Playing by the Rules: A Senior Thesis by Misha Semenov

Townhouse typology in Seaside. Source: Gorlin Architects

Playing by the Rules Quinta Monroy with resident expansions. Source: mfa.fi

Examining the Interactions of Rules, Built Form, and Social Behavior in American Residential Communities Misha Semenov Advisor: Stan Allen Second Reader: Alison Isenberg A Senior Thesis submitted to the School of Architecture of Princeton University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and certificate in Urban Studies This paper represents my own work in accordance with university regulations.

Rules THE SEASIDE CODE (2014) tYPe I

tYPe II & IIa

MIXeD USe

tYPe III

tYPe IV

tYPe V

MIXeD USe

reSIDeNtIAL

reSIDeNtIAL

24 ft.

URBAN CODE tYP

24 ft. min.

min.

25% of Bldg. Width (South Side) TYPE II A

PORCH

BALCONY DEPTH: avg. 6 ft. max.

PORCH DEPTH: 8 ft. min.

BALCONY DEPTH: 5 ft. max.

Región Metropolitana

PORCH

Manual de uso y Mantención de la vivienda

6 ft.

PARKING REQUIREMENT SATISFIED

PARKING REQUIREMENT SATISFIED

2 required

TYPE II

25 ft. reqd.

TYPE II A

22 ft. max.

The Seaside Code is enforced through property deeds; it conforms all construction to a set of “types” in an attempt to create a harmonious urban ensemble. Read more in Chapter 3.

Levittowners must comply with structural and behavioral rules written 2007 as covenants into their property deeds, meant to induce middle-class behavioral patterns. Read more in Chapter 1.

The poor slum dwellers who move into Chilean Social Housing receive this manual, which gives them useful tips for making their home rise in value. Read more in Chapter 4.

Alexander’s PREVI design is not a single plan but a set of rules that, with certain user inputs, are meant to generate a house design based on particular patterns. Read more in Chapter 2.

James Stirling’s flexible PREVI housing solution is meant to follow different expansion patterns depending on each family’s needs. Read more in Chapter 2.

Los Próceres incorporated the lessons learned at PREVI and other projects, including special spaces for future expansion, along with manuals, with its homes. Read more in Chapter 2.

Caja de Agua residents were legally required to expand their homes according to expansion plans prepared by the Junta de Vivienda. Read more in Chapter 2.

Rules at Village Homes, such as the fencing regulations depicted here, largely focus on creating a strong connection between residents and the natural environment. Read more in Chapter 3.

Elemental’s projects are all governed by joint property contracts that empower residents to police each other and follow the architect’s expansion rules. Read more in Chapter 4.

Nuclei

The Levittown Caja de Agua, LimaRanch home, shown here in a

homeowner’s manual, encodes social expectations and symbolic meanings while offering space for expansion. Read more in Chapter 1.

The Levittown Cape Cod, by virtue of being a balloon frame construction, was very easy to expand in a standardized way, as this ad for expansions shows. Read more in Chapter 1.

Here, the residents of Quinta Monroy play with a model of their homes at a home expansion workshop. Learn more about this customizable nucleus in Chapter 4.

Typical House Plan, in blue initial house

e design for incremental growth of this typology is based on a 3 by 3 meter odular plan. Each family received half a house of 32.18 sqm consisting of: chen, bathroom, common area and one room on the second floor with staircase. The planned expansion can add 48.56 sqm for a total area of .52 sqm. The houses were designed to build within structural constraints at help control their incremental growth. A reinforced concrete loadAldo Van Eyck’sisnucleus unit at Homes,each homes are passivelyThe heatedsecond aring wall was builtAt Village between house. floor made ofPREVI, designed to protect residents from their own selves, and lit with South-facing windows; homes face od beams supported by reinforced concrete columns and load-bearing toward gardens (right) while turning their backs included provisions to ensure good light and lls. This strategy helps guide the self-construction phase because it inlimits ventilation.

Learn more Chapter 2. to the street (left).

Learn more in Chapter 3. e structural growth.

Leon Krier’s drawings of Stirling’s courtyard-based PREVI unit show the eclectic resident-built extensions anticipated by the architect. Read more in Chapter 2.

2m

emental growth

At Casas Chubi in Santiago, residents were expected to complete a series of expansions upon occupying their homes, almost doubling the original nucleus’ size. Learn more in Chapter 4.

The Nucleus structure at Caja de Agua fails to suggest a coherent pattern of growth; it was expected that a housing authority would oversee the expansions. Learn more in Chapter 2.

While no nucleus was built at Seaside, the typological instructions for home construction encoded a basic starter shape for each home type. Learn more in Chapter 3.

Homes at Levittown feature a Thermopane picture window on the back and shoulder-high, privacy-ensuring windows on the front. Read more in Chapter 1.

Windows at Village Homes are designed to help achieve the community’s environmental goals, and no new construction may block the “solar rights” of South-facing windows. Read more in Chapter 3

By code, all windows at Seaside must be of a proportion 1:1.5 or greater. The enforcement of vertical windows helps the community foster walkability, create a stable urban fabric, and induce a very particular mode of vision. Read more in Chapter 3.

Christopher Alexander’s PREVI proposal was based on his anthropoligical study of Peruvians. All his home designs included Mirador windows, allowing Peruvian girls to engage in their “favorite” activity: street-watching from the safety of home. Learn more in Chapter 2.

Homes at Caja de Agua came with one-meter-tall windows, many of which were quickly switched out for different window designs; even if this modification was unanticipated, the block structure of the nucleus allowed openings to be easily adjusted. Read more in Chapter 2.

James Stirling’s PREVI home was built with precast concrete panels that featured his signature porthole windows and filleted doors. While ship windows seem out of place in a Peruvian neighborhood, they have been embraced by PREVI’s residents. Read more in Chapter 2

Homes at Casas Chubi in Santiago come with the original horizontal windows shown at left; the wood frame structure has allowed many-even most--residents to change the windows to more vertical ones.

Read more in Chapter 4.

Elemental’s Quinta Monroy project features stacked vertical windows that cannot be modified by contract; they are meant to act as a stable, regular feature to counterbalance the messiness of resident expansions, ensuring stable real estate values. Read more in Chapter 4.

Windows

Windows (at comparative scale)

2m

Caja de Agua

Casas Chubi

P

James Stirl

in

g

VI / RE

Seaside / Robert Stern

Village Homes

Levittown: back

Quinta Monroy

Levittown: front

Acknowledgments In more or less chronological order, here are the many people without whom this project would have been impossible.

A few days after I arrived for my first summer internship at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. in May of 2013, Andrés Duany and Lizz Plater-Zyberk invited me over for dinner. I left their home that night with a giant stack of “required readings” to pore over for the next few weeks of my stay in Miami. Little did I know that this was only the beginning of a vast educational operation. In the last two years, Lizz and Andrés have provided me with a rigorous training in architecture and urbanism that’s been an incredible complement to the official education I have received at Princeton; simply put, I wouldn’t be who I am today without their influence. And that influence extends to this thesis. It was one warm Miami night in the DPZ guesthouse, reading over a book by Charles Jencks that Andrés had given me, that I first discovered the existence of PREVI; in the office the next day, Andrés, as he often does when he wants to explain something terribly exciting, made everyone in the room stop working so he could explain the beauty of Alexander’s PREVI proposal. Between my conversations with Andrés and my inspirational visit to Seaside during the Seaside Prize ceremony in January of 2014, the ideas that would eventually coalesce into this thesis began to swirl in my head.

