Contemporary Rowhouse Designs
Posted in Discourse on Fri Sep 29, 06 by Kyle under Domestic Architecture.
I am completely obsessed with row houses, or terrace houses in the British parlance. If you aren’t familiar with them row houses are tall houses built on deep narrow lots directly touching each other with no side yards, usually involving some kind of shared party walls. Old American cities like New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston and San Francisco are famous for their 19th century row houses. Of course most of Europe and Britain are blessed with many centuries of such urban houses. There is a lot of general interest in free standing single family houses and high-style apartment buildings, but to me row houses provide a great balance between the density of apartments and the privacy and neighborhoodliness of individual houses.
I love the look and the feeling of a cozy street full of tall skinny houses, especially when they are enlivened by lots of bay windows, projecting stoops, and fun ornament. I’ll admit it, I’m still stuck in urban 19th century aesthetic. (As if you can’t tell from everything else I write about.) For me there is some kind of perceptual or emotional effect that makes places like this feel like one of the ideal urban environments. They are the perfect balance between bustle and excitement and homeliness and geniality. They focus and delineate the space of the street without bearing down and casting them in gloomy shadow all day. Sadly row houses fell out of favor in most of the US by the 1920s or 1930s and were replaced by dispersed suburban type houses.
Of course, row houses are not ideal in all respects. The major complaints that contributed to their demise at the turn of the century were the lack of yard space, light and air circulation for rooms in the middle of the house (if the houses are more two or three rooms deep, special design tricks are needed to bring natural light, ie, windows into those rooms), and the general feeling of cities being too crowded. Not to mention all the stair climbing that could be involved in a four of five story house! These are all problems associated with any kind of high density development. Modernists, especially Le Corbusier tried to solve these problems with their hyper-rational tower-in-the-park plans, but that kind of typology introduced its own set of social and environmental problems. Most notably when used in the context of several infamous public housing projects.
Recently however row houses seem to be regaining their respectability. I’ve read about several projects in New York using new row house type plans broken into separate duplexes and condos, and here in San Francisco a lot of the new loftominium developments that popped up during the dot-com and housing-runup have borrowed some of the characteristic features of row houses with varying degrees of success. Of course, in places like NYC and SF, that kind of development is necessitated by the price of land and the existing layout of lot and street boundaries. I was very interested when I came across this post on the Inhabitat blog. Although the project designed by Youmeheshe is not row housing per se as the buildings do not touch each other or make a continuous street front, I was thrilled to see that tall, skinny, and densely packed houses are being worked on by contemporary architects. For convenience I have included the pictures from the Inhabitat post below for your reference. Youmeheshe also have a PDF file with some additional pictures on their website.
Their inspiration for taking up this type of house came from its suitability as a sustainable green solution for housing. The less land a house takes up and the closer together houses can be built, the more land there is to be left in a more natural state. An obvious premise but one that was lost and disregarded for most of the 20th century thanks to the zealous enthusiasm for technology, industry, and the automobile and the easy availability of throw-away priced raw materials and energy supplies.
Style wise the project reminds me a little bit of the new deYoung Museum in San Francisco and some of the original Daniel Liebeskind renderings for the Freedom Tower in NYC. All of these buildings make use of the planar crystalline forms that have been so popular in recent times. Although this is the first time I have seen such a design for a building that uses wood instead of the default and staid trio of steel, glass, and concrete of most contemporary architecture. There is something about this kind of vertiginous asymmetric treatment of flat planes or similar angular shapes in 2d design that has become something of hall mark of the past several years. I can sense another post forming as I type…
Like all renderings and models, this house may not be as pleasing in person when you realize that the lovely wood grain that you see in some of the renderings is nowhere close to being in scale to how the wood grain would appear in full sized buildings. (Those tricky architects!) I do however think that the shape, plan of the house, and the floor plan flexibility could be very exciting. I would really like to be able to see more clearly how the center stair hall space is resolved.
The planing of circulation space in such buildings is always tricky. Which is why the stair hall to the side, with rooms in sequence was so prevalent in traditional row houses. The separation of circulation space from proper rooms is one of the reasons that traditional row houses been viable and survived for so long. It made them very adaptable to different forms of use, ie, roommates splitting up a large house, division into separate smaller flats or apartments, etc. That is one of my qualms concerning open planning, large open spaces can require a great deal of unsympathetic intervention to be repurposed once the building starts to drift away from the original use and tenancy patterns it was designed in mind with. No to mention that you and everyone you invite over gets to see just how many dirty dishes are left in the sink and how much working clutter is on you desk.
Planning and space use issues aside, this seems to be a big step in the right direction especially considering that it is designed to be a green, prefabricated, and affordable house. Good and interesting solutions are great and relatively easy in one-off commissioned houses with supportive clients, but fitting such concerns into mass produced speculative building is a much harder game to play.
This building utilizes a lot of what is currently in style in design and architecture in terms of materials, form and volume, and space planning, right down to the retro-Modern-chic Eames lounge chair. I don’t know how I would feel about an entire street of these houses, I can see them either being really nice, or fail miserably. What would they look like painted? All the renderings show them with no context or in more wooded suburban looking streets. The majority of what makes a street of row houses so nice is that they are a solid attached row, the proportions between street and façade, and the rhythm of façade details down the street across several buildings. These houses might make a great alternative to suburban mediocrity, but only time will tell if they could make great civic architecture. One wants to be optimistic about them, but a lot of contemporary architects have failed or not even considered this aspect of building.
Plus what exactly is up with with that boxy cantilevered snaky light fixture(?) tentacle coming out of the wall towards the shivering gal in her underwear? And where is the bathroom? Despite these lingering questions, if I were ever to have a modern styled house I’d certainly give these a look.