public building - the chapel at Seaside - brought Merrill back to the panhandle.

(MUSIC) Geoffrey Baer: [laughs] You know it's,it's,it's monumental!

But it's also very simple.

How do you do that?

Scott Merrill: It's ... a gift to be simple.

Geoffrey Baer: You're very inspired by the vernacular in architecture, low, local, simple and we really see that in here, don't we?

Scott Merrill: The reason I think I like vernacular stuff so much is they're recurring, they're solutions to recurring problems.

Geoffrey Baer: And Merrill's inspiration here was agricultural buildings.

Scott Merrill: And so I look at things like corn cribs and I look at grapefruit sorters and I look at grain elevators.

And if you look at their walls and strip away the sheathing, they have some similarities and affinities with the way these side walls are designed.

The side walls are what you might describe as tall, unsupported walls and when you have high winds, like you would during a storm event, uh, you have to design them so that they take incredible lateral force.

Andres Duany: I've always found his uh, descriptions rather beneath his buildings.

That building is magical.

The size and repetition of the trusses.

The way they catch the light!

It's absolutely magical.

It really is sacred space.

David Colgan: It was the first time we'd done a building where other people got to come into it.

I got married in that chapel.

Scott Merrill: You're gonna have everything from concept drawings in here to fireplace details.

Geoffrey Baer: Is this how you like to think?

On paper?

Scott Merrill: It's easiest and fastest for me to draw this way.

Geoffrey Baer: These tracing paper drawings show a plan Merrill is developing with Duany Plater-Zyberk.

Scott Merrill: We are being asked to come up with a master plan that will, in part, encourage Emirate citizens to come back into the center of the city, which they have largely abandoned.

Geoffrey Baer: It transforms the center of a city in the United Arab Emirates into a place where homes, stores, and workplaces are close together, insuring the streets are filled with life.

The challenge is local financial incentives that are instead encouraging people to spread out across the landscape.

Scott Merrill: There's an ongoing program that locates people or encourages them to locate to the edges of the city and of course what they're doing is sending tendrils further out into the desert.

Geoffrey Bear: Which is eating up a lot of energy.

Scott Merrill: And a lot of land that is beautiful before the development.

Here we go halfway around the world, a lot of us, to work on a problem that is, that exists in your own home town.

Geoffrey Baer: Vero Beach is like a lot of cities in the Middle East, and the United States where homes sprawl across formerly open land, and people drive to work and shop at centers like Vero Beach's Miracle Mile, that are surrounded by parking lots.

There's huge parking lots.

Scott Merrill: Huge parking, yeah.

Geoffrey Bear: And nobody lives there.

Scott Merrill: Nobody lives there, it's all commercial.

Geoffrey Bear: It's just stores.

Scott Merrill: Stores, restaurants, things like that.

Scott Merrill : Our town is surrounded by grapefruit groves.

We would like to have a city that has low density, lots of street trees and so on and so forth.

The price that you pay for that is that you send these tendrils out into the grapefruit groves.

Geoffrey Baer: Merrill's office developed a plan in the center of Vero Beach that brings some of the ideas from the Middle East plan to Florida.

It concentrates people and still gives them open spaces and landscaped courtyards.

Scott Merrill: We did a master plan for a five acre parcel that was immediately adjacent to Miracle Mile and it was a really good opportunity to say, okay, we'll prescribe some form this greater density will take.

It's the only bad thing I think about this master plan, is that the zoning did not allow for mixed use.

Geoffrey Bear: Right, so it's all offices.

Scott Merrill: It's all office space.

Geoffrey Baer: Part of the development has been built.

What's at stake in Merrill's state is the balance between the land people live on and the natural landscape that's disappearing, just like those humble vernacular buildings, as the population continues to grow.

Scott Merrill: There's a certain number of people who are gonna come to Florida every year and we don't really have much to say about it.

The only thing that's up for debate is the type of settlements we have, either developed land or completely undeveloped land, and not something in between, because you could have a house on 5 or 10 acres and it would still ruin an environment like this.

Geoffrey Baer: Merrill's attention to simple, local traditions might hold a key to continued building in Florida.

It's a down-to-earth approach that helps to preserve what's left of precious open land.

MUSIC Scott Merrill: The best description of architecture is Flannery O'Connor's description of fiction and she says basically it's about everything human, and we are made of dust, and if you scorn getting dusty, then it's just not a grand enough job for you.

Narrator: Major funding for "Architect Scott Merrill: The Power of Simplicity" is provided by The University of Notre Dame School of Architecture through the generous support from the Richard H. Driehaus Charitable Lead Trust.