PREVI stayed on in the back of my mind the next school year, and it became the basis for a research project I undertook in Esther da Costa Meyer’s class on Globalization, Architecture, and the Environment. Esther’s courses teach her students to always see creative production as part of a larger social, economic, and environmental context; one leaves her engaging lectures frustrated by Architecture’s lack of engagement with social and environmental issues, and, at the same time, so very inspired and excited to use design to make a difference. That spring, with the invaluable help of Matthew Mulane, I wrote a short paper on PREVI and Elemental.

Then, with Esther’s support, I got a summer thesis research grant from the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and that’s when the larger project really began moving forward. I was lucky to be able to count on the help of Felipe Correa, who dedicated a lot of time to connecting me with architects in Lima and Santiago. In the process, Felipe became a great advisor and friend. Thanks to Michael Laffan for guiding me through the proposal-writing process.

In Peru, I’d like to send muchas gracias to Frederick Cooper, for providing a home for me in Lima, connecting me with so many incredible architects, and getting his wonderful chauffeur Carlos to take me on a tour of PREVI; to Marc Samaniego, for taking me along to visit several housing projects and becoming a great friend in the process; to Adolfo Cordova, for teaching me about the history of Peruvian architecture; to Eduardo Figari, for taking the time to explain his work to me; to Gustavo Riofrío, for chatting with me about interventions in barriadas; to Sharif Kahatt, for helping me to organize my trip to Lima; to Helen Gyger for her help navigating archives; to Ministry of Housing archivist Segundo Tiznado, for finding a way to let me access the Caja de Agua files; and to my wonderful hosts Francisco Nicolás, Diego Saco, Diego Rivas, and Gianfranco Botteri, for making me feel like part of the Lima family.

In Chile, an enormous thank you goes out to the folks at Elemental: Diego Torres Torriti for offering his thoughts on Elemental’s work; Rayna Razmilic, for helping organize visits to Elemental projects, and Fernando

Garcia-Huidobro, for offering to meet with me in Santiago; to Praxedes Campos for hosting me at Quinta Monroy; to Eugenio Simonetti, for an great tour of Lo Barnechea; to Rodrigo Perez de Arce, for helping to guide my project and offering great thoughts on the work of Elemental; to Maria José Castillo, for sharing her research on housing with me; to Cesar Vergara Muñoz, for detailed information on the Mujer de Esfuerzo project; to Ana Cristina Vargas, for the information on Torreones de la Reina; to Manuel Hernandez for hosting me in Valparaiso; to Francisco Narvaez, for giving me a home in Santiago; and to all the residents who so generously opened their doors and homes to me.

In Levittown, thank you to Levittown Public Library librarian Ann Glorioso and to Peggy Stein from the Levittown Historical society for granting me access to their archives.

Back at Princeton, I have been so lucky to have the guidance of the people who have been my greatest inspirations on campus. Stan Allen, you were my first Architecture professor freshman fall, and your course was a big part of the reason I chose this major and this career; it has been an honor to work with you on turning this thesis from an idea into a reality.

Alison Isenberg, I came to Princeton already hooked on urban history, but working with you over the last three years has really allowed me to take my historical research and analysis to another level. Thank you for believing in me and always pushing me to take my questions further. Lucia Allais, if it weren’t for you, this thesis would probably be far tamer. Thank you for giving me the courage to make bold and sweeping statements, generate polemics, and build unexpected arguments, as well as the tools for justifying them. After studying with you, I feel that I can finally read and even contribute to architectural theory. Thank you to Fabrizio Gallanti for giving me a solid grounding in the Latin American context and offering aesthetic guidance. To M. Christine Boyer, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, and Bruno Carvalho, thank you for meeting with me and offering constructive criticism.

A big shout-out to the intrepid graduate students Daria Ricchi and Justin Fowler for their feedback, and to Jeremy Rosenthal for copy-editing and providing a reaction from outside the discipline.

To the family of friends I have made here and to my fellow Architecture majors, I am so grateful for these last four years. Thanks to you all, Princeton is a place where I am constantly surrounded by learning and intellectual conversation. Thank you to my partner-in-crime, Kassandra Leiva, for staying up so many nights with me building models and writing theses, for always being there for me, for being the only person who I know will always understand and never judge me. I love you so much, and I can’t wait to see what the next thing we create together will be.

Most importantly, I am grateful for the support and love of my family, without whose hard work my Princeton education would not have been possible: to Bob Rintel, for always being there for me and helping me to navigate through any crisis; to Jenia Semyonov, for reminding me to find the fun in my work; to Andrey Semyonov, for inspiring an intellectual curiosity in me from an early age; to Stan and Ruth Rintel for supporting me in all my endeavors; and, finally, to my grandmothers, Lidiya Suzdaltseva and Galina Semenova, for all the ways in which you have cared for me and made me who I am today.

Thank You!

Contents Introduction: Incomplete Pedigrees

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1 Levittown: Living by Levitt’s Rules

21

2 Lima: The Game with Lost Rules

43

3 Seaside: Typology as Nucleus

73

4 Chile: The House as Investment Formula

101

Conclusion: The Rule Writers

123

Endnotes

130

Appendix: Pullout Project Grids

137

Figures are referenced throughout according to the number that appears below as well as in the corresponding sidebar descriptions.

Key images for each project have been placed into special grids that make it easier to compare them. These are all found in the appendix.

As you read each chapter, you may find it useful to consult these grids.

Images in them have an “A” prefix in front (ie, A17).

“One must hold not a parade but a game. To play a game is to take into account precisely the unexpected. Its rules are based on the idea that ever-changing variety is possible, that the unexpected will take place, and that surprises will manifest themselves [‌] we are not concerned in the first place with designing a town, but with creating rules for a game designed to make creativity possible.â€?

-John Habraken, Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing1

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Introduction

Incomplete Pedigrees

At first glance, it would seem difficult to find two architectural and urban schemes as distinct as Quinta Monroy and Seaside. One, a social housing project meant to replace a slum in a small coastal desert town, is an austere, minimal concrete block construction of alternating rectangular masses, interspersed with voids meant to be filled in by the unpredictable informal wood frame expansions of its residents. The other, a vacation town on the Florida panhandle, is a colorful, postcard-perfect collection of gable-roofed homes with wood siding and front porches, all designed and built according to a set of specific architectural guidelines.

One sports the look of an iconic avant-garde project; the other appears steeped in nostalgia and history. Yet a look at these two projects’ genealogies—both the official lineages expounded by the designers themselves and the implicit historical debts of the two projects, missing from official accounts—points to a very different, much richer, and more interconnected story.

