A New American Suburb

A New American Suburb A Thesis by Edgar Dylan Corr

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A New American Suburb A Thesis by Edgar Dylan Corr Kentucky

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thesis by Edgar Dylan Corr

California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo, California 2013-2018 College of Architecture and Environmental Design Bachelor degree in Architecture Minor in Sustainable Environments Advisor// Dale Clifford Special Thanks// Nancy & Ed Corr All rights reserved All information that follows is cited at the end of this book in the notes and bibliography sections. If not cited, it can be assumed that it is the authors original work or thought. If it is believed that anywhere in this thesis this is not true, please contact the author.

Blurb Publications

Contents . . .

III Introduction 2 The History of Homes 4 Types of Houses 8 Housing a Changing America

14 Locations of Homes 15 Traditional Towns 20 Cities 26 Suburbs

38 Problems with Homes 39 Physical 46 Cultural

52 Case Study Homes 55 The House for the World 72 Formosa 1140 79 New Suburbanism

88 A New American Suburb 90 96 99 103 122 124 125 149

A New American Suburb's Design Goals Site Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Phase 5 Building the New American Suburb

176 A New America 181 Notes

introduction to the new American suburb

"It's a construction plan of epic proportions, They're calling it [portentous pause] a freeway! Eight lanes of shimmering cement running from here to Pasadena! I see a place where people get on and off the freeway, off and on, off and on, all day and all night. . . I see a street of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food, tire salons, automobile dealerships, and wonderful, wonderful billboards as far as the eye can see. My god, it'll be beautiful!"1 - Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Architecture is one of the world’s most essential and timeless professions. From the cave to the McMansion, humans have been designing and building structures for shelter for thousands of years. Architecture is often described as the problem and the solution, in that it’s construction and creation destroys natural lands and uses up natural resources and materials, but it is simultaneously a human necessity that won’t be going away any time soon. How then, can architecture solve the problems that architecture itself has created, and what are the problems that architecture has created?

Earth is slowly warming as a result of human action. It has been severely effected over the course of history, and is still being effected today. The built environment emits a large percentage of the worlds CO2, and the cars that are used to drive between poorly designed buildings and the factories that make the materials that are used to build these things make most of the rest. In order to change this system and stop the slow upward creep of the global temperature, the way in which buildings and the systems that Introduction | III

A New American Suburb support them are designed must be entirely rethought.

The best place to start this redesigning is in American homes.

It is here that the illogical, dysfunctional, and borderline immoral has become widely accepted by the American people. Homes have been increasing in size while family sizes have been decreasing, they’ve been moving farther from places of business, and they have been moving farther from other homes and amenities.

This suburban sprawl that plagues the US is clogging highways, isolating families, and is killing the environment.

Working to redesign suburbia and intervene in this broken system will require an examination of not just architecture, but economics, politics, and culture. Answering questions like why are homes inefficient, why are they unaffordable, who is making this possible, and why is everyone okay with it, is the essential first step. Only then will it be proved that suburbia has devolved into a sprawling maze barely usable by anyone, even those who have lived there the longest. It is not enough to show people the harm that their way of life is doing, they must also be shown the benefits they will reap if they change their living environments and lifestyles for the better.

The following pages seek to prove the advantages of an urban intervention in suburbia. An examination of the history of housing in America, both architecturally and culturally, will show where America took a turn for the worse. Then, a closer examination of how this has effected where Americans live and why they choose to live there will make some problems with American homes very apparent, not just how they look or are built, but where they are built, by whom, and why they are built. Next, some successful and unsuccessful case studies of American housing design will be examined, so that this design may learn from their victories and failures. Once the major issues are conveyed and a problem is defined, an American suburban intervention will be proposed to address many of the problems with suburbia and the culture that surrounds it.

IV | Introduction

A New American Suburb In doing these things, suburbia in America will become a much more functional, welcoming, accessible, affordable, and environmentally responsible place to live. By combining the advantages of urban neighborhoods with suburban sprawl, it may be possible to make suburbia into a much more welcoming, accessible, and beneficial place to live. Effectively an attempt to make Levittown just as convenient and communicable as New York City or Boston by way of good design and effective planning.

Introduction | V

The History of Homes in America

"The home is the center and circumference, the start and the finish, of most of our lives."1 - Charles Perkins Gilman

What a "home" is in America has been changing ever since the first settlers arrived here, and will continue to change depending on a number of factors. The definition of home varies from person to person and place to place, it is different depending on what culture they are in, what time period they are in, and it can depend on the occupants age, sex, and employment. The home is rarely clearly defined, which makes it easier to criticize and harder to design.

However, a distinction between a house and home can be made, one being an object and the other a place, or one being a structure and the other a shelter. The most important difference, however, is that a home is lived in, it is where people dwell. People are what makes a house into a home. Designers design houses, that are then made into homes by the people that live, or dwell there.2 Le Corbusier describes them as machines for living.3 When a home is defined not by it's looks, but by the practices and characteristics of those who live within it, the complication of defining it becomes more evident. When asking an Eskimo and The History of Homes | 2

The Big Orange Splot This children's book perfectly describes the difference between a house and a home. It is the story of a man who decides to paint his house in some wild and crazy colors, despite it now being different from all the other houses on his street. He makes his house into a reflection of himself, and soon all of his neighbors see how happy he is and how fun his house is, and they decide to follow suit, making their neighborhood into a very unique, very expressive grouping of homes.

Pinkwater, Daniel Manus. The Big Orange Splot. Paw Prints, 2008. pgs. 4,11,31.

A New American Suburb a Floridian what a home is, they may describe it using the same terms, emotions, or attributes, but be talking about two entirely different structures.4 Even someone who is homeless will most likely be able to give a description of what home is. Perhaps then a home isn't a structure at all, but a set of cultural and social values?

This set of values that makes a house a home and defines dwelling, has undergone an intense and extensive change in America during it's relatively short life span. Despite the fact that there have always been a number of constants in defining the American home, other factors and the home itself will always be subject to a constant evolution.5

Types of Houses Where to begin the history of what the American home looks like is not an easy task. One could argue that the Native American Teepee was the first home to occupy American land. Along with those Teepee's however, was adobe construction. Adobe began in the South West, in what is now called New Mexico, hundreds if not thousands of years ago.6 Adobe bricks are made out of sun dried Earth, and can be stacked to make walls that supply great thermal mass in climates, such as the South West, that have high daily temperature swings.7 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries English and French colonists brought post and girt construction.8 This wooden framing method consisted of large posts that held up girts that were joined together by skilled carpenters using mortise and tenon joints.9 Post and girt construction was expensive and time consuming, and eventually gave way to the quicker and easier balloon framing method.10 In the late nineteenth century houses were still being framed in basically the same way, except they were now being put together by assemblers, not carpenters, and were being made out of precisely cut, quality controlled lumber, and held together using factory-made nails.11 A house was no longer The History of Homes | 4

Balloon Framing This was America's first step towards industrializing housing. The pieces of lumber are much more uniform in size than in post and girt construction, but they still often vary in length. The floor and roof connections to the wall studs are also more complex than they are in platform framing.

Platform Framing Above is one of the most commonly used construction methods in America.

Notice the wall studs no longer go from the floor to the roof, instead, they are all 8 feet long and only stretch from floor to ceiling.

“Wall Systems.” Building Construction Illustrated, by Francis D.K. Ching, 5th ed., John Wiley & Sons, 2014, p. 5.42.

“Wall Systems.” Building Construction Illustrated, by Francis D.K. Ching, 5th ed., John Wiley & Sons, 2014, p. 5.41.

A New American Suburb built by the people who would be living in it, they were built by developers and contractors looking to turn a profit.

The introduction of balloon framing was revolutionary, it made house construction easier, cheaper, and faster. It did, however, have it's downsides. The smaller pieces of lumber that were now being used to build houses did not have the same fire resistance properties that their larger counterparts of the post and girt method did. The extremely dangerous effects of this were horrifyingly displayed in 1871 in Chicago during the Great Fire, where around seventeen thousand buildings burned to the ground.12 The Chicago Fire and other fires like it lead to significant changes in building codes in cities across the country. Americans realized the dangers of such dense balloon framing construction in cities, but little changed elsewhere where structures were not grouped as closely together.

Balloon framing lead to platform framing, which was essentially the same thing, except the vertical members of the homes now only spanned from floor to ceiling, instead of ground floor to roof.13 This shift began primarily between 1945 and 1950 as veterans were returning from World War II.14 Platform framing only made it easier and faster to build a home, most of the pieces needed would now fit in the back of the average pick up truck.

This boom in platform framing also marked the beginning of Americans fleeing from cities into the suburbs, where communities were springing out of farm land seemingly overnight.

These structural and building strategies changed steadily from the first day the settlers arrived to lay down their roots. Along with these physical strategies, cultural typologies and styles were also changing. Beginning in the early 19th century, the first colonies in the North East were adopting the Greek temple style.15 It was a particularly anti-urban style, because the Greek Revival houses looked best standing alone and undisturbed in rural landscapes.16 Additionally, their low pitched roofs and strictly rectangular floor plans did not work well for large families in the snowy North The History of Homes | 6

Design for a Cottage Villa Cottage Residences magazine featured many different homes and home styles, shown just like the one seen above. This era and magazine represents when homes stopped being designed for people or a purpose, and started being designed to look a certain way or portray a certain feeling.

Davis, Alexander Jackson. Design for a Cottage-Villa in the Bracketted Mode, Constructed in Wood. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, New York; London, 1842, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, www.metmuseum.org/art/ collection/search/384431.

A New American Suburb American climate.17 Later on in the nineteenth century, once Greek revival homes were growing dysfunctional and outdated and were beginning to be questioned as the national style, Alexander Davis and Andrew Downing came along to publish the Cottage Residences magazine which laid the ground work for the Victorian Style.18 Almost a polar opposite to the Greek revival style, Victorian houses were irregularly shaped as a result of being an "orgy" of many different styles combined into one house.19 While the American house kept evolving in construction and style, one may wonder about the other housing typologies, like townhouses, apartments in skyscrapers, condominiums, group housing, affordable housing, and row houses. All though these types of homes are not houses, they are very important. About 68% of the American population lives in the suburbs, which are made up of almost exclusively single family houses.20 For this reason, most of this chapter, and the rest of this thesis will focus primarily on the detached, single family home typology.

Housing a Changing America The part of the American home that is more important than the actual house itself, is the people, the families, and roommates, that live within it. The demographics of people who are living in single family houses has been changing just as rapidly as the houses themselves. As Dolores Hayden says in her book A Field Guide to Sprawl, "Since 1950, most new American suburban neighborhoods have been constructed of similar houses sold at similar prices to families who purchase similar kinds of household goods".21 This has lead to cookie cutter homes, boomburbs, and even the The History of Homes | 8

A New American Suburb housing market crash and the subsequent stock market crash of 2008. The problem is that the people in America aren't all this similar anymore, our country has evolved and is very different from what it looked like in 1950, but our housing market is not reflecting this change.

One way to better understand America's failure to adapt and evolve over time is by examining some demographic statistics.

In 1950 nuclear families, or families with 2 parents and at least 2 kids under the age of 21, made up 42% of our population.22 Today, nuclear families make up less than half of what they used to, they are now only 20% of the American population.23 Not only this, but America's urban centers have been gradually losing density.

In Chicago in 1910, 90% of the population lived at a density of 30 dwelling units per acre, which is generally a density that will support public transportation like trains, buses, and light rail.

Today, only 45% of the population in Chicago lives at such a density. Detroit is just as bad, having gone from 80% in 1910 to 15% today.24 Not only has the population of America as a whole been rapidly changing, but the families that make up that population and the houses that they live in have also been changing. In 1960 the average house was 1,200 square feet and housed 4 people, but in 2010 the average household was 2,135 square feet, and only housed about 2.25 people.25 Additionally, 28% of Americans are single and living alone, yet out of all of the housing stock in America, not just houses but apartments as well, .87% are studios and 11.63% are 1 bedrooms.26 Families are getting smaller and more diverse in their make up, but houses are getting larger, farther apart, and less efficient.

At the same time that families are getting smaller, the older population in America is experiencing growth like never before.

By the year 2050, more than 1 in 5 adults, or 88 million people in America will be over the age of 65.27 If America does not change its ways, this statistic is great news for retirement homes and assisted 9 | The History of Homes

A New American Suburb living companies, but bad news for the elderly. As people grow older and their children and families move away, their homes no longer suit their needs, so they move, usually to a rural or suburban area. This is great at first, but can spell disaster as soon as they lose their drivers license.

This unfortunate circumstance which occurs far too often usually leads to the elderly person or people having to re-retire into a retirement community, unless they are wealthy enough for a chauffeur.28 As Andres Duany puts it in his book Suburban Nation, "They know that the minute they lose their license, they will revert from adulthood to infancy and be warehoused in an institution where their only source of freedom is the van that takes them to the mall on Monday and Thursday afternoons".29 Unfortunately, more often than not, to not have a drivers license in America is to not be able to go anywhere, do anything, or see anyone.

There are many other groups of Americans that are very different than they were in 1950, and who are suffering dearly from the consequences of America's failure to adapt to change.

The middle class, perhaps more than any other, is being greatly effected. In 1971, 61% of US households were considered middle class, that number has fallen to 50%.30 Not only this, but after adjustments for inflation, middle class incomes have also stagnated, while the average home price has surpassed pre recession levels. This means that middle class Americans are continuously earning the same amount while places to live get more and more expensive.31 The rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer in America. We are becoming a country of the super rich and the super poor, and the wage gap that is driving these two groups constantly further and further from one another will soon become The History of Homes | 10

Tesla A bifurcated world has lead to advances in technologies with good intentions, but poor reach. Only the wealthy can afford to buy a Tesla, the newest and coolest form of eco bling. There are alternatives, such as the Nissan Leaf of Chevy Volt, but these are all still cars, which no matter if they are electric or oil powered, will contribute to sprawl.

“Charging Estimator.� Tesla, Tesla Motors, 2016, teslapresentation.com/.

A New American Suburb so vast that the entire middle class will have been partitioned off into one of the two levels.

This trend towards a bifurcated world goes beyond human adaptation to housing opportunities and markets. It relates to other issues too, such as climate change, which is so closely linked to the problems with housing in America. Wealthier societies and people will be able to adapt to these environmental and economic shifts, they might even benefit from them. Poorer people, however, will most likely not be able to adapt or keep up, and will suffer much more.32 America needs to do everything that it can to avoid this trend.

It needs to realize the plights of car centered design, and needs to admit that the families and people that are living here now are not the same as the ones that were living here in the 50s. America is made up of multi generational families, 3 and 4 person families, parents that are living with children that are in grad school, and single mothers who are living with other single mothers. The McMansion and 5,000 square foot home were never needed, and certainly aren't needed now. America now, more than ever, needs to learn from the history of their homes so that it can better move forward in housing its citizens.

The History of Homes | 12

Locations of homes traditional towns, cities, and suburbia ". . . we shall solve the City Problem by leaving the City."1 - Henry Ford

Before the American landscape was scarred by highways and softly bending, confusing suburban roads, most people lived in traditional neighborhoods or towns. America started off as a collection of villages or colonies, that were centralized and walkable, because there were no cars and the needs of everyday life couldn't extend the great distances that they do in modern times.

