My mother is a liberal democrat who supports environmentally conscious legislation and business. So naturally, she opposes sprawl. I was recently driving with her through a 1990s suburb where the houses are built very close to one another, less than 10 feet apart. She said to me, “I don’t know why anyone would want to live right on top of their neighbors like that.” She’s not alone in having these competing, yet understandable, points of view. When discussing sprawl as an urban condition, there is no lack of vitriol. But at the scale of the house, most people want their space. Very few critics of sprawl believe that they live in it—it’s a place that is further out, less sensible, and less tasteful than their own neighborhood.
Given the nearly unanimous opposition to them, it is surprising that the suburbs still exist, let alone thrive. But they are the dominant mode of urban growth worldwide. This project is a hypothetical alternative to established suburban models—with house prototypes and a block layout that accept sprawl, but reconfigure it. Houses are amassed in a dense, but porous ribbon around the perimeter of the block. They have a long, low sensibility with elevated courtyards. In most suburban houses, windows are more or less uniformly distributed (on the front and back, north and south, in living rooms and bedrooms).
In these houses, street elevations are almost totally opaque, emphasizing form and color. This feature also enables the houses to be located very close to the sidewalk—they don’t need the distance that typically separates the domestic realm from the public street. At the same time, courtyards are lined with glass, so interiors are open and light.
Four new types of garages, each with a different mechanism for opening the door, are seamlessly integrated into the house forms. They are invisible when closed—a new response to the age old problem of how to hide the garage—and reduce the need for driveways and alleys. They allow front yards to shrink, freeing up ground area for large houses and a generous amount of open space. A park at the center of the block is designed for collective use, smaller courtyards on the upper levels of the houses provide more isolated outdoor areas, and paved terraces underneath cantilevered parts of the houses function as covered patios.
The project makes a case for experimental form in suburban architecture. Rather than viewing the suburbs as a problem to be fixed or as an amalgam of morally bankrupt development strategies, it suggests ways to tweak the suburbs. It’s a matter of considering what could be designed instead of what should be.
Project Team:
Independent Architecture - Paul Andersen, Molly Chiang, Jason King
Character drawings - James Jean