Alejandro Aravena, the architect behind Quinta Monroy, goes out of his way to emphasize the distinguished modernist pedigree of Elemental, his social housing-focused firm: “There have been two important moments in the history of social housing: the first, in 1927 in Germany, when the best architects of the time got together and built a model neighborhood near Stuttgart. The second in the seventies in Peru, when the most important architects of the moment for the last time got together and built a model neighborhood outside of Lima. Elemental wants to write the third chapter of this story and bring the best architects in the world back to build social housing.”2 Aravena’s reference to Weissenhof immediately connects Elemental back to the legendary figures of Mies van der Rohe and his star-studded cast of architects, who built twenty-one prototypes for workers’ housing outside of Stuttgart in one of the first major collaborations of the modernist movement; many went on to become major members of CIAM. The 1970 PREVI (Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda) project in Lima, Peru, meanwhile, was a UN-organized international housing competition based on a Team X reaction to CIAM’s planning and architectural doctrine, which culminated in the construction of a low rise, high density neighborhood of homes by the likes of Christopher Alexander and Aldo Van Eyck. Aravena’s quip implies a linear progression: modernism’s housing efforts begin at Weissenhof with early prototypes for affordable homes; PREVI represents an adaptation of this design aesthetic by Team X members; Elemental is the chance for twenty-first-century architects to reestablish the relevance of modernism to public housing projects (this time, unlike at PREVI and Weissenhof, without the all-white paint job). Both these precedents, like Elemental, were attempts to define a larger role for high architecture in mass housing, and both, as Elemental aspires to do, involved many important international designers of the time, but Aravena’s choice is nonetheless not an immediately obvious one.

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1 - Weissenhof Housing Estate, Stuttgart, 1927. Though the project, featuring the work of over a dozen famous architects, had meant to demonstrate prototypes for modernist low-cost housing, the neighborhood was never actually affordable and the unique homes were not . Unlike later American projects, Weissenhof featured multifamily buildings, some of which can be seen in this image.

Source: Phaidon 2 - Terraced homes by J.P. Oud. at Weissenhof.

Source: Wikipedia 3 - the PREVI Housing Estate, Lima, Peru, appears in a 1970s photo from Peter Land’s archive. As at Weissenhof, the houses have been painted white. This uniform look would not last for long, as residents would soon take charge. Source: Peter Land 4 - Kikutake, Maki, and Kurokawa’s housing at PREVI; as at the later Elemental, one-story structures alternate with taller volumes, providing room for future growth. The usual barriada bricks are painted white. Source: Peter Land 5 - Elemental’s Quinta Monroy Housing Estate, which even in its unoccupied state has a different aesthetic from its precedents, more industrial-looking raw concrete replacing the modernist look of white stucco. At left is a picture after completion in 2004; at right is the project with resident expansions a year and a half later. Source: Elemental

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Aravena’s use of historic-looking black-and-white photographs to document the process of planning Quinta Monroy; the dramatic shots of the project as built, with its harsh geometry reminiscent of Dutch Modern or Russian Constructivism; Aravena’s boasting of his project’s inclusion in Frampton’s Modern Architecture, A Critical History in his list of credentials; it may all be understandable in light of what critic Felipe Hernandez calls the constant search for “inclusion into the distinctly singular history of architecture” written by Western scholars, seemingly the only way “buildings produced in Latin America […] appear to have any historical value,”3 but it points to a larger desire, apparent in Aravena’s publicity, to tie his work to the modernist project. Consistent with what David Harvey calls modernism’s “persistent habit of privileging spatial forms over social processes,”4 Elemental’s built forms are presented as singlehandedly encoding the instructions for residents’ expansions of and interactions with their homes; specifically, Aravena claims that he has invented a form that can guarantee the twofold appreciation of the homes’ real estate values, allowing the project to “act like an investment.” As Elemental architect Diego Torres explains, “we work with forms, not with codes.”5 At Quinta Monroy, Aravena’s team claims, the built form, meant, like modernist housing, to be purely functional and mass-produced, is the architect’s primary product, containing within itself the rules that will help the project achieve its social and economic aims.

The architects and planners behind Seaside, Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, offer a very different story. Writing in Harvard Design Magazine in 2006, Duany explained the linear progression leading to Seaside and the New Urbanism as follows: the original CIAM “had discarded urbanism.” Then, Colin Rowe “rediscovered spatial definition,” Team X “reconstitute[d] the street network,” Aldo Rossi “restore[d] respectability to typology,” and Leon Krier “propose[d] the traditional city again,” until finally, “an organized group of young Americans … develop[ed] the techniques to project urbanism anew, massively, as required by the circumstances of modernity. They [did] what these gentlemen [CIAM] might have done in their youth had they been thinking clearly and not been so embittered by the mess of the First World War.”6 Seaside, Duany claims, is a reaction against the anti-urban, anti-typological bias of the direction heroically individualistic, avant-garde modernism took in actuality—proponents of the Seaside model constantly refer to its connected, pedestrian streets, typological consistency, and historical references as the antithesis of modernism—but it is also what modernism might have led to; in Duany’s words, New Urbanism encapsulates “CIAM-vintage reformist intentions rather than postmodern expressive ones.”7 Had the architects of the Weissenhof estate been “thinking clearly,” they would have developed the architectural tools to project urbanism on a scale commensurate with what Duany quoting Giedion, calls “modernity’s true definition: ‘the problem of large numbers.’”8 That tool, at Seaside, is not pure form but rules. In fact, Duany and Plater-Zyberk did not design a single house in Seaside; instead, they wrote a series of typological rules, based on the theories articulated by Aldo Rossi, the urban experiments of Team X, and the systematic patterns Christopher Alexander had developed at PREVI, that allowed them to systematically generate an entire town. Rather than design and build repetitive forms as Aravena had, Duany and Plater-Zyberk picked a set of essential elements—porches, gable roofs, vertical windows—and then projected these over the Seaside grid as rules. At the same time, the ambition and formal rigidity of the code also suggest that DPZ’s pedigree may be heavier on the side of 15

6 - Duany’s essay on New Urbanism, featured in the book Visions of Seaside, prominently features a picture of CIAM members in its section of precedents; there is a clear intention here to build up a historical link to CIAM, as some of the text reproduced here indicates.