This all began to change as, among many other things, modes of transit advanced. Trollies, trains, and subways allowed Americans to travel greater distances faster than ever thought possible. They facilitated the transformation of small towns and neighborhoods into booming cities and they made great Western expansion possible. As our small colonies densified, and the horse and buggy and eventually the Model-T and the automobile came to fruition, suburbs were born.

America has gone from dense, walkable settlements to hyperdense mega cities, to the dangerously low density of Suburbs. The pendulum has swung all the way back and continues Locations of Homes | 14

A New American Suburb going way too far in the wrong direction. In order to identify the causes of this pendulum effect in American living environments, the characteristics and driving forces of traditional towns, cities, and suburbs must be better understood.

Traditional Towns The first type of American living environment that will be examined is the traditional town. This is where America got its start and where the new urbanists think it should be returning to. They think that by encouraging smart growth, we can make a return to the mixed use, semi dense, easily walked towns of old.

Traditional towns such as Alexandria, Virginia, are built on the shoulders of 6 main characteristics. There are also many other towns throughout the US that have been around for centuries that follow these same 6 rules, like Charleston, Beacon Hill, Nantucket, and so on.2 The first main characteristic is the center. All traditional towns have a central area, a place to convene and interact in commerce, culture, and governance, somewhere for civilized people to come together and interact with each other in civilized ways.3 The second is the 5 minute walk, or the idea that the main necessities of ever day life, living, working, and shopping, are all within a 5 minute walk of each other. In places like Alexandria these 3 main activities may even be found in the same building.4 The third characteristic is traditional towns all have a network of streets, or multitude of ways to arrive at a multitude of destinations.5 By organizing streets in a grid or network, there isn't too much pressure being put on any one area or road. If there is an accident that blocks off one street, or a parade, or kids playing basketball, there are many other routes that may be taken, that allow the obstacle to be circumnavigated with relative ease and little to no time added to the trip.

The forth characteristic is that the streets that make up this 15 | Locations of Homes

A New American Suburb network or grid need to be narrow and versatile.6 This means that they are rarely more than two lanes wide. The roads are intentionally kept narrow, and are always lined with many other activities such as walking, biking, conversing, dining, and parking.

This means cars drive slower, and people walk shorter distances to cross the street. Trees line roads, and parallel parked cars create a buffer between sidewalk and road, making these places more comfortable to walk through and around.

The fifth and arguably most important characteristic is mixed use developments. Nearly all of downtown Alexandria is mixed use zoning, as well as mixed use buildings, and this is what allows all the other characteristics of traditional towns to work.7 Towns aren't walkable if they are single use zones, like suburbia. Single use zoning creates residential islands, where people become stranded and disconnected from the needs of their everyday lives. Office parks are designed to be driven to, just as malls and food courts are. By sectioning off certain areas of towns for only certain things, the distances between things of daily importance becomes too great, and walkability is killed.

The sixth and final characteristic of traditional towns is special sites for special buildings, or the idea that within a logical and understandable street grid, prominent or unique sites are set aside for buildings or building typologies that represent the identity and aspirations of the town.8 These could be things like town halls, public libraries, schools, and so on.

These six characteristics make towns that are easily navigated, safe, compact, walkable, versatile, dense, manageable, and comfortable. They don't require the people that live in them to drive everywhere, they create a sense of community, and they can grow organically and quickly over time. All of these characteristics make a great place to live, but despite this, traditional towns do have their fair share of problems.

New urbanists and other people that advocate for "smart growth" and better development practices are not addressing Locations of Homes | 16

Brooke, Steven. “Color Photographs of Seaside Architecture.” Seaside, A Simple, Beautiful Life, Seaside, www.seasidefl.com/history/architecture/ gallery-2/.

A New American Suburb a brutal truth of the current American housing landscape; 68% of Americans in 2010 were living in suburbia, meaning around 210.3 million Americans are already living in car reliant, oversized, and disconnected suburban homes.9 Smart growth and better development practices will help the minority of this number that may one day move into one of these traditional towns, but for the most part new urbanism does nothing to suggest ways we can improve the living conditions of those 210.3 million Americans who are already living in suburbia.

Perhaps one of the best examples of the pitfalls of a traditional town in our modern times can be described ironically by examining The Truman Show. In this film, Jim Carrey stars as Truman Burbank, a man who was born on a TV show that is set entirely in a fake town, built to hold him prisoner as the rest of America watches him grow up in a completely fabricated environment that Truman thinks to be real. The irony comes when a little research about the film is done, and it is discovered that the set for Seahaven (the town Truman is forever trapped in as he lives out his 24/7 televised life) wasn't a set at all, it was all filmed in Seaside, Florida.10 (pictured left) Seaside is a new urbanist planned town meant to re-create a traditional Florida beach town, and it was designed by none other than Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, authors of Suburban Nation, the book that lays out the 6 characteristics of a traditional town that I've just explained.11 Seaside was meant to be the quintessential traditional American town, but it was taken and used by Hollywood to portray a completely unauthentic and fabricated setting that is literally used to keep Truman prisoner. This begs the question of the new urbanists, are they having trouble letting go of the past? Are all of these ideas and guidelines and design philosophies trying to recreate something that no longer exists? How is a new urbanist beach town that is designed to portray a certain time in history or what things used to look like, any different from a suburban home that is designed to look like something that it clearly isn't?

Locations of Homes | 18

Chicago Metropolitan Area

Chicago $546.8 B

Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas Colorado Connecticut Delaware Georgia Hawaii Idaho Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota

$173.1 B $51.4 B $258.4 B $105.8 B $264.3 B $230.1 B $65.8 B $418 B $67 B $57.9 B $278.1 B $149 B $130.9 B $164.8 B $247.7 B $51.6 B $301.1 B $391.8 B $385.2 B $281.7 B

Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Mexico North Dakota Oklahoma Oregon Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Utah Vermont Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming

$97.8 B $249.5 B $38 B $94.2 B $130.4 B $63 B $79.4 B $40.3 B $155 B $194.7 B $50.1 B $165 B $40.1 B $266.5 B $124.5 B $25.9 B $355.1 B $66.8 B $254.8 B $37.6 B

Economic Power Cities have economic power in America that is hard to argue with. The Chicago Metropolitan Areas economic output is greater than that of 42 American states. The city of Chicago is almost 11 times as economically productive as the state of Rhode Island.

Chakrabarti, Vishaan, and Norman Foster. A Country of Cities a Manifesto for an Urban America, edited by SHoP Architects, Metropolis Books, 2013 pg. 58

A New American Suburb

Cities Traditional towns in America often eventually grew into large cities, like Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco. Cities and traditional towns have a lot in common, the six characteristics that were discussed in the last section work for almost all cities, just sometimes in differing ways. Taking New York City for example, the 5 minute walk, or subway ride, is unarguable. NYC clearly has a well laid out street network, that is easy to navigate and provides many routes to many destinations. The streets that make that grid are for the most part very narrow and used for a multitude of reasons, and the city is obviously mixed use. Lots of people that live in NYC never see a reason to leave.

The difference between traditional towns and cities in America comes when their scales are examined. The industrial revolution and the booming American population in the 20th century allowed cities to become the powerhouses of this country.

Take the city of Chicago for example, which has an average annual economic output of $546.8 billion, which is more than the average annual economic output of 42 US states.12 This is a stunning fact, but it speaks to the extent at which traditional towns in America in some cases exploded and grew into massive, living breathing, hyperdense cities.

This is all well and good, but then what happened? Why, in 1910 was 95% of New York's population living at or above 30 dwelling units per acre, but in 2000 only 65% of its population was?13 Similarly in Detroit, in 1910 80% of the population lived at or above 30 dwelling units per acre, but in 2000 that number had dropped to a measly 15%.14 What was causing this 20th century drop in density in America?

There are many factors to blame for the suburbanization of America, but World War II, government subsidies, and the proliferation of the automobile are three main drivers of dying American cities. WWII and the industrial revolution that fueled Locations of Homes | 20

Robert Moses tried to impose order and rigidity on New York City with his Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village slum clearance housing development. The result is forcing the poor into drab, boring, quickly run down, prison like housing blocks.

Tata, Samantha. “Aerial Photograph of Robert Moses's Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village .� PIX 11 New York's Very Own, WPIX A Tribune Broadcasting Station, 1 Mar. 2016, pix11.com/2016/03/01/lottery-opens-for-5000-units-in-stuyvesant-town-and-peter-cooper-village/.

A New American Suburb it taught America a lot of things about mass production, growth, and complex task management that it maybe had not learned from Henry Ford's Model T years earlier. The members of the professional class that were returning from the war with their new found management skills were determined to apply their new strategies of classifying and counting to house all of America efficiently and quickly.15 Jane Jacobs touches on these ideas in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities when she says, "Planners began to imitate and apply these analyses precisely as if cities were problems in disorganized complexity, understandable purely by statistical analysis, predictable by the application of probability mathematics, manageable by conversion into groups of averages.".16 Jacobs is a huge advocate of cities being described as problems of "organized complexity", meaning they present places or problems in which there are never two variables simply interacting that can be discovered or analyzed to reach a solution.17 Cities are a conglomeration of variables and circumstances that are continuously interacting and changing in subtly connected ways, and to try to explain or understand them simply using probability, classifications, or counting, is not only trivial, but impossible.

Jacobs outlook on cities differed greatly from the planners and designers of the post WWII era like Robert Moses, and they still differ to this day. Housing in America, and the cities in which most of us used to live still aren't being looked at as wicked problems, or problems that have no solutions or definitive and objective answers.18 Until America accepts that which it cannot control, and stops looking at this as a bad thing, but rather the thing that makes our cities and neighborhoods places worth caring about, it will never move on from its outdated, unsuccessful, post WWII era Locations of Homes | 22

FHA Loan Advertisement Buying single family, detached, suburban homes in the 50s and 60s was not only easy, it was expected and encouraged. During this time, middle class, white American families were looking for an easy out of the "dirty, crowded, unsafe" cities of America, and the government, auto industry, and Veterans Association knew it, and encouraged it.

“Federal Housing Administration car card, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota,� Digital Public Library of America, https://dp.la/item/5c4c82f125c9792 8c4e8fc4388a2e494.

A New American Suburb suburban planning ideas that significantly weakened and are still harming our cities.

Not just WWII, but the money and government subsidies that followed it can also be blamed for Americans leaving cities. The Federal Highway Act of 1956 and intense lobbying by the National Association of Realtors made it easier for Americans to own suburban homes, while also making it easier for them to get to them.19 In 1920, for the first time ever the US census measured an urban as opposed to rural population, but by 1950 the suburban growth rate was 10 times that of the urban rate, and by 1970, the suburban population in the US had outgrown the population of American urban centers.20 This did not happen on its own, and was only possible because of massive incentives and investments from our government. Look no further than the federal infrastructure budget as evidence of this fact, where it is seen that the US government spends around $42.8 billion annually maintaining highways, as apposed to an embarrassing $1.6 billion on railway infrastructure.21 These are pretty general over arching numbers showing Americas bias towards automobile subsidies, but there are also more specific examples.

During the post WWII era, when veterans were returning home in droves, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration created a mortgage loan program that provided mortgages for over 11 million new homes.22 The mortgages in these programs typically cost less than monthly rent, and were applied solely to new single family detached houses.23 These loan programs all but guaranteed the beginning of the American populations flee from urban city centers to sprawling suburban edge growths.

As if these loan programs did not encourage sprawl enough, In 1956, Eisenhower signed the previously mentioned National System of Defense and Interstate Highways bill, the largest and most expensive public works project ever undertaken in the United Locations of Homes | 24

Arbuckle, Alex Q, and Wolfgang Wild. “The First Drive-Ins.” Mashable, Getty Images, mashable.com/2016/08/11/first-drive-ins/#xRxrauug8SqL.

A New American Suburb States.24 Not only did this Cold War era development project favor cars over other modes of transport, it favored cars over people and neighborhoods. The highways, that were awarded land mass throughout the country equivalent to that of the state of Delaware, often ran through poorer neighborhoods, and encouraged the development of raw suburban and rural land.25 The accessibility and convenience of the automobile was placed before that of American citizens, and the highways that were originally meant to connect distant urban centers had become the veins by which the disease of sprawl could spread.

While it is easy to blame the government and lobbyists for these types of bills and "public works projects" car manufactures and oil companies also have to take some of the blame for our asphalt nation of almost four million linear miles of public, asphalt paved roads.26 The introduction of the automobile as a necessity in everyday American life was both the cause and effect for leaving American cities.

As soon as America stopped designing it's neighborhoods, streets, shopping centers, and towns for people, and started designing them for cars, we were headed down a path that would inevitably take us to sprawled, disconnected, and dangerous towns that most of us live in today. One need look no further than one of Americas largest land holders, McDonalds, for proof of this fact. Drive through food, theaters, churches, banks, and drug stores are all a direct result of car based design.27 American cities ran out of room for all their inhabitants cars, and Americans new found love of and access to mobility sent the majority white masses out of the cities and into the suburbs.

Suburbs Suburbs are the symptom of many historical occurrences in America, be it the invention of the car, WWII, the civil rights movement, racism, government policies, or even population Locations of Homes | 26

20 Minute House Foyer This is a perfect example of a double height entry that shows as much of the house as possible as soon as you walk through the front door. This one vantage point shows the backyard, living room, family room, formal dining room, kitchen, and upstairs landing.

Why any suburban family of 5 would ever need 2 staircases right next to each other is mystery that may never be solved.

Kieley, Eric. “Napa Valley Register.� Napa Valley Register, Napa Valley Publishing, Olney, Maryland, 22 Jan. 2017, napavalleyregister.com/lifestyles/homeand-garden/why-we-love-to-hate-mcmansions-but-still-buy-them/article_e1baad81-f28d-596c-9110-2b29930b7773.html.

A New American Suburb increase. Whatever the main driver of America's suburban sprawl may be, it is approaching critical mass and the country needs to start looking at itself in the mirror and addressing the issues causing it's population to slowly spread out and burn through its natural resources and land at rates previously thought impossible.

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck define suburbs the best in their book Suburban Nation where they say the five characteristics of sprawl are housing subdivisions, shopping centers, office parks, civic institutions, and roadways.28 Housing subdivisions are single use, residential developments, often master planned by a developer and filled with quickly and cheaply built, cookie cutter homes.29 Housing subdivisions, despite their developers best efforts, usually have no charm, or in other words are homes that are built only to be bought and sold, and not lived in, meaning that no one actually cares about them.30 A phenomena known as the "20 minute house" has begun to dominate neighborhoods across the US. These are homes designed while thinking solely about the 20 minutes that they typically have to win over a perspective buyer.31 This results in homes that are gaudy and overly complex when viewed from the street, but boring and forgotten when viewed from the rear.

These houses are usually identified on the interior by a 2 story great hall that provides a glimpse into nearly every other room in the home.32 The hope is that a potential buyer will enter the home, be in shock of the grand staircase and wide open spaces, and fall immediately in love, before they even enter any of the other rooms in the home.

