RGealy Thesis Prep

Pecha Kutcha

2009-02-27T10:48:00.000-08:00

Urban vs Suburban
The American Dream - a Marketing Campaign
Who is middle America?
changing demographics, renting vs homeownership
Support / problems with an urban american dream
problems with suburbia
rising sustainability concerns
lack of availability of middle income housing in cities
Urbanizing the American Dream
urban housing marketable toward middle America
economical
efficient space use
rent / own relationship
shared spaces

New American Dream?

2009-02-15T07:34:00.000-08:00

Demographic shift to smaller households

Problems with suburbia
-Traffic, long commutes
-Health and lifestyle
-Obesity
-Isolation

Sustainability concerns
-destruction of agricultural land?
-energy used for transportation

New Attitudes
-Urban living as hip
-Urban living as responsible

The shift in cultural values, the attitudes of Americans toward Urban living, is there, but are the economic incentives in place?

Breen, Ann and Dick Rigby. Intown living : a different American dream. Westport, Conn. : Praeger, 2004.

-Portland
"Today downtown is so vibrant it is hard hard to picture a down-and-out central Portland as the 1960s ended. Much like people have trouble visualizing a derelict Baltimore Inner Harbor now that it is revitalized." (Breen, 177)

"Here is how the owner of new construction, the six-story McKenzie Lofts built in 1998, sells its seventy-five units: 'What attracts people and businesses here is an uncommon desire for a more active, urban way of living and doing business away from suburban sprawl, communter traffic and the responsibilites of conventional homeownership. The Pearl District lifestyle is about freedom and creative living -- following a path of your choosing, rather than surrender to a conventional suburban lifestyle.'" (Breen, 182)

"The Portland Business Alliance has a staff member working full-time on housing. The current emphasis of the Alliance is to develop a program that will provide more workforce and middle-income housing in the city." (Breen, 182)

"With its success in stimulating housing, both in the Pearl neighborhood and in downtown, the Portland Business Alliance sees challenges ahead in making the city accessible to what it calls the workforce population...The two areas the business group were planning to study further were the lack of housing it sees available for the workforce population, and critical 24 to 35 age group. The group, the Alliance notes, grew by 45,000 from 1990 to 2000. 'Our ability to capture this population is key to sustained economic growth and livability.' A familiar business-driven refrain.
Subsidies for middle-income housing is obviously a touchy subject. In Portland, you can earn up to $46,000 a year and buy a condominium for as much as $175,000 and recieve a personal ten-year property tax waiver...
Meanwhile, the business alliance sponsors a downtown open house tour of available properties. In 2002, hundreds of people went through nineteen properties, centered in the Pearl [a Portland district] Part of the motivation was to show people that the area was not just for singles and the wealthy. Interest was, shall we say, keen. At Streetcar Lofts on Northwest 12th Avenue, there were thirty people waiting in line to get a view of units ranging from $180,000 to $662,000, with a fifteen-minute wait." (Breen, 188)

-Dallas
"An account by one of the urban residential pioneers attracted to the old department store:
'I wanted to downsize my life,' says Realtor Kitty Dusek, who after a divorce traded in a three-bedroom house in Rockwall for a loft apartment at 1900 Elm. 'Six acres of mowing was too much for me, so now I'm living in what used to be Titche's linen and fine china department, I feel I'm so 'in.'' (Breen, 70)

"A number of subsidies played a role in the conversion [of the downtown Dallas building], including a fifteen year property tax abatement from the city for historic restoration work, a $5 million low-interest loan, a sum from the the downtown tax increment finance district for sidewalk work, and funds from the US department of Housing and Urban Development."
"A 1999 newspaper story offers an account of life in the Kirby: [Henderson, Houston Cronicle Op Ed]
"Dorcy Seigl grew up in North Dallas in a spacious home with a generious yard and a short drive to shopping malls and movie theaters. Now she lives in a 600 square foot apartment with no yard, far from the nearest mall. She wouldn't have it any other way. 'It's a completely unique experience,' she says. 'I can walk to work. I can walk to gym. Last Saturday night, I had about 35 people over and we walked to the Gold Bar in the Titche-Goettinger building...It was a novelty for them the actually walk somewhere in Dallas.'" (Breen, 70)

5 characteristics of urbanity: walkability, density, diversity, hipness, public transit (Breen)

Breen Intro

"Patricia Gay, executive director of the Preservation Resource Center in New Orleans, has been one of the strongest advocates of the need to repopulated cities with middle class residents in particular. Urban policies 'almost never take action to increase the middle class, because of the risk of displacement," even though "displacement occurs when neighborhoods are not stable and when buildings deteriorate to an uninhabited state. Displacement occurs when residents of any income level are forced to move out because of crime," she writes. She notes that public subsidies fuel sprawl, while urban programs create enclaves for the poor. "We have confined our urban revitalization efforts and considerable resources in poverty programs. We have ignored the need for diversity and jobs generated by an urban middle class."