Source: Visions of Seaside 7 - Aldo Rossi is a significant and often-quoted precendent for the New Urbanists. Shown here is one of his paintings, which reveals a fascination with typological elements of cities, here plucked out of their context to create a new composition. Source: designboom 8 - In reality, although it depicts itself as a counterreaction to modernism, DPZ’s systematic approach is firmly rooted in it; shown here is an important diagram for Andrés Duany, Le Corbusier’s typological analysis of trees in Chandigarh. Source: Ouevre Complete 9 - Views of Seaside, Florida show the overall typological homogeneity achieved by the code. Sources: Garrett Realty and Buildipedia

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modernism than a cursory analysis suggests. For the architects of Seaside, an Urban Code that guarantees urban cohesion, walkability, and community, rather than a built form, is the ultimate architectural product, coding being, in Duany’s words, “the most abstract, rigorous and intellectually refined practice available to a designer.”9 In their use of rules, whether written in law or encoded in structure, both these projects represent radical departures from the early CIAM modernism they reference. In his Towards an Architecture, Le Corbusier proposed that a “Manual of the Dwelling” be “distributed to mothers of families,” comprised of a long list of demands these families should make of their architects: “Demand a bathroom looking south” for sunbaths; “one really large living room” for simplicity, and “bare walls” with “built-in fittings” in all rooms.10 While these rules are slightly more specific to residents than Le Corbusier’s general five points for architects, they are not meant to be executed by them; instead, the implementation these rules is up to the modernist architect, a Corbu or Mies of whom the family must “demand” this new machine aesthetic in one complete, final house project, like the homes Le Corbusier himself designed at Weissenhof and Fruges.11 What Corbu didn’t quite prepare for, however, was that the residents would reshape the architecture according to their own rules, that, once out of the control of the architect, they would defy the great form-giver’s principles. Indeed, as ribbon windows were turned into vertical windows, spaces between piloti filled in to make conventional ground floors, and flat roof gardens turned into French gable roofs—a process of modification well-documented in Boudon’s now-famous post-occupancy study—Le Corbusier’s design principles were seriously undermined (Figures 11, 12). “It is always life that is right and the architect who is wrong,” he said of the project, a statement taken by many as an admission of failure.12 Both Seaside and Quinta Monroy, as well as their shared precedent of the Team X-influenced PREVI, are fundamentally opposed to the idea of a complete and final house project in the vein of Pessac, because both take as their starting point the idea of a user-modifiable, user-generated built environment; further expansions are not a “failure” but a foreseen process. Elemental claims to be able to regulate this growth through an initial form; Seaside’s architects believe in the power of written codes to govern the town’s growth. Given this crucial distinction, why are these projects’ designers interested in constructing linear links to modernism?

Beginning their origin stories with modernism, whether in the guise of CIAM or Weissenhof, is an easy way for these architects to keep their work grounded in architectural history; moreover, it serves to make the very idea of flexible, user-generated expansion governed by rules seem like the invention of a heroic avant-garde architect; it legitimizes these architects within the discourse of twentieth-century Euro-centric modernism.

It is what allows Aravena to go to the Biennale and present the idea of a low-cost house designed to appreciate in value as if he invented it as his own unique adaptation of Weissenhof and PREVI. It is certainly true that both projects owe much to CIAM and Team X, but there is another precedent that is just as significant and largely omitted from the incomplete pedigrees that stay in the realm of high architecture: As collections of owner-occupied, individual dwellings—a very American homeownership model that differs from its European parallels—bound by regulating rules with specific architectural instructions, these projects are fundamentally indebted to the North American model of a residential neighborhood governed by codes, covenants, and deeds meant to protect real estate values and maintain social stability. This model, first developed in the nineteenth century in the upper-class suburbs 17

10 - Le Corbusier’s Fruges Housing at Pessac, as built. Corbu’s main principles of roof gardens, piloti, and ribbon windows are all applied here. Source: Colquhoun, Rules 11 - The now-classic image of Le Corbusier’s Fruges Housing Estate modified by its inhabitants was made famous by Boudon’s post-occupancy study Lived-In Architecture.

Source: laciudadviva.org 12 - Modifications to Le Corbusier’s L’Ege Estate, from Charles Moore’s The Place of Houses. Homes that once followed Le Corbusier’s principles have been totally transformed with vernacular features.

of North America, found its application to mass-produced housing in the postwar Levittown suburbs, where an expandable basic unit—the “nucleus”—built with standardized parts came with strict expansion and behavioral regulations meant to encode a particular kind of community and citizenship. The control mechanisms at play in Levittown are critical to the conception of Seaside and Quinta Monroy, as well as early Peruvian experiments in housing. Seaside’s strict rules could not function without binding property deeds and an accompanying enforcement structure, while the success of Aravena’s Quinta Monroy project, despite his emphasis on form alone, relies on the expansion regulations placed into its legally-binding “Shared Property Contract,” part of its status as a special type of Social Condominium.

This pairing of legal and social systems with built form gives Levittown, Seaside, and Quinta Monroy an additional regulatory power that Le Corbusier’s housing lacked. The minimal, mass-produced homes in projects like Pessac, by channeling the machine aesthetic and avoiding armoires, pitch roofs, and sash windows, were meant, in his words, to induce physical health and “moral sentiment,”13 leading to a new “state of mind,”14 but this attempt at social engineering was undermined by the unforeseen resident modifications. Following the model set by Levittown, however, Seaside, Elemental, and, to some extent, PREVI all encode social and behavioral expectations in a much more powerful way. As Clare Cooper writes in her study The House as Symbol of Self, the private home is a psychologically powerful symbol that, for most owners, is closely tied with self-identity and expression.15 By implication, then, rules that govern the user-initiated expansion of a private home also shape the user (who is, in many cases, also the builder) himself, into what each project defines as the ideal citizen, and rules affecting a group of homes also color the interactions between their occupants. At Levittown, the structure and rules interact to induce middle-class behavior and social conformity, growing a new homeowning class as a bulwark against the spread of Communism.

Rules in the 1960s PREVI homes, encoded both in structure and in special “expansion manuals” meant to be given to residents, enforce paternalistic visions of culture and progress. At Seaside, the rules’ stated purpose is to manufacture a walkable community that encourages neighborly interactions, restoring the sociability of a traditional neighborhood. At Quinta Monroy, the rule is a social and economic investment equation, and the residents, former illegal squatters, are encouraged to take advantage of this opportunity to participate in a legal system, making sure their additions, as investments, contribute to the economic appreciation of the complex. The resulting project is far more than the built form itself: it is an open legal and structural system of growth that also shapes its users into a particular kind of law-abiding citizen; each project assumes, manufactures, and maintains a particular kind of social cohesion. And, just like its North American suburban precedents, each system also works to ensure a steady rise in real estate values. Rules, as projections of future construction overlaid on an existing “nucleus,” or, in some cases, simply on a plot of land, become a powerful form of architecture in their own right, as much a part of an architect’s deliverables as the home itself.

The object of this study is to hold up a critical lens to the interaction between built form, guiding rules, and the behavior of residents in these significant housing projects in the Americas, allowing for the reconstruction of an alternative pedigree plastered over by the modernist discourse. This approach allows us to see past the stylistic stigmas of each project, analyzing them on the same level as open, user-modifiable systems with rules. Particular attention is paid to the role of larger political and economic frameworks in shaping these systems and their outcomes.

The first chapter begins a thorough investigation of the mechanisms at

play in Levittown, setting up the development as both a foil and a launching point for the projects that follow and using it to develop an analytical toolkit. To aid in the creation of this comparative strategy, specific architectural and urban design features of each project serve as case studies throughout: the basic nucleus, its windows, structural walls, and yards.