Just like the 20 minute house replaced the row house or countryside cottage, shopping centers are America's modern day replacement for the downtown main street. Their parking lots are sized for Christmas eve rushes, and they separate their single story boxes from the streets that have to be driven on to get to them.33 Every American is familiar with these single use developments, most of them rely on them for their everyday needs. They are the Locations of Homes | 28

Google earth V 7.1.8.3036. (February 24, 2018). Paradise Valley, Phoenix, Arizona. 33° 36’ 05.094”N, 111° 59’ 06.57”W, Eye alt 1390 feet. Landsat / Copernicus. http://www.earth.google.com [June 1, 2018].

A typical American landscape, a shopping mall, ironically called Paradise Valley, surrounded by a sea of parking, in between cul-de-sac strewn suburbs with private pools. There is also a golf course thrown in, for good measure.

California City is a failed utopian suburb in California, they got the first and most important step done though, carving out the suburban roads and cul-de-sacs in the desert.

Kim, Chang. “Atlas of Places.� Atlas of Places, California City, California, Oct. 2017, atlasofplaces.com/filter/Photography/Utopia-Incomplete-Chang-Kim.

A New American Suburb Targets, Walmarts, Sears, Home Depots, Whole Foods, and Costcos that dot highways across the country.

Perhaps the only thing worse than shopping centers is the office park, whose only relation to parks is that they are typically good at isolating whoever is in them, and they sometimes are lined with trees. Completely devoid of any type of real architecture, they are best described as massive parking lots with some boxes in the middle where people work.34 Civic institutions have met a similar fait, these buildings are schools, churches, and town halls, which have been taken out of the city center and moved to the periphery or along highways with office parks and shopping centers in order to fit their massive parking lots, which are usually bigger than the buildings they were made for.35 The fifth characteristic of suburbia is roadways, the stitching that desperately tries to pull together the four previous components.36 James Howard Kunstler puts the insane reliance that Americans have on roads in perspective in his book The Geography of Nowhere when he says, "Imagine what the town would have been like if railroad tracks ran down every single street carrying a constant stream of privately owned locomotives. Imagine further that the sides of every street were lined with idle engines, boxcars, pullmans, tankers, and cabooses, so that all of Saratoga was a gigantic railroad yard that only incidentally contained houses, shops, schools, churches, and businesses. This is roughly the situation today with the automobile. Saratgoa, like virtually every other town in America, has become one big automobile storage depot that incidentally contains other things."37 Roads have become as essential to the American daily routine as food and shelter, because for the most part, you need a road to get to food and shelter when you live in suburbia.

Locations of Homes | 32

Here are 2 streets that one may find in the "missed connections" section of Craigslist.

They are so close, yet so far, from making this neighborhood somewhere you could actually drive through. Something has gone horribly wrong when a suburb cannot even get car based design right.

Google earth V 7.1.8.3036. (October 14, 2017). Greeley, Colorado. 40° 22’ 26.25”N, 104° 46’ 10.24”W, Eye alt 6463 feet. Google 2018. http://www.earth. google.com [April 14, 2018].

A New American Suburb The only thing worse than Americans reliance on roads to do anything and go anywhere, is the design of the actual roads themselves. Most suburban roads are too wide and unnecessarily curved or confusing. Streets first began to be curved when they were built in undulating, mountainous environments, they followed the path of least resistance along the topography, and often dead ended in cul-de-sacs when the terrain to connect a street became too steep.38 Unfortunately, even as time went on and suburban developments began to usually be built on leveled, rural greenfields, these curved roads and cul-de-sacs did not go away.

Suburbs are still designed as if they are on some picturesque hillside in the country, but these curved roads are also another result of car based design. The typical city grids of places like New York City, San Francisco, Charleston, and Boston, are amazing for pedestrians, way finding, and traffic control, but they are not great for driving. The softly bending, wide, suburban roads whose intersections are often filleted corners, allow cars to travel as quickly and as easily as possible from one point to another, with minimal use of the break pedal. This means it is much easier for cars to drive faster through a suburban neighborhood than it would be for them down Park Ave in New York City.

These cars that speed through "family friendly" suburban neighborhoods that have kids playing basketball on the streets are a direct result of another influencer of suburban street width; fire departments. Fire departments across the country are typically more concerned with fire rescue than they are with accident prevention, which means streets are wider and cul-desacs diameters are larger, to make it easier for fire trucks to get where they need to go.39 What these fire marshals don't realize is, the very act of widening the streets and bending corners is making cars drive faster and crash more, which are the calls that the fire department is really responding to most of the time. In attempting to make access to fires easier, wider roads are allowing Locations of Homes | 34

Racist Suburbs "White flight" and racism in housing deeds was not uncommon during the beginning of mass suburban sprawl. Signs like this one in Detroit, Michigan, were seen all over the country. Suburbs like Levittown in New York only accepted offers from white applicants, and the deeds they signed stipulated that they not sell their new home to a non-white family, a rather common practice during the time.

Wilkinson, Mike. “Bridge.� Bridge, Bridge Magazine, Detroit, Michigan, 2018, www.bridgemi.com/business-bridge/report-michigan-must-spendbillions-more-year-modernize-infrastructure.

A New American Suburb more car accidents, giving firemen much faster access to accidents that they helped cause.40 Suburban roads, along with the other characteristics of suburbia discussed in this section, are not accidental, they are a result of designed systems that are intended to create the suburbs that sprawl across the country today. Whether this be the blatant racism that has been included in deeds and home ownership agreements across the country in places like Levittown, or the clustered world that has been created by advertising and marketing professionals working in the real estate market, the evidence of various groups intentions was never hidden very well.

Since the 1950s, most American suburbs have been designed to contain the same homes, that are marketed at similar prices, to similar families that buy similar things.41 This stratification of the built environment is partly responsible for the separation and segregation of American cities and towns, and largely responsible for the proliferation of suburbs.

If America is ever going to function without cars, if it is ever going to have walkable, dense, mixed use, diverse communities again, it needs to start rethinking the societal, economical, and political forces that have driven the majority of its population out of urban centers and into suburban edge growths.

Locations of Homes | 36

Problems with homes physically and culturally

"Whenever a stranger came to the street of Mr. Plumbean and his neighbors, the stranger would say, 'This is not a neat street'.

Then all the people would say, 'Our street is us and we are it. Our street is where we like to be, and it looks like all our dreams'."1 -Daniel Manus Pinkwater

Homes in America have gone from family heirlooms to bought and sold commodities. What once was the pride of a family is now the bunker that they retreat to so they can hide from their neighbors.

Within the past century, or even half century, kids grew up in neighborhoods where doors were never locked and neighbors were seen as friends and sometimes family, rather than people to be avoided and pushed away. This industrialized nation and refusal to change has left us building homes that are tailored to few and desired by fewer at a rate never before thought possible.

The design and construction of the typical American house has been in a downward spiral for too long. Cultural and social change is needed to make people see the flaws of modern design and ideals, but more importantly, they need to realize that Americans know how to make desirable places to live, they've done it before, they just need to stop accepting the "design" that they've become so accustomed to.

The good news is that people like Jane Jacobs have vehemently questioned urban planning and the established Problems with Homes | 38

A New American Suburb methods of housing in the US before, and this type of constructive criticism and active resistance needs to continue. If the American dream is going to live on and climate change is going to be slowed or stopped, the citizens of this country are going to have to start being a lot more honest with themselves.

An interesting aspect of the housing issue in America is that housing affects all, this is not just the architect or the builders problem, this is an issue that is far reaching and all encompassing.

One need look no further than Jane Jacobs for proof of this. New York City would not look the way it does today if it were not for Jane Jacobs, and she wasn't an architect or a broker or real estate mogul, she was a mother and a journalist, she was a community member that cared.

The Jane's of modern day America need to admit to themselves and convince others that there are serious issues with the design of homes, and the culture in America that has lead to the creation of those designs. Physical and cultural characteristics of home design have serious issues, and need to be critically examined to determine possible solutions.

Physical The physical appearance of houses in America, especially since the industrialization of the housing market after WWII, has become dishonest and misguided. Houses are now designed to be sold, to convey a style, and to look like they should cost a certain amount.

They also are now designed to best fit the needs of cars, or people who are completely reliant on cars.

A typical suburban neighborhood consists of more fake brick, stone, and wood siding than it does authentic materials being presented in an architecturally interesting way. The only material that there is more of is plastic, sometimes wood, horizontal siding that makes up the three sides of suburban homes that don't face the street.

39 | Problems with Homes

A New American Suburb Suburban houses have all too often turned into McMansions, a conglomeration of architectural styles, architectural details, roof types, windows, materials, and shutters that are usually combined and cheaply and quickly built without the consultation of an architect. Not only are they a haphazard throwing together of parts, but they are also usually extremely large, they are called a McMansion for a reason. McMansions are typically about 3,000 sqaure feet, when the average American household in 2010 was only 2,100 square feet.2 This is not to say they can't be bigger, some of these homes can fetch 5,000 or even 6,000 square feet, sporting home theaters, indoor pools, a bathroom for every bedroom, concealed double height entries, game rooms, and other unnecessary amenities so the occupant can avoid a lengthy and stressful drive through heavy traffic in one of their 5 cars to get to them.

Kate Wagner runs a blog entitled McMansion Hell where she satirically critiques the all too common suburban housing typology. She explains which houses are McMansions, but she also explains why they are McMansions, and allows her readers to better understand why they hate the houses they see all over their neighborhoods so much.3 Wagner uses dry humor and a haphazard pasting of text and arrows in various fonts and colors to critique McMansions.4 This method is particularly interesting because the way she applies the text and annotations to the images is very similar to the way windows, moulding, architectural details, and shutters are applied to suburban homes. They are placed in varying sizes, randomly and with no particular care or aesthetic goal in mind.

Beyond the entertaining, but sometimes depressing McMansions of Wagner's McMansion Hell, there are a number of other housing types with their own set of characteristics and shortcomings that have arisen from suburban sprawl in America.

These other types of homes are more often than not also considered McMansions.

Problems with Homes | 40

A typical American McMansion, built from a random smattering of materials and styles in the middle of perfectly good farm land, topped off with a roof designed by a NASA engineer.

Snout Houses Garages as far as the eye can see, not a front door in site. These homes were clearly designed to be driven into, then entered through a door in the garage, but don't let that fool you, many of these garages are most likely filled with junk and forgotten possessions.

Slosiarek, Jim. “The Gazette.�The Gazette, The Gazette, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 23 Jan. 2017, www.thegazette.com/subject/opinion/blogs/24-hour-dorman/ sticking-up-for-snout-houses-20170123.

A New American Suburb To steer the conversation to these other types of homes, cars must be sited again as a major influencer on the aesthetics and designs of suburban homes. Snout Houses are perfect examples of homes that are designed for cars and not for the people that live in them. A snout house has a garage that extends far past the front of the house, and the front door, like the snout of a pig.5 Snout houses are often found on long, narrow lots. The entire street facade of the house is given up to the garage, and the front door is set much further back from the street, on one side of the lot. This doesn't matter to those that live in the house, since 99% of the time they will most likely be entering their house through whatever door is in the garage. This type of home allows a person to wake up every morning, get in their car, and drive to work without ever going outside. Without too much effort, they could even drive back home and repeat that process for the entire week, without ever setting foot outside.

The effects of a snout house can also be felt in less obviously car designed homes. Any suburban home that has a garage that isn't filled with bikes that no one rides and three broken lawn mowers that no one uses, and therefore is filled with a car or multiple cars, creates the same effect. There may be a front door on these homes, but they are most likely used by no one but the mail man and solicitors. The main traffic in and out of the house flows through the garage door.

The pork chop lot is like a snout house, but instead of a stretched out garage, pork chop lots have stretched out driveways.

"Pork chop lots signify sprawl because they indicate pressure to sell farmland. Planner Tom Daniels describes nickel and dime housing, which occurs when owners cut large lots off an existing farm, one or two at a time, often to meet rising taxes. The pork chop lots are the second to go, after the lots with road frontage".6

Problems with Homes | 44

Tract Mansions This is the definition of designing a house to look expensive. These "homes" have the full package, horseshoe driveways, columns that are holding up nothing, roofs designed

by Einstein himself, 2 and sometimes even 3 Turrets, the only thing they are missing is a moat and drawbridge.

Hayden, Dolores, and Jim Wark. A Field Guide to Sprawl. W.W. Norton, 2006. pg. 111.

A New American Suburb These types of lots are another perfect example of a place where houses are built to be sold and profited from, not to be lived in.

There is little planning involved in these lots and houses, and it results in a neighborhood that is disconnected, spread out, wasteful, and inefficient.

The last house type is a tract mansion, which is very similar to a McMansion, but typically a little larger and a little more ridiculous.

They are often described as a, "mind-boggling mix of Rapunzel towers and pretend Palladian, Jacuzzis, and surround-sound".7 These homes are usually built as cheaply as possible and sold for as much as possible, under the illusion that they are luxurious, state of the art, and well crafted masterpieces of architecture.

Houses in America are built, not designed, and on the rare occasion that they are designed, they are designed to sell, not to be lived in. The sooner Americans begin prioritizing, simple, effective, efficient, proven residential architectural design over the fake, cheap, and wasteful design of modern day, the sooner our communities and neighborhoods will again become places of families, friends, and neighbors, and not dysfunctional, disconnected wastelands.

Cultural Major culture shifts that happened in this country after WWII that are a result of an industrial capitalistic economy have greatly changed American housing. Houses used to be where Americans went to live their lives, raise their kids, and create family memories.

Now, Americans newfound obsession with money, cars, excess, luxury, and possessions has made the places that we used to live into places where we store all of our unneeded stuff until we need more room for more stuff, so the house is sold and a new one is bought.

This change has been widespread and almost universally accepted; it was sold to the American people by those that would Problems with Homes | 46

A New American Suburb benefit from it, and sadly for the most part, they have forgotten they can stop buying it. Industrialization played a major role in this massive shift, "For the first time, a division between home and workplace was created on a mass scale: the man was out of the house during the day, in the public world, while the woman kept the home and took care of the children.

After work the man would go home, that is to say to a place he did not share with the public world. This division had major implications for the meaning of the home in nineteenth-century society".8 When the majority of Americans lived in traditional towns and cities, their homes were above their places of employment, or next door to their butcher, or near the house they grew up in. Now, the house is completely detached from all of this, it has become a far removed place reserved for sleeping.

This change in gender roles and America's car based society isn't the only reason for insular housing design. Central supplies of drinking water, sewage systems, gas mains, public baths, and electricity have slowly eliminated reasons that people used to leave their house, and therefore reasons for them to meet and talk to their neighbors.9 To be fair, many of these things have also greatly improved the hygiene and health of modern society, and should not be viewed as entirely negative design advancements, but admitting to and recognizing the negatives could help cultural and social design improvements be made.

Electricity and the technology that has come along as result of it is a great example of something that has done a lot of good, but has room for improvement. Namely the internet and it's ability to globalize the world. Never before have Americans been able to maintain contact with the outside world while remaining in the comfort of their homes like they can today. A persons ability to 47 | Problems with Homes

A New American Suburb communicate, their connection between the private and public realms of where they live, is a huge factor in their satisfaction with their house. Perhaps this fact coupled with the advent of the internet is part of the reason the quality of houses has been in such sharp decline.

