The smell of spice and seafood slowly envelopes me as I cross Chartres Street, a block or two from Canal Street. I’m in the French Quarters of New Orleans, Louisiana.

Ten minutes later I’m sitting in a little bar having a cold beer, enjoying a plate of ‘Cajun Pasta Bayou’, which seems to be a cajun shrimp menu with lots of fresh spices, mushrooms and served in a cream sauce with fresh linguini. ‘It’s just something the cook whipped up’ the waiter tells me, smiling, as I compliment the food. Jacob looks very pleased with his ‘Gumbo’ which is the cajun version of bouillabaisse, added a lot of spice I presume by looking at his face. He’s trying to put out the fire in his mouth with crackers. Futile but worth a try.

I’m looking out the window at the locals, who have started the preparations, pushing around barrels of beer and carrying around the industrial size sacks of pretzels that will be served when the humid heat lowers. They’re all grinning, these lovable sellers of leisure and temptation. Next to me someone orders a Mint Julip, reminding me of another thing I’ll have to give a go, but not now.

We pay the waiter and go for a stroll and decide to locate the bar where we are meeting up with a journalist later. The ladies of Bourbon Street are slowly coming to life and are starting to appear on the streets as the dawn of a new evening in The Big Easy starts to spread its rays of light. Music starts to play in every bar, in every window and you can see the smiles starting to appear in the faces of yesterdays casualties.

Every bar, every cafe, every restaurant we pass is inspected to see what temptations they have chosen for the night - be it a menu, a beer, a cocktail or a lap dance. Everything is a possibility, everything must be felt, tasted, seen, loved - it’s New Orleans and here I come.

We went to a place called Seaside the other day. It’s a thirty minute drive from Panama City. Just take the road west towards Pensacola and be ready to go left when the road splits. At some point you’ll get to a place called Alys Beach, just go on through (beware of rich people in polo shirts crossing), and you’ll get to Seaside in ten minutes tops. Now the thing about Seaside is that it’s in every thinkable way unique. There are very strict rules on what kind of buildings are built - in fact you’ll need a permit to build, and the aesthetics are very important when they consider your application. This creates a township where no two buildings are alike, but still within the same conceptual scheme.

It really does create a very pure and distinct expression for the entire town, and I really like the fact that the developer has insisted that no high-risers were to be built at the beaches (for those who haven’t been to Panama City Beach, imagine a 20 mile stretch with no access to the beautiful beaches unless you are residing in one of the apartment complexes or hotels. And should you try to walk through a parking lot, chances are that a local, employed by the owners, will come running to inform you that you’re trespassing).

But obviously this purity comes at a steep price. The price starts at roughly on million dollars and ends at the same time that you run out of imagination. A five bedroom condo with 5.5 bathrooms (?!), will set you back roughly four million dollars. So it really isn’t something you buy on a whim. But should you be able to afford it, you’ll have access to the luxuries beaches, cafes, bull-courts, small parks etc. that seem be a must in this place - and although luxurious, a cup of coffee is still 15% cheaper than in Denmark.

But beauty standing alone, almost out of context can seem cruel.

The day before arriving at Seaside, I read an article in the local newspaper that said 50000 people, primarily kids and retirees were about to lose their health insurance. Nobody argued against the numbers, the disagreement regarded what was to be done about it. The US are heading into a recession (or getting some wind in the face/taking a break/at the bottom of a steep hill if you don’t like using the “R”-word), so obviously there aren’t as many funds to spread around at the moment, due to lower tax income. And when there are less funds available, budgets need to be cut, or taxes need to be raised - that’s pretty simple as well. And it was fairly obvious that the raising of taxes really doesn’t comply all that much with the Florida mindset. So it ended with budget cuts. And those budget cuts ended up happening in health care, nothing unusual about that either.

This is where I start to wonder, and in many ways lose interest in the beauty of Seaside. It’s uniqueness and architectural innovations begin to be contrasted to the world instead of connected to it. It becomes ad pure place in the crystalized, cold sense of the word and turns into something that divides, almost monopolizes beauty instead of sharing it.

The formal beauty - especially in this case - almost becomes vulgar. Instead of being soothing and uniting it becomes the opposite: the expression of a segregation of the people of a nation. Enjoying a glass of red wine in a five million dollar condo, whilst people within forty miles are dying from lack of simple medical treatments isolates a place like Seaside.

Of course I’m very susceptible to contrasts, and coming almost straight from hurricane stricken Atlanta, things will probably hit me a little stronger. But being in the magnificent town square of Seaside, I couldn’t help but wonder: standing outside of Seaside, having just been stripped of basic necessities such as health care, how cold must the beauty of Seaside not seem? It’s 68 degrees, the sun is shining, kids are running around having the time of their lives and still, looking at it in all it’s purity, I felt no warmth.

Works of art are created in a context. They are the embodiment of formal beauty but at the same time a part of their environment. That’s what make them truly special. Seaside is lacking the latter. It holds the beauty but withholds it as well, making it unreachable to some but even worse: a goal to others.