How are these elements controlled, and how do they, in turn, control the inhabitants of these projects? The second chapter turns to Peru, where similar principles and American funds were used to build housing estates that proposed the formalization of slums. In particular, it examines PREVI, the international housing competition with user-expandable homes that were “not the end but the beginning,”16 as a significant precedent and case study for both Seaside and Quinta Monroy. The third chapter takes apart the Seaside code, arguing that despite being entirely rule-based, Seaside does have an implied “nucleus.” It also looks at an application of similar principles in the Village Homes eco-development. The final chapter then investigates how rule-based design has been applied under Chile’s new user-expandable housing program, culminating in a close reading of Quinta Monroy. In the process, it becomes apparent that the boundary line between rules and form is not as clear cut as Aravena or Duany’s comments would make it out to be, and that both these projects, in their own ways, represent variations on the Levittown model. By questioning each project’s social agenda and analyzing its physical form architecturally—as planned and following occupancy—this study attempts to establish a firmer basis for the broader and more effective use of rules by architects, whether in low-income housing or high-end development, whether encoded in structure, custom, or law, adding a twist to the idea of environmental determinism by defining architectural production as more than just a built form.

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13 - Wendy Schuman, “An Outbreak of Diversity.” The New York Times,. October 3, 1976.

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Living by Levitt’s Rules

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The pioneering Levittown system was an incredible feat of economic, social, and structural engineering. Within the span of four years, developer Bill Levitt, along with his father Abraham and brother-architect Alfred, employed a mass-production system whose efficiency Le Corbusier could only dream of to cheaply construct 17,447 nearly identical homes for World War II veterans, largely urban apartment dwellers of modest incomes, on former potato fields on Long Island. Despite early predictions that it would devolve into a slum or a monotonous wasteland, several decades later, the development had transformed into what Will Levitt would call an “unrecognizable” and “beautiful […] collection of very distinctly individualistic homes,”17 property values had sustained a steady increase, and the residents themselves had become solidly middle-class, homeowning, lawn-mowing suburbanites. The Long Island suburb—along with two later Levittowns and countless imitations to follow—became a wildly successful and influential test case that served as the basis for suburban communities around the country and the world, including several future Levittowns.

A big reason behind the success of Levitt’s operation certainly has to do with the postwar government policies meant to encourage suburbanization on a broad scale, as government-backed mortgages made homeownership accessible to a much broader range of income groups.

Fearful of the threat a nuclear attack posed to the dense cities from which Levittown’s residents hailed, the federal government heavily subsidized freeways and roads, while restrictions on FHA loans that favored detached, single-family residences in low-density suburban communities made Levittown a feasible proposition.18 A significant part of the community’s success, however, is due to its strategic assimilation of the rules and patterns found in wealthy suburban communities. The Levitts had started out building upper middle-class suburbs of Tudor-style homes in park-like settings that offered “swank at low cost,”19 and got the chance to hone their mass-production skills in several wartime housing commissions. By the time they built Levittown, they were recognized as industry leaders in “providing amenities and restrictive covenants—all traditionally associated with upper-middle-class residential developments—to the mass market.”20 The kinds of covenants and deed restrictions the Levitts employed have played an important role in the history of the American residential suburb from its very inception, with developers using restrictions on lot sizes, setbacks, heights, stylistic features, and the race of occupants to protect real estate values and prevent residents from finding themselves, in the words of some realtors, “between unpainted, one-room shacks, and the most undesirable neighbors.”21 From Riverside, Illinois, to Radburn, New Jersey, where deed restrictions preserve the original homes’ volumes by allowing expansions only over existing porches and garages,22 America’s most famous suburbs have usually come along with sets of rules, and the strongest justification for these rules has usually been economic, based on the model of the individually owned home as a capital investment. By the 1930s, deed restrictions were being advocated by the national government, with the 1931 President’s Conference for the Design of Residential Neighborhoods report suggesting that “stability of investment in a home is best assured when the subdivision is a community or neighborhood unit, which is amply protected by deed restrictions.”23 Levitt’s big contribution was to show that these investment mechanisms could be just as effective when applied to cheap, mass-produced housing. In producing a community for the masses, Bill Levitt was proposing a suburban alternative to public housing, boasting that “a small home can be so well designed, nicely landscaped and soundly built that people of low income will not want to turn to public housing projects.”24 Levittown was to be “a low income community, complete in every phase,” a

“dream” that was, thanks to the Levitts’ efficiency, actually achievable for the first time.25 Levittowners were introduced to the regulations that governed their nicely landscaped and soundly built homes through “Homeowners Manual” booklets distributed to new residents (Figure 14). For example, a Levittown, PA Manual, prepared by Levitt & Sons “in order that you may enjoy your house” and “better understand […] your responsibilities,” explicitly tied these rules to an economic incentive: “every good community has restrictions that will insure its continued maintenance.

As a result property values increase and greater enjoyment results to all homeowners.”26 Levittown, NY’s rules, introduced through the booklet “Our Town,” implored residents to be “good neighbors” and “wise citizens” by following “certain restrictions […] written into the deeds for our mutual benefit.”27 Going far beyond the expansion rules mandating that additional carports, garages, and rooms be “similar in architecture, color, and material to the dwelling,” not projecting in front of the original house and maintaining specific side and back yard dimensions, the restrictions listed in the manuals covered even small aspects of day-to-day life. Levittowners were required by covenant to mow their lawns once a week, to keep trash cans out of sight, dry their laundry in the backs of their homes, only on approved revolving dryer stands that had to be removed for weekends or holidays, and, until racial covenants were struck down in 1949, to refrain from allowing non-Caucasians to use the homes.28 Levitt was known to come around the neighborhood enforcing these rules— and cutting unmowed lawns at the owner’s expense! On the economic level, the rules were a hit, as evidenced by the section of the 1957 edition of the “Our Town” booklet titled “property values have soared,” which describes the “ingenuity and originality” of the rule-abiding Levittowner, “still on his way up,” had shown in improving their homes.29 Beyond ensuring the growth of property values, however, what these ostensibly aesthetic and architectural rules amount to is actually a subtle form of social engineering. As Jenni Buhr writes, “In Levittown, [deed restrictions] served the purpose of training working class urbanites to be middle class suburbanites.”30 By eliminating what Diane Harris calls “the sure signals of lower-class and nonwhite living on residential exteriors”—more than one car parked on lawn, unkempt yards, clothes lines, unsightly trash cans—a physical environment was created that fostered a middle class identity.31 Meanwhile, restrictions on laundry drying on weekends and holidays all but ensured that wives stayed at home.32 Perhaps the biggest emphasis of the rule books was horticultural, with ten pages of the “Homeowners Manual” dedicated to proper care of the trees and lawns carefully curated by Abraham Levitt in his quest to build a garden city, an curious fact given that Levittowners were by and large former urban dwellers. This suburban emphasis on vegetation is discussed at length in the yard section below. Levitt’s rules were particularly effective because they were presented less as restrictions and more as the natural outgrowths of the residents’ common middle-class values. The Our Town manual, prepared by the Homeowners Association, an institution increasingly common in FHA-sponsored developments of the time and the guardian of Levitt’s restrictions, explains that Levittown has been “carefully landscaped” and “planned as a garden community,” with its setbacks, curved streets, “park-type lights,” and “satisfactory lawns […]