Another way to look at this phenomenon is similar to the chicken and the egg question. Is America's acceptance of poor residential design partly a resultant of an always internet connected, globalized world? Or do all American's feel the need to be connected at all times by the internet because they live in places in which they are rarely connected to anyone or anything?

The truth is both scenarios have probably worked together to strengthen each other. Questions like this about cultural influences on the American housing market are perfect examples of wicked problems.

Wicked problems like these are extremely hard to find answers to, there is no test to a solution and there are very few ways to determine the specific causations.10 In other words, "The full consequences cannot be appraised until the waves of repercussions have completely run out, and we have no way of tracing all the waves through all the affected lives ahead of time or within a limited time span".11 This means that Americans have to question everything; that which they are comfortable and familiar with, as well things that are seemingly unrelated. The only way to attempt to solve or address these types of problems, is to do something and try to learn from what happens.

Another pressing issue with American suburbs is this delusion that the suburbs are the place you need to move to start a family and raise your kids. America's suburban sprawl has created the "cul-de-sac kid, the child who lives as a prisoner of Problems with Homes | 48

Suburban Playground In the suburbs, most things are designed with cars in mind, leaving little room for much of anything else. This collage shows a girl swinging on a swing, hung from the only place it can be in the suburbs, a traffic light.

A New American Suburb a thoroughly safe and unchallenging environment".12 The great distances between things and dizzying maze of suburban streets and neighborhoods effectively creates a corn maze, in the middle of which children are being raised and looking for an escape to the outside world. This creates an environment in which, "Children are frozen in a form of infancy, utterly dependent on others, bereft of the ability to introduce variety into their own lives, robbed of the opportunity to make choices and exercise judgment. Typical suburban parents give their children an allowance, in order to empower them and encourage independence. 'Feel free to spend it any way you like,' they say. The child then says, 'Thanks Mom. When can you drive me to the mall?"13 Is this really the ideal place to be raising kids? American's are trying so hard to keep their children safe, they forgot that they will one day have to move out and take care of themselves.

The cultural changes that America has endured, as well as the physical changes to the housing design present in this country, have been deteriorating the housing market, especially in the past 70 years. The next chapter will review some of the circumstances and occurrences discussed in this chapter, and provide examples of attempted solutions to these problems and speculate about what their implications were and can be for the future.

Problems with Homes | 50

CASE STUDY Homes and what they have taught us

"The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under a pine tree. We shall both have our own car.

We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline. All of which will necessitate a great deal of work . . . enough for all."1 -Le Corbusier

Homes in America have gone from family heirlooms to bought and sold commodities, what once was the pride of a family is now the bunker that they retreat to so they can hide from their neighbors.

Within the past century, or even half century, kids grew up in neighborhoods where doors were never locked and neighbors were seen as friends and sometimes family, rather than people to be avoided and pushed away. This industrialized nation and refusal to change has left us building homes that are tailored to few and desired by fewer at a rate never before thought possible.

The design and construction of the typical American house has been in a downward spiral for too long. Cultural and social change is needed to make people see the flaws of modern design and ideals, but more importantly, they need to realize that Americans know how to make desirable places to live, they've done it before, they just need to stop accepting the "design" that they've become so accustomed to.

The good news is that people like Jane Jacobs and Buckminster Fuller have vehemently questioned the established methods of Case Study Homes | 52

The American home that everyone dreams of, with all the parking one could ever desire, a private pool, right by a lake and across the street from a baseball field.

A New American Suburb housing in the US before, and this type of constructive criticism and active resistance needs to continue. If the American dream is going to live on and climate change is going to be slowed or stopped, the citizens of this country are going to have to start being a lot more honest with themselves.

An interesting aspect of the housing issue in America is that housing affects all, this is not just the architect or the builders problem, this is an issue that is far reaching and all encompassing.

As mentioned before, one need look no further than Jane Jacobs and Buckminster Fuller for evidence of this. New York City would not look the way it does today if it were not for Jane Jacobs, and she wasn't an architect or a broker or real estate mogul, she was a mother and a journalist, she was a community member that cared.

Buckminster Fuller was an architect, which made his admittance of the architects flaws even more valid. Fuller was a visionary architect that embraced industrialization rather than fighting it. He wanted to further industrialize American housing to make it so that anyone and everyone had access to a roof over their head. Whether you agree or disagree with his design ideas, his willingness to question the status quo and not just design a new building, but redesign the system in which homes are built has to be appreciated. Fuller famously tried to think of what would be best for all, and was willing to follow or explore any path that aided him in this quest.

The House for the World Richard Buckminster Fuller is a perfect example of someone who did not accept the status quo after WWII was over. He is someone who thought the way housing was being constructed and had been constructed in that time was not working, and he came very close to revolutionizing housing and the housing market in America forever. Whether or not one agrees with his ideas and plans, it must be acknowledged that he is one of the greatest 55 | Case Study Homes

A New American Suburb architectural theorists of recent history, and that his ideas, no matter how misguided or detrimental, were revolutionary and important to America and architectural history.

Fuller started in 1927 with the Fuller House, which saw many iterations throughout the years, but eventually became the Dymaxion House in 1929 and the Dymaxion Dwelling Machine, or the Wichita House in 1944.2 This all started with a manifesto that Fuller wrote in 1929 entitled 4D Time Lock, which he distributed amongst friends and trusted people of power that he knew to get feedback about his ideas.3 This manifesto began by Fuller claiming that, "It is the subjects furthest removed from personal contact, and of the least immediate necessity, which have received the most honest and unbiased attention and design, to wit; the aeroplane, automobile, radio, etc. Force of habit, too, blinds us to the great improvements that might take place in our everyday doings. The art of house building was created long before the art of transportation and the methods devised for building with local materials and help have persisted way into this era of transportation and centralized mass creation."4 Fuller is claiming that because house building is so ingrained in our culture, because our methods are so well known and practiced, we have allowed those methods to age and become something that we view as "not broken", so why would we try to fix them? Fuller's genius was in realizing that the system was indeed not functioning to its fullest potential, we were spending so much time revolutionizing airplanes and automobiles, we had forgotten about the very thing we all had in common, our homes.

Fuller was always considered a raging optimist, and he wanted to "redesign the house for the world".5 The patent drawings that are seen in 4D Time Lock show that he is not afraid to do this, even Case Study Homes | 56

4D Time Lock Patent Elevation and Plan These are the patent drawings included in Fuller's 4D Time Lock that he sent out to influential friends and the patent office. This is the most tame Dymaxion dwelling design, but it still shows the central shaft that is so essential to Dymaxion designs that follow.

Fuller, R. Buckminster. 4D Time Lock. Albuquerque, NM: Lama Foundation, 1928, 1970. pg. 64.

A New American Suburb though they are a "pragmatic compromise" meant "to make the 4D House seem less shockingly new".6 In these patent drawings it can be seen that Fuller is trying to simplify the construction of the house, and make it so that it can be built out of a kit of parts as quickly, efficiently, and light weight as possible. The house radiates out from a central mass that contains all of its mechanical, electrical, and plumbing functions; the roof that cantilevers off of this central core then supports all of the exterior walls.7 The "4D" in 4D Time Lock came from Einstein's fourth dimension, time, and alluded to one of the biggest driving forces behind Fullers designs for the new 20th century home; he wanted to design a house that could be constructed by a single person in a matter of days.8 Despite the ingenuity of these ideas, Fuller was not awarded the patent this time, all though by the time the patent was rejected the drawings in the patent were outdated and had been replaced by the drawings that more closely resemble the Dymaxion House.9 The word Dymaxion is a combination of dynamic, maximum, and tension, dy(namic)max(imum)(tens)ion.10 In his book Nine Chains to the Moon, Fuller describes the house as, "Simply an attitude and interpretive principle - a principle of doing the most with the least in consideration of mobilizing, integrating a society necessitous of breaking its exploitable bondage through science."11 Fuller was trying to mobilize American society, therefore breaking it out of its outdated and limiting house design. Fuller saw the average American house of the time as "a decorated nozzle on the end of a sewer", and was very interested in bringing the piping, systems, and resources that houses needed, into the houses themselves.12 By doing this houses could now go anywhere, they were not constrained by outdated and decrepit underground systems, it was the ultimate encouragement of human mobility.

Case Study Homes | 58

1929 Dymaxion House Plan, Elevation, and Model Pictures The 1929 Dymaxion House was a hexagonal shape, and it was hung from the central mast, creating space underneath to park cars and privately owned airplanes, something Fuller was convinced everyone would soon have. He may have been right, had his Dymaxion House design been hugely successful, everyone would have spread out distances that even a car could not have efficiently covered.

Krausse, Joachim, and Claude Lichtenstein, eds. Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller The Art of Design Science. Translated by Steven Lindberg and Julia Thorson. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Muller, 1999. pg. 134.

Krausse, Joachim, and Claude Lichtenstein, eds. Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller The Art of Design Science. Translated by Steven Lindberg and Julia Thorson. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Muller, 1999. pg. 55.

Dymaxion House Painting This painting was shown on a double page spread in a 1946 Fortune Magazine. It shows a lovely Dymaxion neighborhood set amongst lush green trees, directly adjacent to a lake with a man fishing in a boat, complete with airplanes flying off into the distance in the background.

"Fuller's House." Fortune, April 1946, 166 . May 29, 2010. Accessed November 26, 2017. http://www.fulltable.com/VTS/f/fortune/bf/b.htm. pgs. 64-65.

Airplane House Fuller working with aluminum Wichita House components in one of the B29 Bomber plants in Wichita, Kansas.

"Fuller's House." Fortune, April 1946, 166 . May 29, 2010. Accessed November 26, 2017. http://www.fulltable.com/VTS/f/fortune/bf/b.htm. pg. 169.

A New American Suburb Soon after the Dymaxion House of 1929, the stock market crashed and the great depression set in. Fuller's houses for the world were put on the back burner for a few years, until the end of WWII approached, and his designs resurfaced most notably in 1944 with the Wichita House.

The Wichita House gets its name from Wichita, Kansas, the location of a massive WWII B29 bomber airplane manufacturing plant.13 In order to keep up with demands for airplanes during the time, the population of Wichita went from 100,000 to 200,000 in one week, workers were sleeping in 3 shifts in beds to keep the plants open and running 24/7.14 The town was packed, and the workers lives were anything but glamorous, and many of them started asking themselves, once the war is over and there is no longer this desperation for B29 bombers, what will I do; why am I putting myself through this torture for a job that has no future?15 During this trying time Fuller was serving as the head engineer on the Board of Economic Warfare, and he got wind of this problem that Wichita was having.16 Fuller recognized that there would be a massive housing shortage after the war, and saw an opportunity for the Wichita's B29 plant to begin producing his Dymaxion homes, and not just airplanes.17 The home went through a series of changes again, much like what happened during the transition from the 4D House to the Dymaxion House. Fuller preferred the Dymaxion House's hexagonal shape over the rectangular one of the 4D House because the hexagonal plan allowed the forces to abate symmetrically.18 When 1944 came around and Fuller began designing the Wichita House, the shape changed again, this time to a circle. Many people wondered why the house was now circular, to which Fuller always responded, “Why are houses rectangular?�19 The answer is that they are made up of straight, rectangular pieces. In contrast, the Wichita House was made of the rolled aluminum sheets that used to make airplane bodies, wrapping the sheets around the tension hung rings was the most efficient way to use the material.

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Wichita House Prototype There were only 2 prototypes of the Wichita house ever built. Seen above is the construction of the floor and roof structure.

Krausse, Joachim, and Claude Lichtenstein, eds. Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller The Art of Design Science. Translated by Steven Lindberg and Julia Thorson. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Muller, 1999. pgs. 239-240.

A New American Suburb However, like many things that Fuller thought of, it wasn't that simple. There were multiple other factors informing this design decision, such as the metal tension members that radiated out of the central mast of the house and made up the roof support. They were designed to mimic the, “Efficiency of (the) umbrella and bicycle”.20 Finally, the circular shape also greatly reduced the drag of the house, letting wind flow by easily, greatly reducing the energy needed to heat the house.21 Basically, the new circular shape, “offers the advantage of a maximum of space being enclosed with a minimum of materials, while the tensional construction uses the metal at its strongest capacity”.22 Fuller had effectively industrialized houses, he had taken something that had a long history and tradition and made it as high tech, efficient, light weight, and economical as possible. A few years earlier he had figured that the 4D house should weigh about 3 tons, which is precisely what the Wichita House ended up weighing, when a typical house of the time that was around 1,000 square feet weighed in at about 150 tons.23 24 In the Wichita House, "No single component, no beam or rib or panel, weighed more than ten pounds and each could be lifted by a man with one hand, leaving the other free to fasten it in place. All the components of a disassembled house, including the mast, could be packed in a packing case of less than 300 cubic feet for shipping by air to any place in the world. The retail price of the house would be $6,500, about a dollar a pound, or the cost of a Cadillac, at the time."25 This home was described as "a civilization station inhabited by people outside of any urban context".26 Also, just like the older Dymaxion House from 1929, the Wichita House was to "be absolutely 'self supporting' in every sense".27 Not only had Fuller Case Study Homes | 66

Wichita House Prototype Once the roof structure is completed, the aluminum framed design, which was inspired by the spokes on a bicycle or umbrella, is clad in rolled aluminum sheets, and then hoisted into the air.

Krausse, Joachim, and Claude Lichtenstein, eds. Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller The Art of Design Science. Translated by Steven Lindberg and Julia Thorson. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Muller, 1999. pgs. 241 & 244.

A New American Suburb designed a home that could be mass produced on an industrial scale and sold for around a dollar a pound, he had made one that was entirely inwardly focused and self supporting, it required no plumbers, electricians, or carpenters, and could be dropped in and set up almost anywhere on Earth.

So what was the problem then, why aren't all Americans living in airplane look-a-like Wichita Houses? There are a number of reasons that can be blamed for the Wichita House never truly coming to fruition and being produced at the industrial scale that Fuller thought it could be. Fuller’s pursuit of weightlessness and ease of assembly through his circular design harkens back to Loos’s “‘plain shoe modernism’ in ‘Ornament and Crime’ (that tried) to form (a) ‘completely smooth’ modern aesthetic…”.28 Fuller never wavered in his pursuit of perfection, which eventually forced him to shut down his entire operation after building just two Wichita Homes. The infrastructure and tools did not exist to mass produce and build the house across the country, and he viewed it as unfair and irresponsible to sell something that was vastly unprepared to people, and he saw it as practically morally repugnant to profit off such a thing.29 In 4D Time Lock Fuller says, “that there was a three billion a year business for the producer of the new economical home”.30 What he did not realize, is that there was already a system and grouping of professions and practitioners making that 3 billion a year, and that they would not make it easy for Fuller’s new designs to dominate that market. The plumbing and electrician unions said that, “If you bring in a house with all the plumbing and wiring all done we won’t have any business left”.31 Fuller believed that Ford’s proliferation and production on an industrial scale of the automobile was incentivizing people to decentralize, but he claimed their was no 20th century home for them to decentralize to.32 This is the biggest problem with Fuller's idea, rather than recognizing the dangers of a decentralized society that relies Case Study Homes | 68

Wichita House Prototype Finally, the rolled aluminum walls are put up around the house, and the rotating air vent cap is put onto the roof, completing construction of the home in under a day.