Many of my generation, raised in suburbia, are aware that low density development has its own set of issues, many of which were not anticipated by the proponents of single family detached housing. Commuting headaches, obesity, and isolation are a few that some to mind.[1] We are slowly realizing that suburban developments are simply not sustainable. Even if some Americans are not conscious of this, they feel the effects. Hayden writes, “It is much more common to complain about time or money than to fume about housing and urban space… Americans often say, ‘There aren’t enough hours in the day,’ rather than ‘I’m frantic because the distance between my home and my work place is too great.’”[2] However, many Americans, such as myself, are keenly aware of the benefits of urban living.
[1] Breen, 22.
[2] Hayden, 39.

An Inconvenient Truth - movie by Al Gore
Wikipedia:
The film opened in New York City and Los Angeles on May 24, 2006. On Memorial Day weekend, it grossed an average of $91,447 per theater, the highest of any movie that weekend and a record for a documentary, though it was only playing on four screens at the time.[31]
The film has grossed over $24 million in the U.S. and over $49 million worldwide as of June 3, 2007, making it the fourth-highest-grossing documentary in the U.S. to date (after Fahrenheit 9/11, March of the Penguins and Sicko).[33]
Al Gore has stated, "Tipper and I are devoting 100 percent of the profits from the book and the movie to a new bipartisan educational campaign to further spread the message about global warming."[34]

4 day work week instituted in CA? to reduce commuting

Growth of hybrid car industry from www.hybridcars.com: "Despite tough economic times and a shrinking US vehicle market, demand for hybrids continues to outpace the overall market. We expect the hybrid market to defy the gravity of a recession in 2009.
Hybrid sales—as a percentage of all new car sales—are likely to expand from about 2.5 percent in 2008, to beyond 3 percent in 2009. That will mean almost 500,000 new hybrids hitting American roads in 2009.

PreFab / Mass Customization / Flexibility

2009-02-14T08:01:00.000-08:00

http://www.bensonwood.com/

"This grid system underlies the floor plans of the houses we design. For example, by fixing the standard floor-tofloor heights in our homes as multiples of 71⁄2-in. risers, we have significantly increased the chances of stairs being functional and to code. Our designers generally don’t plan new kitchen layouts because the hundreds of kitchens in our electronic catalog fit the common quadrants that result from our grid system. The same is true of bathrooms, bedrooms, entry sequences, and even combinations of rooms. As we continue to increase the number of plan blocks in our electronic catalog, the possibilities for creating custom floor plans using standard components based on an organizing grid become limitless. Rather than being constrained, our designers have found that such an organizing grid frees them to focus on larger design issues. A system based on predesigned and pre-engineered components—be they stairwells, floor-plan blocks, or dormers—allows for a tremendous variety of aesthetic expression. The same 8-ft.-wide gable dormer ends up in varying numbers and at different locations on many of the homes we build, but each of these homes is a unique design. The design system allows us to achieve a form of mass customization in which we provide high-quality work without the investment of time and money usually required for custom design." From Bensonwood Homes - Reinventing the House

Habraken, N. J. Supports: an alternative to mass housing [by] N. J. Habraken. Translated from the Dutch by B. Valkenburg. New York, Praeger Publishers [1972]

Stewart Brand How Buildings Learn (Penguin, 1994)
"The essential point of the book is that houses appear to be insentient, but are more like living organisms, no matter what the intentions of the designer and the builder. After showing examples in many types and styles of buildings, Brand concluded that attempts to prevent adaptation and change are both futile and shortsighted. Life is not static; therefore, buildings that house life should be mutable...
there are actually distinct layers in buildings that live in time differently. To make buildings more flexible and durable, these layers should not be entangled with each other. Duffy described four layers, but Brand amended the four to six, and he called them the six Ss: site, structure, skin,
services, space plan, and stuff." From Bensonwood Homes - Reinventing the House

Boudon, Philippe. Lived-in architecture : Le Corbusier's Pessac revisited / Philippe Boudon ; translated by Gerald Onn ; with a pref. by Henri Lefèbvre. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1979, c1972.