That, however, is as far as the builder can go and the rest is up to you. To make the community what it should be, you must have pride in ownership and consideration for your neighbors.” If the values of “pride in ownership” and “consideration” are adopted, then the covenants become so natural that they are almost unnecessary: “certain restrictions are written into the deeds for our mutual benefit. If, however, the owners have proper pride and neighborly consideration these restrictions will need no enforcement.”33 What is inherently implied is that the physical environment 23

14 - The Levittown, PA Homeowner’s Guide came with each new home and featured many details. It was writen in a pleasant conversational tone: “Now let us start at the front door and walk through your new home...” Ten pages of the manual were dedicated specifically to gardening and landscaping. Source: LevittownRelics

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of curving streets, green lawns, and carefully regulated houses can be naturally maintained through the mass adoption of shared values. The code was still important to keep, however; when Levitt’s original covenants, by then referred to as the “Magna Charta of Levittown,” began to expire, the LPOA fiercely and successfully campaigned to get them permanently written into the town’s zoning code.34 The shared values induced by the community’s rules and forms were very intentionally anti-Communist. Indeed, historian Barbara Kelly argues that one of Levitt’s big successes was that “any criticism of Mr. Levitt or his ways” became “tantamount to an attack on the American way of life.” Residents who complained about the community’s official name change to Levittown, or expressed concerns about the restrictive covenants, were insinuated in editorials in local papers—both of which were controlled by Levitt—to be Communists or supporters of the Russians.35 McCarthy himself paid a visit to Levitt’s community and received a personal tour.36 In claiming that “no man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist” because “he has too much to do,” Levitt bought into what Kelly calls a “20th century form of environmental determinism,”37 expressed by many politicians at the time in statements such as “socialism and communism do not take root in the ranks of those who have their feet firmly embedded in the soil of America through home ownership.”38 And indeed, busy following the landscaping rules, finishing his attic, and paying off a mortgage, Levitt’s veteran homeowner was perhaps too busy for Communist activity.

The imagery built into the “nucleus” homes at Levittown very explicitly reinforced the connection between these middle-class, anti-Communist “shared values” and physical form. The Levittown house designs combined mass-production with carefully curated symbolic elements of bourgeois life and high design that helped to project the development’s social ambitions. What Alfred Levitt called “the most efficient house ever developed in America,”39 the economical and deliberately patriotically nostalgic Cape Cod design, built at Levittown from 1947 to 1949, had become a popular typology during the depression.40 The Levitts’ minimal version came with four rooms: a kitchen and living room in front, two bedrooms in the back, and a bathroom tucked behind the kitchen. The central staircase led to an unfinished attic space. Despite its simplicity, the house was charged with meaning: chamber candle motifs carved into the stairrail, the split rail fence at the side of the house (despite a general prohibition on fences), vestigial shutters, a winding access path, and exposed ceiling beams all spoke to the desire to conjure up an image of a rustic colonial past and to reinforce the inhabitants’ identity as pioneers colonizing the potato fields.41 In 1949, in response to criticism of the monotonous and overly historicizing Capes, Alfred went back to the drawing board, soon producing a new house model, the Ranch, which, while still a two-story box, adopted more “modern” elements, with asymmetrical windows and plainer ornamentation.42 While its plan was simply a ninety-degree rotation of the Cape Cod, with the living room, now complete with a picture window, facing the back of the house, the Ranch included new features like a central two-way fireplace, an element that, in a house centrally heated with in-floor copper tubing, was more than anything a symbolic nod to the American notion of a central hearth, as well as, in Alfred Levitt’s words, an homage to Frank Lloyd Wright.43 Both the Ranch and Cape Cod came in several models, the differences between which were entirely cosmetic façade treatments, and the homes were slightly staggered on each plot, creating the illusion of variety and “customization” from the outset when, in fact, all homes were identical on the inside and back.By offering models with different patterns of fenestration, and curving unpredictable winding lanes and cul de sacs over an entirely flat 25

15 - Plans and elevations of the Levittown Cape Cod and early Ranch homes. Source: Newsday 16 - The four Levittown Ranch models with carports, as advertised in newspapers. Source: State Museum of Pennsylvania 17 - Three of the Levitt Cape Cod models; note the emphasis on “authentic” Cape Cod architecture and the evocative model names.

Source: glogster

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topography, the Levitts made their mass-produced boxes and their surrounding landscape seem unique.

One of the architectural features that corresponded perfectly with the implied pairing of values and physical form was the Levittown window. As the interface between the public and private realms, windows can encode expectations of privacy, surveillance, and conspicuous display, and reveal a lot about the relationship between the interior and exterior of a home, a division that, especially in the postwar period, was strongly associated with the gender divide, with women encouraged to stay at home and tend to the domestic realm. The size, height, and transparency of a window thus corresponded not just with to the willingness of a home’s inhabitants to open up their lives to passerby, but also with the magnitude of the perceived social division between the female and male realms. Although not specifically regulated by the restrictive covenants, the windows used in the Levittown homes were no mere accident and established a persistent pattern. While windows on the Cape Cods were all similar traditional vertical windows, it is in the revised Ranch home model that fenestration begins to play an important role within the larger social framework of the project. The front of the house, the public side, apart from the taller kitchen window found in some models (in this sense, windows at Levittown also became a marker of identity, as the arrangement of fenestration, always asymmetrical, was a defining feature of each Ranch “model”), has “shoulder-high” horizontal windows, which serve to admit light but exclude a direct visual connection between the street and the home. As Diane Harris explains, these windows were part of a larger “postwar privacy discourse:” “more than almost any other housing element, residential privacy,” in stark contrast to crowded inner-city dwellings, “signaled a white, middle-class identity.” The shoulder-height windows, which served to exclude outsiders, were thus “a small but very important detail, especially in a neighborhood filled with houses that looked very much alike and in which privacy served as an essential aspect for identity formation.”44 Levittown was certainly not the only place such privacy-centered windows were used; for example, a 1956 catalog of “Select Homes” from the Horine Lumber Company advertised a house model by boasting that its “shoulder high windows at the front of the garden view living room achieve the privacy so often desired.”45 (Figure 18) The privacy discourse was ubiquitous in home design at the time; the January 1950 edition Home Beautiful had an entire section dedicated to privacy. “The very raison d’etre of the separate house is to get away from the living habits and cooking smells and inquisitive eyes of other people,” reads Joseph E. Howland’s introductory article, “if your neighbors can observe what you are serving on your terrace, your home is not really your castle.”46 Other articles explained how to “make the neighbors disappear”47 and praised the replacement of a porch on a historic home with a walled-off garden that blocked off outside views (Figure 19).48 Because fences were not allowed in Levittown, the use of shoulder-high windows for privacy was a doubly important—and persistent—trend. Indeed, many residents continued to use shoulder-height windows on the front façade even as they expanded their homes upward (Figure 21). Expansions with shoulder height windows are more common on the Ranch homes than on the Cape Cods, suggesting that the pattern set by the initial nucleus has an effect on later fenestration choices.