Krausse, Joachim, and Claude Lichtenstein, eds. Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller The Art of Design Science. Translated by Steven Lindberg and Julia Thorson. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Muller, 1999. pgs. 245 & 247.

A New American Suburb solely on cars to do anything and challenging that notion, he accepted it as inevitable, and looking at America today maybe it was. However, in accepting this vision of the future, the houses that he designed only added fuel to that fire, and would have pushed people even further out of urban centers.

Fuller thought that "The great city, necessary before transportation and distribution, is losing its advantage. It will have lost it all with the advent of the industrially produced home".33 Unfortunately, he did not realize that transportation, as discussed in earlier chapters, was not the only thing hampering America's great cities of the time. The proliferation of sprawl and the decline of density in America was the direct result of efforts by those who would benefit or profit from decentralization, and the indirect result of people of power and influence who helped these groups of people achieve their misguided goals.

Fuller made the mistake so often made in design of creating a bandage for a much larger and complex problem, rather than addressing the cause of the problem itself. Yes, his Wichita House most likely could have helped the post WWII housing problem a great deal, but it would have been a short term solution that would have been extremely detrimental in the long run.

Fuller was inwardly focused when creating his houses. Jane Jacobs said in The Death and Life of Great American Cities that, "City dwellings - either existing or potential - are specific and particularized buildings always involved in differing, specific processes such as unslumming, slumming, generation of diversity, self-destruction of diversity.

Because this is so, 'housers', narrowly specializing in 'housing' expertise, are a vocational absurdity. Such a profession makes sense only if it is assumed that 'housing' per se has important generalized effects and qualities. It does not".34

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Wichita House Model The Wichita House featured an extremely efficient plan that fit 3 beds in 2 bedrooms, and 2 bathrooms into about 1,000 square feet. The house also contained Fuller's Dymaxion bathroom design, as well as a sizeable kitchen and living room.

"Fuller's House." Fortune, April 1946, 166 . May 29, 2010. Accessed November 26, 2017. http://www.fulltable.com/VTS/f/fortune/bf/b.htm. pg. 171.

A New American Suburb Jacobs is saying calling yourself a "residential designer" or something similar, makes no sense because that implies that housing design in one place is the same as in another. Surely then she would have been aghast at Fuller's idea of making one house that could be bought by anyone and be put anywhere in the world, and rightly so. Fuller was so focused on making "the house for the world" that he didn't consider what was becoming of the world he was putting that house in.

Fuller was a pioneer in that he questioned that which he saw as illogical, impractical, and outdated. Though his eventual solutions to the problems that he defined may not have been perfect, a lot can still be learned from his designs and ideas. The next sections in this chapter will focus on housing projects that aren't direct responses to a post WWII America desperate for more housing, but projects that still attempt to offer an alternate perspective on housing in America that is unique and bold.

Formosa 1140 Formosa 1140 is a 11 unit multi family housing building in West Hollywood, Los Angeles. It was designed by Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects and completed in 2010.35 The lovely California weather, typically well off residents, and easy access to land in Los Angeles has led to single family McMansions and cookie cutter homes that sprawl out from the city center in suburban and exurban typologies.36 This project is of great significance because it was designed and built in this troubled Los Angeles, one of the most car reliant cities in America, yet it still managed to challenge accepted and traditional norms for multi family housing development and design.

Formosa addresses issues such as urban density, residential community-building, public park space, and neighborhood circulation.37 Unlike Fuller's Dymaxion House, Formosa is very aware of where it is built, and works at the human scale, building Case Study Homes | 72

Courtyard Model These 2 LOHA diagrams show the typical courtyard typology, and how it creates insular green space that is privately controlled and accessed by residents of an apartment building.

New Model LOHA's new apartment design fits the building onto two thirds of the site, leaving the remaining third for a public park. When two buildings like this are placed back to back on a block, a green street across the block is created.

“FORMOSA 1140.� LOHA: Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects, Accessed 22 Feb. 2018, loharchitects.com/work/formosa1140.

A New American Suburb scale, and neighborhood scale to accommodate not just those that live there, but those that live near there or may at some point be passing through.

The project is revolutionary because it creates density and public green space simultaneously. West Hollywood has plenty of housing, and 90% of that housing is multi-family, but only 1% of the land in West Hollywood is allocated to parks.38 Formosa addresses this issue by dividing the site into thirds, one of which is made into a publicly managed pocket park, while the other two thirds are the building.39 Formosa takes the typical courtyard housing typology, and moves the courtyard out from the interior of the building, making it accessible to those that live there and to those in the community.

This also creates a green belt through the residential block when two developments that take advantage of this idea are placed back to back to each other. Formosa effectively creates one third outdoor public space and two thirds residential private space on a site that traditionally would have been two thirds residential private space that surrounded another third of private outdoor space.

James Howard Kunstler describes communities as organisms in his book The Geography of Nowhere when he says, "There must have been a time when people looked forward to the erection of a new house in town, or even at the edge of town. By town, I mean something akin to a living organism composed of different parts that work together to make the whole greater that the sum of its parts - that is, a community. A new building would be expected to add value and richness to this community, as a new child is eagerly awaited by members of a family".40 Formosa, more than any other building recently built in West Hollywood, does just this. Formosa is a residential building that Case Study Homes | 74

“FORMOSA 1140.” LOHA: Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects, Accessed 22 Feb. 2018, loharchitects.com/work/formosa1140.

“FORMOSA 1140.” LOHA: Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects, Accessed 22 Feb. 2018, loharchitects.com/work/formosa1140.

A New American Suburb gave to those that lived in it, as well as to the community it was built in. It took a plot of land and gave a third of it back, a third more than is usually shared when land in a neighborhood is developed.

Innovations and practices like these are desperately needed in an America where most of the housing takes up only a fraction of the land it is built on, but none of that unused land is shared with anyone, and is therefore wasted by those that own it and those that live in that community. Like Formosa in LA, America needs to strive to create infrastructure of opportunity, which goes beyond the systems by which people, water, sewage, communications, data, and electricity are transported, and includes, "the means by which people can attain their aspirations with increased access to employment, education, recreation, enjoyment, and health".41

New Suburbanism The speculative project New Suburbanism by Lewis Tsurmaki Lewis Architects is a play off the more commonly identified new urbanists. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck who wrote Suburban Nation and designed Seaside, Florida; things that have been referenced frequently in previous chapters, are new urbanists. To review from earlier, a new urbanists attempts to achieve more environmentally responsible design by designing neighborhoods that are of a higher density, are walkable, and have a mix of use types. This is all well and good, but these goals too often lead urban planners astray.

New urbanists are often accused of being too stylistic, and trying too hard to emulate successes of the past, as was shown earlier when defining traditional towns. Seaside's attempts to recreate the traditional Florida beach town are a perfect example of this. The town looks too planned, as if it is the actualization of a South Florida postcard. This is not always a bad thing, but when this artificial environment is created en mass across the 79 | Case Study Homes

A New American Suburb country, it begins to falsify and disguise American communities.

Learning from the principles of traditional towns, and applying those lessons to modern day developments is smart and should be encouraged, but simply trying to recreate or copy an old neighborhood somewhere else 100 years later will rarely work.

Lewis Tsurmaki Lewis's New Suburbanism project combines two typical suburban typologies; the single family home and the big box store.42 Big box stores, such as Target, Walmart, Costco, Staples, Best Buy, or Home Depot all look pretty much the same.

They are single story CMU block warehouses that are usually built within a parking lot that takes up more room than the building itself. There are rarely windows, you enter in the front from the parking lot, and the rear typically consists of loading docks, trucks, and dumpsters, while the roof is almost always white, flat, empty, and higher than it needs to be.

LTL Architects took advantage of this wasted roof space by allowing single family homes, "to occupy the vast horizontal roofscapes of the big boxes," that were arranged linearly based off of the "repetitive system of the big box store’s open-span structure, aisles and storage racks".43 They also took advantage of the dead space in big box stores that is above the shelves but below the roof. They did this by puncturing the roof plane, and allowing things like parking, pools, storage, and circulation to exist below the roof plane but above the shelving of the store below.

LTL Architects New Suburbanism is unique because unlike the new urbanists, they are not advocating mimicking the past or applying urban planning principles of the past to the present. They are also not saying that the suburbs are doomed and everyone who can should be living in hyperdense urban centers. Instead, they claim that, "In this hybrid of house and store, the identities of both are maintained, but in an altered form - now cross-wired to produce unanticipated social and spatial relationships Case Study Homes | 80

Lewis, Paul, et al. “New Suburbanism.� LTL Architects Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis, Accessed 15 Mar. 2018, ltlarchitects.com/new-suburbanism.

A New American Suburb through their mutual influence. In New Suburbanism, the logic of suburbia is exploited, wasteful redundancies are resolved, and new sectional matings are established in continued pursuit of the American Dream".44 LTL Architects has done something very important, and that is realize what the existing landscape looks like.

Rather than talk about new urbanist "smart growth" strategies for new development, LTL Architects took what exists and ran with it. They took 2 prolific aspects of the current built environment in America and thought of a way that they could make each other work better.

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Section and Axon Drawings The section on top describes the relation between the previously unused vast horizontal landscapes that exist on the top of big box stores, and the new single family dwellings that can be built there. The influence of the big box stores racks of shelves is seen in the structure of the homes in the axon drawings.

Lewis, Paul, et al. “New Suburbanism.� LTL Architects Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis, Accessed 15 Mar. 2018, ltlarchitects.com/new-suburbanism.

Section Perspective This drawing displays the play occurring on top of and within the roof plane of the big box Home Depot. It shows how the wasted air space above the shelves, and above the store itself, can be seamlessly combined with the single family, detached home.

Lewis, Paul, et al. “New Suburbanism.� LTL Architects Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis, Accessed 15 Mar. 2018, ltlarchitects.com/new-suburbanism.

A NEW AMERICAN SUBURB that makes better living environments for all "If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it".1 - Dwight D. Eisenhower

The problems defined in the previous chapters of this thesis go beyond architectural issues. The suburban landscape in America and the forces that have helped sculpt it are political, environmental, cultural, and economic. Looking at these problems as just planning or design issues is to not understand the problem fully, and if the problem is not understood fully, any attempted remedy will fall short.

As previously discussed, government subsidies of highways and the auto industry, along with their incentivizing and encouraging home ownership has made suburbs all but a necessity across the country since the 50s. These facts coupled with local ordinances and codes that prohibit anything but "quaint", cut and paste, McMansions from being built up and down winding and confusing suburban streets has created American neighborhoods that work for few and are desired by none. Not to mention the grave errors in planning, design, and policy making made by the government during the post World War II Cold War era that created neighborhoods that quickly became dysfunctional and outdated.

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A New American Suburb Environmentalism, despite all its best intentions, has also played a role in falsely portraying suburbs and low density living as the green alternative. The big, scary, dirty, loud, and dangerous label that was given to cities during the mid 1900s that encouraged people to flee to the serene and beautiful country side, to live a more natural life as nature intended in the "wild", was both ridiculous and misleading. People did not realize how hard it would be to live in nature while simultaneously preserving it. Vishaan Chakrabarti describes this best when he says that, ". . . sustainability is about running toward people, not away from them. It is about embracing all of humanity in order to leave most of the natural world just that natural. Put in the simplest possible terms, if you love nature, don't live in it".2 This false sense of environmentalism is also one of the contributing factors to the green lawns and white picket fences of America's most famous cultural phenomenon, the American dream. The quest to live a life of freedom and happiness, in a single family home placed in a sea of green grass protected by a white picket fence and a dog, alongside a wife or husband with 2 to 3 children has long been sought after. The American dream is not all bad, but it is often unrealistic and unattainable for many, and is far too often seen as the only form of success in this country.

Just as the American dream is often thought of as life's ultimate achievement, financial success is seen as one of the most, if not the most, important aspect of American life. The American people often put financial gain above their health or mental wellbeing, and the money and resources put into the auto industry are a perfect example of this.

One can also look to America's investments in high speed rail, or lack there of, as evidence of their worship of the auto industry.

There are about 15,000 miles of high speed rail built in the world 89 | A New American Suburb

A New American Suburb right now, 6,649 miles of that being in China, and the rest being split between 12 other countries. America, however, has an unsurprising 0 total miles of high speed rail.3 It is baffling how a country with one of the strongest most wealthy economies in the world, that claims to be on the cutting edge of technology, has yet to build a single mile of high speed rail.

Perhaps this is because such a huge portion of the American economy is built on not just cars and their sale and production, but on oil and the construction and maintaining of roads, highways, and expressways. This is a model that encourages sprawl and competes with high speed rail, as well as the more diverse and adaptable high density city living model.

These forces that influence and worsen the design, planning, and architecture of the living environments in America can be summarized or narrowed down into 3 main design goals.

By striving to achieve these goals, the already vast suburban landscape in America can be adapted and modified to better suit the needs of those that actually live in it, or will need to in the future.

A New American Suburb's Design Goals There are 3 main issues with suburbs in America. Fixing these issues or even working towards a better version of the suburbs using these issues as a guideline, would be a huge step in the right direction for the living environments in this country. Suburbs are not dense enough, they are single use developments, and they are completely car reliant.

These 3 main problems all feed off of each other, which is why any efforts to improve or eliminate one of the problems is a major step in the right direction. For example, suburbs are entirely reliant on cars because they are at such a low density. A train or light rail system built through the average American suburb would usually be empty, and be very cost ineffective.

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A Nation of Highways The true American flag. A nation built by highways, meant to serve cars and our delusional desire to live in "natural" single family detached home neighborhoods. This flag better represents the true values of the nation.

A New American Suburb Increasing suburban density is the easiest problem to understand. Simply put, way too much land and resources in the suburbs are put to waste, houses themselves are way larger than they need to be, and often sit empty for the most part. The lots these oversized houses are built on are also too big, and are covered in grass that is never walked across, and all of this is built around roads that are too wide for the volume and speed of traffic that they are serving. All of this wasted space and resources is a sign of density that is far too low. The vast distances between things that is created by this wasted space creates even more waste, the empty houses that people so desperately feel they need to fill add even more waste, and so on and so fourth.

Simply taking advantage of all of this space that is sitting empty, unused, and forgotten, in and around American suburbs, would be a massive improvement for the American living environment. Despite American suburbs density problems, filling in all this empty space with housing would be extremely ineffective. Single use developments, like suburbs, office parks, malls, and so on, no matter how dense, are extremely inefficient and car reliant.

Single use development separates out interrelated parts of society, and makes a daily routine entirely reliant on a car. People have to drive from where they live, to where they work, to where they watch a movie, to where they eat and so on. Mixed use developments allow people to live above where they work, or near where they eat or down the street from where they go to school.

By putting many different activities in close proximity to each other, by diversifying the usage types in neighborhoods, people can begin to walk to the grocery again, or stroll down the street and window shop, rather than driving to the closest "downtown" parking their car in a parking structure, and then pretending like they live in a walkable neighborhood.