Living in motion : design and architecture for flexible dwelling / [edited by Mathias Schwartz-Clauss, Alexander von Vegesack ; translations: Manfred Allie ...]. Weil am Rhein : Vitra Design Museum, c2002

Kronenburg, Robert. Spirit of the machine :technology as an inspiration in architectural design /Robert Kronenburg. Chichester : Wiley-Academy, 2001.

International Conference on Portable Architecture (1997 : London, England) Transportable environments :theory, context, design, and technology : papers from the International Conference on Portable Architecture, London, 1997 /edited by Robert Kronenburg. London ; New York : E & FN Spon, 1998.

Methodology Ideas

2009-02-14T07:44:00.000-08:00

Demographic Research of city populations? Who is living in the city?
-singles?
-elderly?
-families?
-children?
->WHY THE CITY DRAIN?

Research history of homeownship
-through statistics
-through ads - Levittown, current housing ads
-through government policies
Research status of American Dream now
Reserach Baltimore (and Portland?) specific situation
->DRAIN CAUSED BY CULTURAL IDEAS AND ECONOMIC DRAW OF SUBURBIA?

How do we draw people back to the city?? Make urban environments attractive to Americans, make it affordable
Hypothesis - use concerns about sustainability, transportation to form a marketing campaign
-portland and houston as evidence that ppl want to live in they city
-An inconvenient truth
-success of hybrid cars
-walmart going green
Problem - how do we attract this demographic to the city?
-> GIVE THEM SOMETHING BETTER THAN SUBURBIA

Analysis of contemporary suburban housing types - numerical and qualitative
-single family suburban home
__square footage
__number of rooms
__cost?
__yard
__access
__privacy
__flexibility- additions? grow old? use of unused space
__personal expression
__transportation issues
__cost
-Baltimore row house
-urban garden apartment?

Analysis of Contemporary Urban Housing types
__square footage
__number of rooms
__cost
__yard
__access
__privacy
__flexibility-additons? grow old? use unused space
__personal expression
__transportation issues
__cost
-high rise apartment buildings

Design explorations - how to have the best of both worlds: densifying the American Dream
-fleixble prefab unit
-flexible building configuration
-application to various sites

Baltimore Bibliography

2009-02-14T07:38:00.001-08:00

Baltimore (Md.). Dept. of Planning. Baltimore: housing and residential areas. Baltimore, 1970.

Breen, Ann and Dick Rigby. Intown living : a different American dream. Westport, Conn. : Praeger, 2004.

Dickenson, Elizabeth Evitts. “Vacancy.” Metropolis : the architecture and design magazine of New York. Dec. 2008.

Dierwechter, Yonn. Urban growth management and its discontents : promises, practices, and geopolitics in U.S. city-regions. New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Hayden, Dolores. Redesigning the American dream : the future of housing, work, and family life. New York : W.W. Norton, 1984.

Hayward, Mary Ellen and Frank R. Shivers, Jr, eds. The architecture of Baltimore : an illustrated history. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Hayward, Mary Ellen. The Baltimore Rowhouse. New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.

Harvey, David. Spaces of hope. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2000.

Olson, Sherry H. Baltimore, the building of an American city . Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

Re: American dream : six urban housing prototypes for Los Angeles. Princeton : Princeton Architectural Press, 1995.

Rohe, William M. “Introduction.” Chasing the American dream : new perspectives on affordable homeownership. Ed. William M. Rohe and Harry L. Watson. Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2007.

Ryan, Brent D. MIT Urban Studies Thesis: The suburbanization of the inner city : urban housing and the pastoral ideal . 2002.

Tiger, Caroline. “Back Alley Breakthroughs.” Metropolis : the architecture and design magazine of New York. Feb. 2008.

Vale, Lawrence J. “The Ideological Origins of Affordable Homeownership Efforts.” Chasing the American dream : new perspectives on affordable homeownership. Ed. William M. Rohe and Harry L. Watson. Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2007.