The back of the Ranch homes, meanwhile, featured a window that was all the rage at the time: the famous 8x16 Thermopane “picture window,” affording an expansive view toward the backyard. Thermopane, a generic name for a window with two sheets of glass, had been invented 27

18 - An advertisement from the 1956 Horine Lumber Company catalog flaunts built-in privacy features. Note that the living room here, just as in the Levittown ranch, has a “garden view” on one side and shoulder high windows on the street side. Source: Project Gutenberg 19 - A House Beautiful article praises the remodel of a historic twin home: the porch has been completely screened off by a brick wall to create a private garden instead of a publicly visible space. Compare this attitude toward privacy and the public realm with that of Seaside’s designers (Chapter 3). Source: House Beautiful, January 1950 20 - Seeing the picture window as a danger to privacy, the magazine offers suggestions such as fences and hedges. Source: House Beautiful, January 1950 21 - A tour through the neighborhood reveals that shoulder-height windows have been used on many of the expansions. Source: Google street view.

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pyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

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by the American C.D. Haven in 1930, but it was not until after World War II that the manufacturer that obtained the patent, the Libby Owens Ford Glass Company, was able to ramp up production of larger sheets.49 The window’s higher insulation properties allowed glazed areas to be much larger, enabling its use as a floor-to-ceiling picture window. As he had done with so many other aspects of his development, Levitt, through the sheer scale of his operation, was able to bring this relatively luxury item into the reach of his lower middle class residents. The very idea of a horizontal picture window suggested the presence of an immersive landscape outside, encouraging the kind of contemplative gaze promoted by Le Corbusier and his ribbon windows. As House Beautiful explained, “a picture window is supposed to bring in a view. In no man’s language is the street considered a view. So-o-o-o-o, if you do need more light on the street side of the house, don’t give up your privacy to get it.”50 At Levittown, the interconnected backyards of the homes were meant to provide that “view,” but in reality, with backyard fences prohibited and lots fairly shallow, the backward-facing picture windows often faced identical picture windows across the green, making the “picture,” as Barbara Kelly points out, more often than not that of “the interior of the house,” turned a “stage” of sorts.51 This is evidenced by a photograph from a Newsday article documenting the Levittown life of the Utt family, a shot of the Utts and their neighbors taken through the picture window from outside (Figure 22).52 The picture window in Levittown, regardless of its actual privacy, made a strong social statement. As historian Peter Hales writes, “Levitt had come up with the embodiment of suburban living ideals: the house closed itself off from the street, and turned instead back toward the family “garden” and, beyond it, the commons.

This was a vision of a house that could be appropriate to the conditions of suburban life, in which work (in the city) was sequestered from life, leisure, nurturance, in the home.”53 The picture window represented a division between street and backyard, public and private that reflected the importance placed on domesticity. It was, as art historian Neil Levine writes, “a direct outcome of the ‘death of the street.’”54 Picture windows turned the primary view of a home to the backyard or fenced front yard; combined with the shoulder-high windows, the system of fenestration discouraged curious pedestrians from using the street while setting the street apart from a private interior landscape.

Today, with fences no longer prohibited, this division is even more true, each house’s “private space” and picture window totally visually inaccessible from the street.

The mass-produced, standardized windows were only one of the many home components that the Levitts were able to manufacture in bulk, resulting in an efficient system for construction and expansion.

The reason the Levitts were able to produce such quantities of cheap homes was their refinement of a building method that already defined the American homebuilding industry. Developed in the first half of the 1800s in Chicago, the balloon frame, in the words of Kenneth Jackson, is “as unique to the United States as the idea of low density suburbs itself.”55 By the late 1800s, lumber mills around the country were producing not only the standardized 2x4 studs and machine nails required for balloon construction, but even entire house kits complete with windows and doors, meant to be easily assembled onsite by carpenters.56 At Levittown, this standardization was taken another step further. Bill Levitt purchased his own California lumber mill and himself manufactured most of the homes’ components, including windows, doors, and appliances. The onsite assembly process was incredibly efficient: once a concrete slab was poured (basements were eliminated in the Levittown homes, a move that had 29

22 - A Newsday article on the Utt family of Levittown features a perfectly staged view through the picture window. Source: Beryt Howell, “The Utts of Levittown,” Newsday 8 Oct. 1949, M2.

23 - A view of life in the Levittown backyards showing the picture window, several of its panes opened to the warm weather. Note how much of the facade is taken up by the window.

Source: Peter Hales, Levittown: Documents of an Ideal Suburb 24 - A House Beautiful article warns against the privacy issues of picture windows, imploring its readers to “use picture windows sensibly.” Source: House Beautiful, January 1950 25 - Prefabricated components loaded onto the concrete slab foundation at the construction site for a Levittown home. Source: Peter Hales, Levittown: Documents of an Ideal Suburb

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required changes to the local building code), prefabricated components were dumped onsite, arranged along a 4’ grid that corresponded perfectly with the frame’s 16” on center posts and 4x8 sheets of plywood and panels of sheetrock. 57 Twenty-seven crews, each trained for one specific task, rotated through each site, erecting the wooden frame, applying the sheetrock, and installing wood siding, producing an incredible figure of thirty new homes a day at the peak of production.58 These minimal house models, as built, were by no means expected to be final; as Barbara Kelly writes, “The original size of the Levittown houses virtually demanded that they be enlarged in order to correspond to the customary middle-class homes of the period.”59 From the very beginning, Levittowners were encouraged to make changes to their homes.

Both models came with unfinished attics that residents could learn to build themselves at Levitt’s night classes (Figure 28),60 while the picture window in the Ranch was deliberately designed to be easily removable so it could become a connection to a back extension.61 The expandable quality of the homes was an important part of Levitt’s marketing; as a 1949 New York Times ad announced, “there are so many other things to talk about,” like the “great big open second floor that can be easily converted into two more bedrooms and another bath.”62 Another ad showed two possible attic extensions, advertising them as “the least expensive way to get more room.”63 This customization process was to be an extension of the “personalized” choice the customer made upfront in deciding which house to buy.

Even as they were encouraged and regulated by the deed restrictions, expansions were also highly mediated by the structure itself. Based on her analysis of the structure of the Cape Cods (Figure 27), Renee Chow maintains that both “the load-bearing framing and services all ran parallel to the street, in a direction that reinforced the separations in claim from neighbor to household to member spaces.”64 The positioning of structural walls thus reinforced the same concepts established by the shoulder-high windows, with walls acting as a permanent barrier between the public and domestic realms. The walls also went hand-in-hand with the covenants’ expansion regulations: where the rules encouraged expansion to the sides of the homes and proscribed enlargements toward the front of the lot, the non load-bearing gable ends also made sideways expansion more practical. The four-foot grid, meanwhile, provided a clear framework for extensions; as long as they too conformed to the grid, extensions could very easily be attached to the existing structural frames of the house; adding a new room was a question of removing a few studs and mixing and matching standardized doors and windows. An additional guiding element, a roofed carport, was added on the side of the house in the later Ranch models (Figure 16); this awkward addition, neither a full garage nor a room, seems designed to encourage expansion and enclosure. Like the “voids” found in Aravena’s Quinta Monroy, then, both the unfinished attic and carport clearly suggest a particular logic of expansion. In fact, while there are many Ranch homes today with almost intact front facades, almost all of them have by now developed both the attic and the carport.