Finally, the third design goal of the new American suburb, which has already been alluded to, is to reduce the reliance on 93 | A New American Suburb

A New American Suburb cars. The more dense an area is, and the more the usage types are mixed in an area, the less reliant that area becomes on cars. This fact is pretty much common sense, so it is baffling how much of America completely ignores it and attempts to create bus routes or light rail lines that end up being mostly empty, forgotten, or neglected.

Public transit relies on dense, mixed use development, whether it be taxis, buses, or trains. If you have a very dense residential area in close proximity to a very dense office development, the public transit will most likely not be effective, because it will only be utilized during rush hour in the morning and rush hour at night. A dense, mixed use neighborhood is needed to truly take full advantage of good bus routes and a well planned metro system. This is why cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago have such famous train systems, and aren't totally inundated with automobile traffic.

All though these cities are famous for their public transit systems, and they serve many very well, the densities that the people who live in these cities live at is not always necessary to have a successful living environment. For example, if the entire world lived at a density of about 25 units per acre, the density of a block of townhouses or brownstones, the worlds 7 billion inhabitants could all live within the state of Texas. This would leave the entire rest of the planet to nature and agriculture.4 Of course this scenario is practically impossible, but it is a great example of the power of density.

America's prolific and already existing suburbs can be redesigned to have higher densities, a greater mix of usage types, and be less reliant on cars. By making simple changes to code and reprioritizing residential and neighborhood design to suit people, and not cars, America's suburbs and neighborhoods can again become great places to raise a family, but also wonderful places for people in their 20s and 30s to figure out life's path , or elderly people to retire to. These changes will stop suburbs from killing A New American Suburb | 94

30 Units Per Acre For everyone on planet Earth to live in the state of Texas, they would all have to live at a density similar to this. Everyone would not have to pack into skyscrapers and never go outside, they would all be a couple flights of stairs from the outdoors. Brownstones, row houses, or townhouses like these are some of the most sought after real estate in the country, and if they were more common and affordable, everyone would be better off.

Pi.1415926535. “Back Bay Brownstones from the Westin.� Wikimedia Commons, MediaWiki, Back Bay, Boston, 26 Aug. 2013, commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Back_Bay_brownstones_from_the_Westin.jpg.

A New American Suburb cities, be more environmentally responsible and efficient, suit the average and not so average American families better, and make the American dream more about a way of life again, and not some outdated and unrealistic monetary goal or material possessions.

Site This architectural thesis is sited broadly in "an American suburb", that will be called Gleamy Valley. This suburb exists no where and every where. It is not a real place, but is a representation of the average American suburb. Suburbs like this can be found in all fifty states, around most major cities, or even near major towns.

Gleamy Valley is a low density, single use suburb where everyone has ample street parking on softly bending, wide suburban streets, that lead into their garages, carports, and driveways.

There are only three types of homes in Gleamy Valley, but they are all covered in a wide array of fake and colorful stones, sidings, and bricks. All the homes also have large, unused backyards and beautiful, expansive, and wasteful front yards covered in plastic green grass. Gleamy Valley is the ideal place to raise your three kids and to park your five cars.

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Project Site

42’

A New American Suburb

15’

30’

10’

Phase 1 Phase 1 of the New American Suburb is to change the existing code and setback laws that prevent people that live in the suburbs from modifying and densifying their neighborhoods to better suit their needs. The origin of this need for a change to the code could have come from many places, whether it be residents tired of slow, boring, car reliant suburban life, or a public official or representative who sees an opportunity for betterment of the community that he serves.

The precious suburban backyard is largely untouched in this change. In Gleamy Valley there is typically 40 to 50 feet between 99 | A New American Suburb

42’

A New American Suburb

8’

the rear site line and the back of the house on the lot. The setback in the front yard, however, will be cut down significantly. Front yards are mostly used in suburbia as a status symbol, who has the biggest trees, the greenest grass, and the most ridiculous and unnecessary walkways to their front doors that they never use?

This wasted front yard space will be reclaimed by the public.

The typical 30 to 40 foot front setback in Gleamy Valley will be cut down to between 5 and 10 feet. This keeps the sidewalk off the front of the houses and still allows residents to create a buffer zone between them and the public realm, but it takes back a lot of previously wasted and forgotten space, and shares it with everyone in the neighborhood.

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A New American Suburb

The side yards are the most important and significant change to the existing suburban code. Side yards in suburbs are completely wasted buffer zones. They are typically where you find tool sheds and trash cans, and are rarely used except by the meter man from the utilities companies. Phase 1 of The New American Suburb in Gleamy Valley completely eliminates side yards, combining the adjacent yards together to make one long, narrow new site that fits between two homes and spans across the suburban block.

In addition to these changes in setbacks and lot sizes, 101 | A New American Suburb

A New American Suburb

the parking codes have also been eliminated, meaning more density can be built in Gleamy Valley, without having to build more garages, parking structures, or driveways. This means the oversized suburban roads can actually be put to use now, with the hope that as time goes on individual car ownership, or car ownership in general, will go down.

The shrinking of the front yards, and elimination of side yards and parking codes in Gleamy Valley during phase 1 of the New American Suburb sounds like a lot, but it must be kept in mind A New American Suburb | 102

A New American Suburb that at this point this is just a change to the code. Notice that there are no actual physical changes happening yet. These code changes simply open up the possibility for the residents of Gleamy Valley to begin planning for uses and designs of their newly found spaces. Once some thinking, planning, and coordinating amongst neighbors has occurred, actual construction and adaptation of their neighborhood can begin.

Phase 2 Phase 2 of the New American Suburb in Gleamy Valley is a change that will happen entirely within the existing suburban homes.

Phase 2 is when the residents of Gleamy Valley begin adapting and changing their existing homes to prepare for a higher density, less car reliant life style. This phase is one that could actually happen almost anywhere throughout the process of creating the New American Suburb, but for ease of understanding and representation will be explained here.

The site for this thesis is in Gleamy Valley, but the concentration of the design work happens between four suburban homes, where the Tanner's, Miller's, Burbank's, and Simpson's live. These four families are very excited about the codes that have been changed in their neighborhood, and feel that all though their lot sizes have decreased, the quality of their lives and the public spaces around them will be drastically increasing over the next few years.

The Tanner's Mindy and Mike Tanner live at 123 Rocky River Road in Gleamy Valley, in a split level home that has more space than they would ever need, even if they had another 2 kids. Their house has a front door, but they always enter from the side door that opens into their carport.

Once in the side door, the ground level contains the living 103 | A New American Suburb

A New American Suburb room, home office, half bath, and a coat closet or 2. There are 2 sets of 4 steps that lead up to the upper level of the split level, and a staircase that leads to the basement. The short 4 steps have always worried the Tanner's, they're not sure how late into their lives they will be able to go up and down all of these stairs, not to mention the stairs that lead upstairs to the bedrooms.

The upper level of the split contains a large kitchen and dining room, along with a family room the size of a small bus. The stairs to get to the bedrooms begin in the family room. Upstairs there are 3 bedrooms that share a bathroom and a master suite that has its own bathroom with his and her sinks. The Tanners have always appreciated the second level of their home, Mindy and Mike have 3 kids under the age of 10, so they need the bedrooms. However, on the first floor, the only foot traffic the family room gets is when someone is walking through it to go upstairs. Their television is in the living room, and their kitchen and dining room is so large that when they have guests, they all mingle in the kitchen while Mindy cooks.

Mindy and Mike were very excited about the changes to their neighborhoods code, and decided they would try to get ahead of the changes that were to come. Mike is a lawyer at a law office in town, but Mindy is a stay at home mom who has recently started an online jewelry store. So that she can be home with her kids as much as possible, but still run her business, the Tanner's decide to convert their unused family room into a small office, and their at home office into a small conference room.

This small change has allowed Mindy to vastly expand her jewelry business while still being around the house when her kids get home from school.

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Tanner's Level 1 | Existing

Unused home office has been converted into a conference room.

Massive, unused family room has been converted into a small office.

Tanner's Level 1 | Renovated

Tanner's Level 1 | Existing and Renovated The Tanner's still needed all of their upstairs bedrooms, so the second level of their home went mostly untouched

A New American Suburb

The Miller's The Miller's are a less traditional family than the Tanner's. Erin Miller has a 15 year old son from a previous marriage, and Andrew Miller has 5 and 8 year old girls, also from a previous marriage.

Erin and Andrew got married a couple years ago, but just recently decided to combine their families and move into 246 Stony Spring Street. Their home is 1 level in the front, but the ground slopes down in the back so that the basement becomes ground level, revealing the 2 level house.

The ground level has 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a living room, dining room, and kitchen. The basement consists of a massive recreation room that is mostly unused by the family, a guest bedroom, and some storage and mechanical space. Erin and Andrew have been so busy trying to find jobs and situate their kids in their new home since they moved, that the recreation room downstairs is mostly filled with moving boxes, and the guest bedroom sits empty.

The code changes to Gleamy Valley were passed just after the Miller's moved there, and now that they have settled in a little bit, Erin and Andrew decide to make some modifications to their home to rid of some of the unused space, and try to make some extra money.

Erin is having no luck finding a job, but she has always wanted to open her own restaurant. She figures they can make some upgrades to their kitchen, and eventually build a nice deli or cafe in between her home and her neighbors home. Andrew also has the idea to close off their front door, so that they can have a more private entrance to their basement. This way they can lease out their basement to someone else, either as an apartment or small office or artist studio.

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Miller's Ground Level | Existing

Erin Miller's old kitchen has been upgraded to support industrial appliances and restaurant demands, they even added a walk in fridge.

A new enclosed entry to the basement has been created so that it can be rented out.

Miller's Ground Level | Renovated

A New American Suburb

The Simpson's The Simpson's are retired empty nesters who are hoping they can age in place. The Simpson's were thinking of moving to a city or into town so that they didn't have to drive as much and could get a little more exercise, but just as they started looking the code changes in Gleamy Valley were announced. They raised their 5 children in this house, and it and the neighborhood that it is in is very close to their heart.

The Simpson's made the ultimate decision that the code changes in Gleamy Valley would turn their neighborhood into a place they would be more comfortable growing old in, so they turned their attentions to their house and began to modify it to better suit their new needs.

The Simpson's house has a front door and side door, but much like the Tanner's, their front door is used only by solicitors and Jehovah's Witnesses. Their side door opens from their carport into their family room, and it is the door they always use. After the family room with a fireplace by the side door, the first floor has a sizeable kitchen, a dining room, a living room, and entry foyer, a half bath and a guest room.

Upstairs, there used to be 4 bedrooms. When 2 of the Simpson's oldest kids went to college, they combined 2 of the rooms into a master sweet, so now there are 3 bedrooms upstairs plus the 1 downstairs.

The Simpson's, much like their neighbors, no longer need all of those upstairs bedrooms, so they decided to close off their foyer so that their front door became a private entrance to the upstairs. They converted their fourth bedroom on the first floor into their master suite, adding closets and making the half bath into a full bath with his and her sinks. The added benefit to this is they have now put all of their needs on 1 floor, so as they get older they don't have to go up stairs anymore.

They converted their family room into a very large dining 111 | A New American Suburb

A New American Suburb room. Melinda Simpson loves entertaining, and when their kids and grand kids come to visit they love being able to share a family meal together. Then they changed the old dining room into an office and left their huge living room alone.

The second floor was made into a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment that also features a lovely kitchen, dining room, and living room. The Simpson's hope that a small family with young children will move in one day, they have sorely missed having children around ever since all of theirs left.

The Burbank's The Burbank's are the newest family in town. Tommy Burbank was recently relocated at work, so the Burbank's had to move. While they were in the market for a new house, they heard about the changes happening in Gleamy Valley. They loved the potential that they saw there, and after talking to some neighbors, decided they would buy a home there that was far too large and modify it to fit their needs.

The Burbank's have an only child, so when they bought the same house that the Simpson's have they knew they could fit their whole family on the first floor. The home they bought was much like the Simpson's on the first level, it had a family room, kitchen, dining room, living room, foyer, half bath, and a guest bedroom.

The Burbank's made the guest bedroom into their daughter Terry's bedroom, making the half bath a full bath. They then turned the massive living room into a master bedroom with a bathroom and walk in closet. Finally, they changed their family room into their new living room, and left the kitchen and dining room alone.

Just like the Simpson's, the Burbank's also closed off their foyer to create a private entrance to the second story of their new home. Upstairs they made a 2 bedroom apartment, that they hoped some students from a near by community college might move into, so they could also baby sit their daughter.

A New American Suburb | 112

Simpson's and Burbanks's Level 1 | Existing

Simpson's and Burbanks's Level 2 | Existing

Newly built second bedroom for the Burbank's only child.

Just like the Miller's, the Burbank's closed off their foyer to create a private entry to upstairs.

The Burbank's new master suite

Burbanks's Level 1 | Renovated

The Burbank's massive master bedroom has been converted into a kitchen, living, and dining room for Alena and Sam.

Alena grew up around this neighborhood and has moved back after finishing college, but did not want to move back in with her parents.

Burbanks's Level 2 | Renovated

Sam was Alena's college roommate, they've decided to stay together post grad and move into this new 2 bedroom apartment in Gleamy Valley, it's the perfect size for 2 recent college grads.

The Simpson's first floor guest room is converted into their master bedroom, putting all of their needs on one level.

The previously unused family room is converted to a large dining room for family and entertaining.

Simpson's Level 1 | Renovated

Much like the Burbank's old master bedroom, the Simpson's is converted into the kitchen, living, and dining room for Melissa and her family.

Melissa is a recently divorced single mother with 2 young children. The Simpson's were very excited to have her move in, they've missed having children around. Melissa was equally excited to find a place that's plenty large enough for her family but still affordable.

Simpson's Level 2 | Renovated

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A New American Suburb

Phase 3 Phase 3 of the New American Suburb in Gleamy Valley turned away from the homes there and focused on the little infrastructure that exists; the streets and sidewalks. The typical road in Gleamy Valley was between 30 to 40 feet wide. Roads this wide can support parking on both sides as well as 2 way traffic. Additionally, since very few people in Gleamy Valley actually park on the street, cars can speed through the neighborhood at speeds approaching 45 miles per hour. This is not ideal for somewhere people are supposed to be raising kids.

In addition to these streets that are too wide, there is a green strip of grass between the roads and the sidewalks, most likely to keep pedestrians feeling comfortable and safe from the cars that come whizzing through the neighborhood. The New American Suburb does 2 very simple things to the streets and sidewalks in Gleamy Valley.

First, it pulls the sidewalks in so that their inside edges are also the edges of the streets. Second, the streets are not just narrowed down to a much safer and efficient 25 feet, but they are also pulled in all the way to the new front site line of the suburban homes from the code change in phase 1. By narrowing the streets to 25 feet, residents and visitors can now park on 1 side and there can still be 2 way traffic, it will just me much slower, and cars meeting each other head on will have to yield to one another. This simple change to the roads means the pavement takes up much less space in Gleamy Valley, and it makes the entire neighborhood safer, while keeping it accessible.

Since the road is being pulled to the front of the houses on 1 side, one may wonder how people will access their homes that live on the other side of the street. To address this issue, a 12 foot sidewalk will be built against the front of the homes on the other side, with the idea that it would be almost entirely foot or bicycle traffic. However, residents of those homes, and those residents A New American Suburb | 122

10’

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A New American Suburb only, could drive on this 12 foot walkway.