___________

Grundrissatlas Wohnungsbau =Floor plan atlas, housing /herausgegeben von Friederike Schneider ; mit einem neuen Vorwort von Reinhard Gieselmann ; fachliche Beratung, Reinhard Gieselmann, Hellmuth Sting. Basel ; Boston : Birkhäuser, 1997.

Reducing the cost of new housing construction in New York City:a report to the New York City Partnership and Chamber of Commerce, the New York City Housing Partnership and the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development /prepared by the New York University, School of Law, Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy ; Jerry J. Slama, Michael H. Schill, co-principal investigator ; Martha E. Stark, project director. [New York] : The Center, [1998?]

The Grunsfeld Variations; Habraken, John

U.S. Beureau of Census, 1999 New York City Housing and Vacancy

Reducing the Cost of New Housing Construction in New York City; J.Salama, M. Schill, and M. Stark, New York Housing Preservation and Development

Housing Economics; Geltner, David

Biard, George and Jenks, Charles. Meaning in Architecture. (New York: George Bazziller, Inc. 1969)

Cook, Peter ed. Archigram. (Boston: Birkhauser, 2002)

Davies, Colin. High Tech Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001)

Kieran, Stephen and Timberlake, James. Refabricating Architecture (McGraw-Hill, 2004)

Richardson, Phyllis. XS Small Buildings. (New York: Universe Publishing, 2001)

Scoats, Christopher. LOT-EK: Mobile Dwelling Unit. (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2003)

Siegal, Jennifer ed. Mobile - The Art of Portable Architecture (New York: Princeton Press, 2002)

http:// www.architecture.mit.edu/housen/

http:// www.architecture.mit.edu/-kll/OSBA_proposa.htm

http:// www.core77.com/reactor/masscustomization.html

http:// www.fabprefab.com

Densifying the American Dream - Initial Thoughts

2009-02-14T07:17:00.000-08:00

Site - Baltimore
-abandoned or vacant lots in city center
-sites in other densifiable cities... houston? atlanta?

Architecture
-Urban housing prototype for infill city site
-Characteristics of suburban housing to be compared and applied to Urban setting
___Suburban characteristic / Possible Urban Answer
___Affordability/Prefabrication, Ownership w/ portion to rent, investment
___Square footage/Flexible and Multiuse Spaces
___Personal identity/Customizable facade and interior
___Ability to adapt/Swing units, used when kids are around, rent when old
___Privacy/Acoustic isolation planometric solutions
___Entry Sequence/Exterior Stairwell
___Green Space /green roofs, ebedded greenspace, courtyards, balconies Unlimited Parking reduced need due to access to public transportation
___Storage
___Lack of community/potential for communal spaces (kitchen, internet quick station?, copy machine?)
___Transportation headaches/ access to public transit, reduced commuting time
___Lack of near by ammenities/ limited commercial possible on the first floor
___Social isolation and uniformity /diversity, awareness of others
-Community scale needs?
-Adaptability of system to range of conditions for economic viability
___mass customizable prefabricated units, flexible public curculation?

Broader cultural relevance
-Need for viable urban housing
-history of the American dream
__economic forces driving homeownership
____driven by government economic policies - FHA and VA
____advertising by housing industry
____tax incentives for owning a home
__automobile
____government support of highway system
____cheapening of automobile makes it affordable
__cultural conditioning
____morality attached to owning a home in the 50s
____status of owning a home
__does the American dream exist today?
____generation that grew up in suburbia
____awareness of sustainability issues, transportation headaches, isolation
____renewed interest in urban living? TV shows, movies?
____is it mostly an ecomonic issue?
__suburban/urban dynamic
____explosion of suburbs and decline of urban vitality esp in 70s
____revitalization of some urban areas (Portland as example)
__changing demographics
____shift from nuclear families to smaller households
__sustainable aspect of urban vs suburban living
____use of existing transportation infrastructure
____conservation of agricultural land

Presentation as Performance
-Marketing Scheme? Market both to all the lifestyle benefits of urban living while simultaneously appealing the conscious of the buyers interms of sustainable living

"In Baltimore, where I live, that economic downturn has been happening slowly over the last 50 years. The city has lost 400,000 residents since its population peak in the ’50s. According to current city records, there are 16,496 vacant buildings and 17,617 vacant or underutilized lots."

Dickenson, Elizabeth Evitts. “Vacancy.” Metropolis : the architecture and design magazine of New York. Dec. 2008.