Additionally, pulling the road to one side means there is no longer a large strip of asphalt running down the middle of the public realm. This makes space for a 60 to 70 foot wide public park.

This newly found green space will encourage biking and walking in Gleamy Valley, while simultaneously providing a beautiful place for kids and families to play. Don't forget about this new undeveloped strip of land, it will come up again in phase 6.

Phase 4 Phase 4 of the New American Suburb addresses transportation. It is the least fleshed out phase because it will vary most depending on proximity to urban centers, density, and technological advancements coming in the near future. Phase 4 is when Gleamy Valley establishes an alternate form of transit so that not every family needs to own 4 cars.

This could be as simple as buying tons of bike share racks to place throughout the neighborhood, to something as complex as developing a trolley system. Probably the best example would be to create bus routes that actually go into the suburbs and don't just circle them and move people around once they are in downtown or the city center.

It must also be kept in mind that in the near future all of these problems might be a lot more simple. The times of privately owned cars may very well be coming to an end, companies like Uber, Google, and Tesla may have fleets of self driven cars driving people around all day in the near future. This would most likely make the issue of sprawl worse, but it does seem to be the way the world is heading.

The best, most space efficient, energy efficient, and environmentally responsible modes of transit are biking, walking, and trains. They use the least amount of resources per capita, take up the least amount of space, and have the most potential to easily A New American Suburb | 124

A New American Suburb serve the greatest amount of people. This has been discussed in earlier chapters, and anyone who lives in an urban area or well planned town will fight tooth and nail supporting public transit and active transportation styles.

Phase 4 is when Gleamy Valley will officially start becoming less and less of a suburb. The slightly increased density from phase 2 along with people beginning to actually use public transit or ride shares will have Gleamy Valley still looking kind of like a suburb, but performing more like a traditional downtown or urban center.

Phase 5 Phase 5 of the New American Suburb in Gleamy Valley is where most of the architecture for this architectural thesis is. Phase 5 is when neighbors begin building more density on their new side lots. This phase is where the biggest jump in density occurs, and it is where Gleamy Valley goes from a single use suburb to a multi use town.

125 | A New American Suburb

A New American Suburb The Tanner's, Miller's, Simpson's, and Burbank's, have gotten together after the passing of the new codes in Gleamy Valley, and decided they are ready to take advantage of their newly created side lots. They hire an architect and contractor, and begin the process of vastly improving their neighborhoods value and functionality.

Once the new side lot insertion is built, the units will either be sold to new families, in which case they would just pay mortgages, or they would be rented, in which case the rent would be split evenly amongst the four families. The families could also decide to keep any of the units that are built on the side yards for themselves. This is what Erin Miller decides to do with her new restaurant space, and it happens to be what the Simpson's opt to do with one of the first floor apartment units that is built.

A New American Suburb | 126

Project Site

Existing pedestrian circulation

A New American Suburb

Level 1 The first level (pg. 134) of the side yard construction consists of a combination of public and private space. By keeping the new structures between the homes on the East and West side of the site public, anyone can circulate through them and access the new public realm and walkway that exists in the suburban backyards.

Not every section of side yard construction needs to have this type of public access, but periodically spacing them throughout the block is essential to reducing the size of the overly long and inaccessible suburban blocks. These public walkways, coupled with the new backyard public paths that run parallel to the streets, vastly improve the accessibly and walkability of suburbia.

As far as the program of the built density goes, some of it has already been mentioned. Starting on the East end, Erin Miller's restaurant is built in. It takes the place of the Miller's carport, as well as the side yard lot directly adjacent to it. The Miller's kitchen was already conveniently located to serve this new restaurant, they simply made some industrial upgrades, and added a service window in the wall, and were ready to open for business.

Since the Miller's took up the entirety of the side yard lot that is directly between their home and the Burbank's home, the two families agreed that the apartment directly to the West would belong to the Burbank's. Truman Burbank decided this new apartment would be the perfect place for his aging parents to move into. They would be very close by, but would have their own space and be able to maintain their independence. It was a win-win situation.

Continuing West, over the new public walkway, there is another new apartment unit. This unit is owned by the Simpson's.

Since they are such huge fans of entertaining, and they no longer have their upstairs bedrooms, they wanted to have a place for their friends and family who come to visit them to stay. This apartment is the perfect size for visitors, and when they don't have anyone in A New American Suburb | 130

New suburban pedestrian circulation

A New American Suburb town to see them, they just list it on Airbnb and are able to pay off most of the rent for it that way.

Finally, just West of the last apartment on the first level owned by the Simpson's, is a corner store, fit right in between the two families homes. Neither the Simpson's or the Tanner's were very interested in building something here, so they decided to build a store front and put it on the market. A retired man who lives a couple blocks over bought the space and decided to set up a corner store. He was excited to have a nice walk to the store every day, where he hoped he would be able to get to know his neighbors and town a little better.

Level 2 The second level (pg. 136) of the new side yard construction still has some public space, but is more private and residential than the first level. The Miller's new restaurant downstairs has become a hot spot in Gleamy Valley. People who don't even live in the neighborhood have begun showing up for dates, or on their way to work, or just because they heard about it from a friend.

However, Erin Miller noticed that her kids were growing out of their one level home, and that customers that came with children often had trouble controlling them during dinner. She saw an opportunity to buy the space above her dining area and convert it into a game room. This way her kids, or kids of customers, or just neighborhood kids from Gleamy Valley would have a place to hang out and have fun. It had the added bonus of making her restaurant below into a kid favorite, as well as adult favorite in the neighborhood.

Directly West of the new game room is Harold's 2 bedroom apartment. Harold is a single father of two young boys. He loved this apartment because it has a semi covered deck space, that gives him direct access to some outdoor space, as well as providing a buffer between his apartment and the game room. It is also big A New American Suburb | 132

A New American Suburb enough to fit him and his kids comfortably, but not so big he has to spend all his free time with his kids cleaning and taking care of the house.

Directly West of Harold's apartment is Matt and Raghav's apartment. They are both single and in their late 20s, and have pretty demanding tech jobs in a neighboring urban center. They like being able to come home to somewhere that is a little more quiet, but look forward to Gleamy Valley soon having all the perks and conveniences of a bustling urban area. The East side of their apartment features a partially covered outdoor deck, much like the one Harold has. This deck again creates a bit of a buffer space between Raghav and Matt's apartment and Harold's apartment.

The third and final apartment on the second level is Eunji's apartment. It is the smallest unit, but has 3 large windows that overlook the street and provide a lot of natural light. Eunji grew up near Gleamy Valley, and now attends a near by community college. She can't afford a car, but was able to find this apartment that is walking distance to campus and affordable. Gleamy Valley and the surrounding neighborhoods also have a lot of kids, so Eunji is able to make some baby sitting money on the side.

Level 3 The third level (pg. 138) of the new side yard construction is the top floor, and is entirely private residences. Starting on the East is Derrick. He is a recent college graduate who is 23 years old. He was the first in his family to graduate college with a degree, and as a result is in a sizeable amount of debt. He wants to get into real estate and look for a job in accounting, and this small apartment in Gleamy Valley is comfortable and affordable, and is the perfect place for Derrick right out of college.

West of Derrick is Fred Brady, who recently lost his job, resulting in him having to sell his families home. They were able to downsize and move into this new apartment not far from where 133 | A New American Suburb

A New American Suburb they used to live. Their plan was to stay here temporarily while they looked for a more affordable house elsewhere, but they have loved the neighborhood so much, as well as the public transit and access to amenities, that they have decided to just stay here. The far West end of their apartment also has access to a outdoor patio that is partially enclosed.

The final and largest unit built in the new side yard development is on the West end of the third floor. This unit was bought by Jane Smith, who is a widow. When her husband was alive and her and her family lived in a typical suburban home, Jane was working a part time job, which combined with her husbands job at an engineering firm was plenty to pay the bills. Once her husband passed, however, she was struggling to make ends meet, and decided that she had to downsize. She was delighted to find this lovely apartment that was affordable and had plenty of room for her family. It even had a large outdoor deck on it's West end that had wonderful views of the new park across the street.

A New American Suburb | 134

Level 1

Corner Store

The Miller's Restaurant

Shared public amenities and a new public walkway.

New 5'-10' front yards

Level 2

Eunji

Raghav and Matt

Harold

Game Room

Level 3

The Smith's

Derrick

The Brady's

East Entry View From this view on Stony Spring Street the Miller's new restaurant can be partially seen on the first level, where the rain screen is withheld to welcome in passerby. This transparency also denotes a more public space. The 2 windows on the second floor into the game room still puncture the rain screen, but provide slightly more control and privacy, while the windows hidden behind the rain screen on the third floor, in Derrick's apartment, provide the most privacy.

South Facade View Shown in the foreground is the new public path that runs parallel to the streets, under, and through the new side yard construction. The South facade gets the most harsh sunlight, so the windows are for the most part hidden behind the rain screen. Also seen to the right is Raghav and Matt's partially enclosed patio.

West Entry View This view, taken adjacent to Rocky River Road from the new suburban park, shows the West facing facade. Again the public space on the first level is the most transparent, while the windows into Eunji's apartment on the second level are more hidden. On the top floor, the Smith's large balcony with views of the entire street and park can be seen.

North Facade View This view best shows the new public path that bisects the side yard construction. It also shows Raghav and Matt's partially covered deck, as well as the Brady's on the third level.

On the North facade, the windows puncture the rain screen, to take advantage of the soft Northern light. The glass in these windows is set all the way forward so that their frames are almost 2 feet deep, meaning the windows can be sat in.

A New American Suburb

Building the New American Suburb One of the most discussed and intriguing parts of suburbs beyond why they are built, is how they are built. This question was thought about very carefully when designing the New American Suburb, and the decided solutions are presented in a number of different ways.

One of the first issues that was tackled was the roof. Suburban homes are infamous for their factory built roof trusses that allow home builders to crank out even the most complex roofs in a matter of days. These same roof trusses will be used in the New American Suburb, just in a different way.

The main design change here is in the shapes of the roofs, rather than their construction. It can be seen in the renderings on the pages before that the roofs of the homes slope inwards, so that their high points are at the exterior walls, rather than a traditional suburban roof where the peak of the roof is in the middle, and it slopes downwards towards the exterior wall. This change does 2 things. The first is it allows apartments on the top levels to have much taller exterior windows, which in turn brings in much more natural light, making it easier to light the interior space. Second, the low point spine that now runs down the middle of the building makes it much easier to control and direct water flow on the roof.

This means that collecting rain water, or more efficiently directing it, will be much easier.

The second biggest change to suburban construction is to the wall system. As was discussed in earlier chapters, platform framing, and it's roots are the most interesting and important part of suburban homes. There most likely would not be suburbs were it not for platform framing and the shear speed and quantities that it allows houses to be constructed at. The framing of these homes is a craft that has been practiced for decades now, but most people don't know this, because the complex and often beautiful framing is unfortunately usually covered with plywood, 149 | A New American Suburb

A New American Suburb gypsum board, fake brick, fake stone, stucco, or some other type of disingenuous material.

Perhaps the only thing more beautiful and honest than a suburban home before it's framing is covered, is the balloon framing of the pre World War II suburban homes. In the New American Suburb, this framing that defines suburbia is celebrated and put on display. Rather than filling up the spaces between the framing with insulation, and then covering it on both sides, 2 framing systems are created, which create a cavity that is then filled with insulation.

As can be seen in the wall details on the following pages, the exterior portion of the wall framing system is a balloon framing system. It's vertical members run from ground to bottom of roof plane. They are sheathed on the inside by plywood, to create the outer wall of the insulation cavity. The outside of the balloon framing is then what supports the semi transparent rain screen.

This screen provides shade and protection, while also tying together the appearance of the entire building. The interior portion of the wall, the one that is seen when you are inside the apartments, is a platform framing system. This system is only sheathed on the outside, to fully enclose the insulation cavity, and to leave the framing exposed to the inside.

This new hybrid suburban framing system has the added benefit of creating insulation that has no thermal breaks.

Because there is no framing inside the insulation cavity, the only interruption to the insulation would be the windows and doors.

This new system created construction that is honest and does not waste large amounts of materials just for the sake of appearance.

A New American Suburb | 150

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Existing Detail

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01 Poured concrete footing 02 Steel dowels or mechanical keys anchor foundation wall to footing 03 Extruded polystyrene protection board for waterproofing 04 6” poured concrete ground slab 05 2 x 6 key locks the foundation walls to the footings 06 Perimeter drain of perforated pipe in coarse crushed stone prevents flooding 07 6” minimum cover of gravel or crushed stone 08 Rigid insulation 09 2 x 6 wall stud, pulled inside of sheathing to show framing but hide insulation 10 Concrete footing for balloon framed rain screen wall 11 2 x 4 balloon framing rain screen studs, outer portion of insulation cavity 12 Steel bolts and connection from concrete footing to wood stud framing 13 L shaped anchor bolts, inserted in wet concrete every 6 to 8 feet 14 2 x 10 header joist 15 1 x 4 wooden rain screen, spaced every 6 1/2” o.c.

16 2 x 10 exposed wooden floor joists 17 Plywood subfloor / sheathing 18 Wood slat finish floor 19 2 x 6 wooden soleplate 20 2 x 6 exposed wall stud 21 Plywood sheathing on exterior of wall framing 22 6” Batt insulation in uninterrupted insulation cavity 23 Plywood sheathing on back of rain screen balloon framing, closes in insulation cavity 24 Exposed wooden ceiling truss 25 Plywood ceiling 26 Roof insulation 27 Plywood ceiling attachment blocking 28 Balloon framing steel roof connection 29 Roof tiles

New Exposed Framing Detail

Public walkway section model

West entry section model

East entry section model

East entry section model

Public walkway section model

West entry section model

East entry section model

Public walkway section model

West entry section model

East entry section model

Public walkway section model

West entry section model

Platform framing in the New American Suburb

The New American Suburb Gleamy Valley has taken the first step towards changing Americans living environments.

The introduction of other usage types besides housing, as well as public transit and more pedestrian, non car orientated modes of transit, has allowed the density of the neighborhood block to jump from 3 units per acre all the way up to 20. This increase is a great first step, but there is still plenty of work to be done, not just in Gleamy Valley, but in suburbs across the nation.

A new America the work still to be done

". . . the systems of information flow and industrialized construction has its own momentum fueled by our individual needs, choices, and actions. As many critiques have argued, merely fitting better products into normative construction only modulates the effects that industrial development has on the biosphere. To make a difference, it is necessary to understand both the structure and velocities of the flows already in place, and to locate the threshold effects that occur in building."1 - William W. Braham

This thesis has attempted to take one of the largest and most complex problems in architecture and in this country and provide a solution to it. However, as any architect will tell you, the design is never actually done, there is always more work that could have been done, or still can be done. Never has this been more true then times like this when such a large and complex issue is being dealt with.

There are many portions to this project and design that were not explored in sufficient depth. These areas of thought may require someone smarter, or with a different expertise, or more experience, or simply more time. Thinking back to wicked problems and the difficulties in solving them, this is an issue that will most likely never have a catch all solution, no perfect house will ever be designed that works at all times, everywhere, for everyone, much to Buckminster Fullers chagrin.

First and foremost, the portions of this thesis and design that were non architectural, the economics, planning, and political portions, were for the most part assumed to be true. It A New America | 176

A New American Suburb was assumed in this thesis that a neighborhood could be found where the inhabitants would welcome and allow changes to the code that essentially reduce the amount of property they own.

Of course it is argued that this reduction of ownership is for the better, not just for the individuals, but for the community as a whole. However, this task should not be taken lightly, simply getting people to agree with this argument could be a political and governance thesis all on its own.

Not to mention the economic implications of such an idea.

The methods by which the Miller's, Simpson's, Burbank's, and Tanner's would profit from or benefit from the New American Suburb are described very briefly on the surface level. The hope is that one day American's will realize the importance of the environments in which they live, and they will admit to and work to change the shortcomings they have been putting up with for decades. This desire also implies that maybe one day Americans would be willing to sacrifice personal wealth or holdings, to a certain degree of risk, to better their homes and neighborhoods.

This desire points to another non architectural aspect of this thesis, perhaps the most important driver of design, cultural change. None of this will ever happen if the rich still feel obligated to buy "Italian Villa" beach front homes in Miami, or even McMansions plopped illogically in the middle of the desert in Las Vegas. Perhaps even more importantly, city planners and development officials that think slum clearance or forced low income housing relocation still have a chance at working, need to take a step back and try to learn from the failures of the past.

Most likely the largest cultural change that this thesis presents is one that argues against almost everything that this young nation was built on. American suburbs are the result of an industrialized housing industry. They were born from abandoning cities, they are the realization that building entirely new housing stock and decentralizing the large majority of the American population will be "easier" than working to make cities and towns better places 177 | A New America

A New American Suburb to live. To fix housing in America, it will have to be accepted that industrialized capitalism is not always the answer, and that may be the wicked problem of the century.

Indeed the non architectural aspects of this thesis have their shortcomings, all though, their are architectural aspects as well that could use further development or explanation. The first and foremost is the siting of the project. Gleamy Valley and it's surrounding environments were created so that the most focus possible could be placed on the ideas and principles of the thesis.

Gleamy Valley, being a generic, average, American suburb, was made so that this thesis's design ideologies could be imagined by readers as working anywhere in the country. Had the design been placed more specifically in an actual suburb that exists in Kentucky, or Maryland or any other state, it would have made it harder for the reader to envision the suburb working elsewhere in the country.

This point is an important one, because it is very different from implying this exact design solution would work everywhere.

Had that been the intention, the solution would have been shown in many different suburbs that actually exist across the nation. Instead, the intention is to show that by using the ideas and principles that are followed and implied in Gleamy Valley, any suburb across the nation can question and challenge the accepted status quo in a similar manner, and come up with their own New American Suburb that works specifically for their neighborhood.

The reader can think back to chapter 4, where Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion and Wichita Homes were discussed. Fuller's greatest shortcoming was thinking that he could design a home that worked for anyone, anywhere. The range of variables and inconsistences is simply too great to accomplish such a task. Had he taken his main ideas, creating a home that is light weight, easy to assemble, cheap, and highly functional, and attempted to create a frame work by which families across the nation could design and construct their own homes, Americans would be living in a much A New America | 178

A New American Suburb different world today. While Fuller's designs were breathtaking and ingenious, it is his ideas and principles that could have been truly revolutionary.

In addition to the siting of the New American Suburb that is proposed in this thesis, there is the construction of the actual building as well. Of course the best building design takes advantage of principles of vernacular architecture and passive design strategies, but it is hard to climatically design a building that is sited somewhere that does not actually exist. This is why the underlying ideas and principles were turned to when designing the building, rather than taking queues from climate or location.

Of course were the New American Suburb to actually be built, it would look much different in New Mexico than it would in Maine.

One of the final pieces of the New American Suburb that is most left to the imagination is how it would change and evolve over time. This thesis calls for side yard construction down the entire block in Gleamy Valley, building density between many different homes to take the block from a density of 3 units per acre to a density of 20 units per acre. Only one of these side yard buildings was designed in great detail, but this supports the idea of neighborhood based design, not master plan implementations.

It is up to the residence of Gleamy Valley to take this thesis idea and make it into their own, not some planner who has never been or lived their. They can build out program in their new buildable areas with help from experts and designers along the way, as needed.

The final design piece of the New American Suburb, the one that is left most to the imagination, the piece that is the least developed, are the long strip parks that have been created by moving the old suburban streets. Of course these spaces are lovely as parks, but they are expansive and frequent. As adjacent blocks learn from Gleamy Valley's success, they will undoubtably begin taking a similar approach to the building out of their neighborhoods. These vast areas of open land will eventually 179 | A New America

A New American Suburb be too tempting to resist. As population and density in the area increase, and it becomes a more and more desirable place to live, the residents will turn to the these open strips of land to continue building. Shops, offices, new apartments, parks, gyms, and so on will start to pop up in the parks.

Of course outdoor space is important, even in cities, but too much outdoor space begins to disconnect and distance neighbors from one another, and if a density of 30 units per acre is to one day be achieved in suburbia, the park strips will eventually be built on.

The New American Suburb has presented one way that the everyday, commonly seen American Suburb can be adapted and changed to increase density, increase diversity of usage types, and decrease reliance on cars. More importantly, it has shown that maybe American suburbs aren't exactly the American dream anymore, but this doesn't mean America should take the approach with them that it took with cities post World War II. If this country can learn from the mistakes of its past, and realize that all though the suburbs are breaking and dysfunctional, they can be fixed and adapted, it may have a chance at saving them.

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A New American Suburb

Notes

Introduction 1// Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere: the Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape. Simon & Schuster, 1993. pg. 9

The History of Homes 1// House & Home. Open indefinitely, National Building Museum, Washington DC 2// Leupen, Bernard, and Harald Mooij. Housing Design a Manual. NAi Publishers, 2011. pg. 18 3// Braham, William W. “Biotechniques: Remarks on the Intensity of Conditioning.” Performative Architecture, edited by Branko Kolarevic and Ali Malkawi, Spon Press, 2004, pp. 57–70. pg. 57

181 | Notes

A New American Suburb 4// Leupen, pg. 15 5// Leupen, pg. 29 6// House 7// House 8// House 9// House 10// House 11// House 12// Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere: the Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape. Simon & Schuster, 1993. pg. 162 13// House 14// House 15// Kunstler, pg. 155 16// Kunstler, pg. 156 17// Kunstler, pg. 156 18// Kunstler, pg. 159 19// Kunstler, pg. 159 20// Chakrabarti, Vishaan, and Norman Foster. A Country of Cities a Manifesto for an Urban America, edited by SHoP Architects, Metropolis Books, 2013. pg. 30 21// Hayden, Dolores, and Jim Wark. A Field Guide to Sprawl.

W.W. Norton, 2006. pg. 32 22// Making Room: Housing for a Changing America. 18 Nov. 2017 – 16 Sept. 2018, National Building Museum, Washington DC 23// Making 24// Chakrabarti, pg. 123 25// Chakrabarti, pgs. 44-45 26// Making 27// Making 28// Duany, Andres, et al. Suburban Nation. First ed., North Point Press, 2000. pg. 122 29// Duany, pg. 123 30// Making Notes | 182

A New American Suburb 31// Making 32// Dwyer, James. “The Century of Biology: Three Views.”

Springer, 9 July 2008, pp. 283–285., doi:10.1007/s11625-0080057-x. pg. 284

Locations of Homes 1// Duany, Andres, et al. Suburban Nation. First ed., North Point Press, 2000. pg. 135 2// Duany, pg. xi 3// Duany, pg. 15 4// Duany, pg. 15 5// Duany, pg. 15 6// Duany, pg. 16 7// Duany, pg. 16 8// Duany, pg. 17 9// Chakrabarti, Vishaan, and Norman Foster. A Country of Cities a Manifesto for an Urban America, edited by SHoP Architects, Metropolis Books, 2013. pg. 30 10// “The Truman Show (1998).” IMDb, 1990-2018 IMDb. com, Inc. Accessed 25 Mar. 2018, www.imdb.com/title/ tt0120382/?ref_=ttloc_loc_tt.

11// Johnson, Rick, et al. “The Seaside Plan.” The Seaside Research Portal, The University of Notre Dame and the School of Architecture Hesburgh Libraries, Accessed 18 Mar. 2018, seaside. library.nd.edu/essays/the-plan.

12// Chakrabarti, pg. 58 13// Chakrabarti, pg. 134 14// Chakrabarti, pg. 134 15// Duany, pg. 11 16// Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Vintage Books, 1992. pg. 436 17// Jacobs, pg. 432 183 | Notes

A New American Suburb 18// Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4, 1973, pp. 155– 169. pg. 155 19// Chakrabarti, pg. 31 20// House & Home. Open indefinitely, National Building Museum, Washington DC 21// Chakrabarti, pg. 168 22// Duany, pg. 7 23// Duany, pg. 8 24// Hayden, Dolores, and Jim Wark. A Field Guide to Sprawl.

W.W. Norton, 2006. pg. 52 25// Hayden, pg. 52 26// Hayden, pg. 20 27// Hayden, pg. 34 28// Duany, pgs. 5-7 29// Duany, pg. 5 30// Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere: the Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape. Simon & Schuster, 1993. pg. 168 31// Duany, pg. 76 32// Duany, pg. 77 33// Duany, pg. 6 34// Duany, pg. 6 35// Duany, pg. 6 36// Duany, pg. 7 37// Kunstler, pg. 135 38// Duany, pg. 33 39// Duany, pg.65 40// Duany, pg. 67 41// Hayden, pg. 32

Notes | 184

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Problems with Homes 1// Pinkwater, Daniel Manus. The Big Orange Splot. Paw Prints, 2008. pg. 30 2// Chakrabarti, Vishaan, and Norman Foster. A Country of Cities a Manifesto for an Urban America, edited by SHoP Architects, Metropolis Books, 2013. pgs. 44-45 3// Wagner, Kate. “McMansion Hell.” McMansion Hell, Tumblr, 2016, mcmansionhell.com/.

4// Wagner 5// Hayden, Dolores, and Jim Wark. A Field Guide to Sprawl. W.W. Norton, 2006. pg. 92 6// Hayden, pg. 78 7// Hayden, pg. 110 8// Leupen, Bernard, and Harald Mooij. Housing Design a Manual. NAi Publishers, 2011. pg. 23 9// Leupen, pg. 27 10// Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4, 1973, pp. 155– 169. pg. 163 11// Rittel, pg. 163 12// Duany, Andres, et al. Suburban Nation. First ed., North Point Press, 2000. pg. 116 13// Duany, pg. 117

Case Study Homes 1// Duany, Andres, et al. Suburban Nation. First ed., North Point Press, 2000. pg. 3 2// Wigley, Mark. Buckminster Fuller Inc. Architecture in the Age of Radio. Zurich, Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers, 2015. pg. 57 3// Hatch, Alden. Buckminster Fuller: At Home in the Universe.

New York, NY: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1974. pg. 104 185 | Notes

A New American Suburb 4// Fuller, R. Buckminster. 4D Time Lock. Albuquerque, NM: Lama Foundation, 1928, 1970. pg. 1 5// Krausse, Joachim, and Claude Lichtenstein, eds. Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller The Art of Design Science. Translated

by Steven Lindberg and Julia Thorson. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Muller, 1999. pg. 80 6// Krausse, pg. 88 7// Fuller, pg. 65 8// Hatch, pg. 105 9// Krausse, pg. 88 10// Krausse, pg. 132 11// Fuller, Richard Buckminster. Nine Chains to the Moon. Cape, 1973. pg. 348 12// Wigley, pg. 85 13// Hatch, pg. 172 14// Hatch, pg. 172 15// Hatch, pg. 172 16// Hatch, pg. 168 17// Hatch, pg. 173 18// Krausse, pg. 88 19// "Fuller's House." Fortune, April 1946, 166 . May 29, 2010.

Accessed November 26, 2017. http://www.fulltable.com/VTS/f/ fortune/bf/b.htm. pg. 172 20// Krausse, pgs. 242-243 21// Krausse, pgs. 244-245 22// Larson, C. Theodore. “Toward a Science of Housing.” The Scientific Monthly, vol. 65, no. 4, 1947, pp. 295–305. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/19225. pg. 301 23// Hatch, pg. 176 24// Krausse, pg. 246 25// Hatch, pg. 177 26// Krausse, pg. 246 27// Wigley, pg. 81

Notes | 186

A New American Suburb 28// Phillips, Stephen J. Elastic architecture: Frederick Kiesler and design research in the first age of robotic culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. pg. 219 29// Hatch, pg. 180 30// Fuller, pg. 1 31// Hatch, pg. 180 32// Fuller, pg. 8 33// Fuller, pg. 19 34// Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Vintage Books, 1992. pg. 440 35// “FORMOSA 1140.” LOHA: Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects, Accessed 22 Feb. 2018, loharchitects.com/work/formosa1140.

36// Joliet, Laure. “Formosa 1140: Density in LA.” Dwell, Dwell Life, Inc., 13 Mar. 2009, www.dwell.com/article/formosa-1140density-in-la-b68b40de.

37// Joliet 38// FORMOSA 39// FORMOSA 40// Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere: the Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape. Simon & Schuster, 1993. pg. 147 41// Chakrabarti, Vishaan, and Norman Foster. A Country of Cities a Manifesto for an Urban America, edited by SHoP Architects, Metropolis Books, 2013. pg. 155 42// Lewis, Paul, et al. “New Suburbanism.” LTL Architects Lewis.

Tsurumaki.Lewis, Accessed 15 Mar. 2018, ltlarchitects.com/newsuburbanism.

43// Lewis 44// Lewis

187 | Notes

A New American Suburb

A New American Suburb 1// Brennen, Bonnie and Margaret Duffy. "'If a Problem Cannot Be Solved, Enlarge It': An Ideological Critique of the 'Other' in Pearl Harbor and September 11 New York Times Coverage."

Journalism Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, Feb. 2003, p. 3. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=933 6766&site=ehost-live. pg. 9 2// Chakrabarti, Vishaan, and Norman Foster. A Country of Cities a Manifesto for an Urban America, edited by SHoP Architects, Metropolis Books, 2013. pg. 75 3// Chakrabarti, pg. 170 4// Chakrabarti, pg. 48

A New America 1// Braham, William W. “Biotechniques: Remarks on the Intensity of Conditioning.” Performative Architecture, edited by Branko Kolarevic and Ali Malkawi, Spon Press, 2004, pp. 57–70. pg. 62

All satellite images on dust jacket cover were taken from Google Earth Pro, version 7.1.8.3036 (32-bit) for Mac, on July 13, 2018.

The images show suburban developments in all 50 US states.

Notes | 188

Alaska

Alabama

Illinois

Idaho

Maryland

Maine

New Mexico

New Jersey

Tennessee

South Dakota

Hawaii

Georgia

Louisiana

New Hampshire

Nevada

South Carolina

Rhode Island

Wyoming

Wisconsin