Fewer homes, however, have gotten around to significantly altering the structural front façade, allowing the overall development to maintain a greater sense of uniformity and keeping in place the original windows.

There is another aspect of the Levittown restrictions that reveals an important component of the Levittown model: the structure of the expansion rules lays out the allowable size of the house not by defining the volume of the home but by setting a minimum size for the yard— the rules for the Levittown Planned Residence District, the encoding of the original “Magna Charta” in the town’s zoning laws, specify a yard 31

26 - A Levittown ad features attic expansion options. Source: Levittown History Collection (LHC) 27 - Renee Chow’s diagram of structural elements in Levittown, both in original homes and in larger expansions, all of which follow the same basic structural pattern: shown here are loadbearing and service walls (solid black) and wood frame elements (vertical dashes).

From Renee Chow, The Suburban Space of Dwelling, 68.

28 - Levittown residents attend an attic expansion class, 1957. Source: Peter Hales, Levittown

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of 25 feet in front and back and 15 feet total on the sides of the house, defining “additions to the main dwelling” as “encroachments” into this space.65 This sacred space also gets more attention than the house itself in the Levittown owner’s manuals, in which almost a dozen pages are dedicated to gardening and lawn care alone. Along with the “rustic” architectural details of the homes themselves, as well as the Levitts’ encouragement of self-built home expansions, the focus on gardening and lawn upkeep tapped into a larger Levittown pioneer myth of “rugged individualism,” in which “the yeoman farmer tills his own soil.” As Barbara Kelly explains, the Levittown “myth’s emphasis on gardening and the rebuilding of the houses roots the Levittown experience in the Arcadian myth and the pioneer saga.”66 The town’s founders actively encouraged this myth; in his welcome letter to the community, published in the local newspaper, Abraham Levitt tells a story of a “bleak, desolate isle in the North Seas,” bereft of plants of birds, rescued by a young clergyman who plants the isle with small seedlings; Levittown, he says, “will to a great extent be like this northern isle,” featuring, provided the proper care, “a beautiful landscape.”67 The plantings of Levittown, carefully chosen and strategically placed by Abraham, were part of his vision to “create garden communities not just for a few rich children but for the great masses of modest and moderate income groups, where thousands and tens of thousands of children shall be brought up in an atmosphere of charm and loveliness and tender thoughts,” in stark contrast to the “unhealthy and unwholesome” tenements of his native immigrant Jewish New York, where “hardly a green leaf or twig” was to be seen.68 In a series of “Chats on Gardening,” published in the town newspaper along with other Levitt & Sons statements reminding residents to follow the community’s restrictions, Abraham Levitt taught his newly-minted suburbanites how to properly care for their lawns, flowers, and fruit trees, helping to create “a bit of heaven on earth.”69 In attempting to create a garden community for those of modest means, Abraham Levitt was expanding on a long-standing American tradition. As Michael Pollan writes, the lawn was originally an upper-class English landscaping feature; “the Americans democratized them, cutting the vast manorial greenswards into quarter-acre slices everyone could afford.” In the late nineteenth century, Frank J. Scott attempted to make the ideas of Olmsted, whose upper-class suburbs had featured extensive lawns, more accessible to the middle class, and in his influential The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds, he praised well-kept lawns as an essential feature of a residential suburb. The American front lawn, writes Pollan, soon became “an egalitarian conceit, implying that there is no reason to hide behind fence or hedge since we all occupy the same middle class.”70 An essential feature of American suburbia, the lawn became a kind of podium for the display of the house, symbolizing openness while providing a buffer of privacy—what Kenneth Jackson calls “a kind of verdant moat separating the household from the threats and temptations of the city,” used in place of but with the same symbolic function as a perimeter wall.71 The uniquely American vision of the suburban community as an egalitarian park of property owners fed directly into Levitt’s strict prohibition on fences (from the manual: “In laying out the plots at Levittown we have achieved a maximum of openness and parklike appearance. Fences will cut this up into small parcels and spoil the whole effect no matter how good looking the fence material itself might be—and some of it is pretty terrible!”72) After years of battle, the prohibition on fences was only recently removed from the document, prompting the concern of many residents that the original character and look of Levittown were being lost.

But Abraham’s argument was far from purely aesthetic or symbolic; just as with the other regulations and home features, a larger economic 33

29 - A comic take on Levitt’s fence restrictions; the house shown is a Pennsylvania model, but the idea is largely the same. By George Ryan for the Levittown Outlook, 1959. Source: State Museum of Pennsylvania 30 - The “Community Appearance” section of the “Our Town” Homeowner’s Manual in Levittown, NY shows the idealized view of the Levittown home set in a pastoral landscape.

Source: LHC 31 - A cartoon that pokes fun at the scale and diversity of expansions at Levittown: “Isn’t it amazing what you can do with a Levitt house?”

Note the Ranch homes surrounding the Colonial mansion. Source: LHC

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goal was involved. As Alfred would later reflect, “Father was the one who had the foresight to realize that by intelligent landscaping the normal depreciation of our houses could be offset.”73 In line with this thinking, gardening tasks were presented in the homeowners’ manuals as wise investments: “Stabilization of values, yes, increase in values, will most often be found in those neighborhoods where lawns show as green carpets, and trees and shrubbery join to impart the sense of residential elegance.”74 But they were investments that were residents’ personal responsibilities: “we only plant; we cannot guarantee to grow anything. That is entirely up to you.”75 In fact, the “Community Appearance” spread in the Our Town booklet begins and ends with pleas to “do your share in keeping Levittown a ‘Garden Community.’76 The image featured in this spread (Figure 30) is particularly revealing: a long winding stone path leads past some trees to a lone Levitt ranch house (complete with those famous shoulder-height windows) on an enormous lawn, complete with scenic clouds.

This kind of scene is, of course, impossible given the actual density of the development, but it is the kind of illusion of personal isolation in an ideal landscape that is fostered by the emphasis on creating a “Garden Community.”

Together, the physical structures, guiding rules, and cultural values that defined Levittown formed a flexible framework for growth and expansion. Beyond offering his clients their choice of several “styles,” Levitt actively publicized the personalization of his homes from the very beginning; in 1952, the Levitts held an amateur home-decorating contest (Figure 35),77 while in 1967, to celebrate the community’s twentieth year, Levitt & Sons awarded a free trip to Paris to the best expanded home.78 By the 1950s, an entire monthly magazine was established dedicated exclusively to documenting and advertising the changes residents made to their Ranches and Capes. The pages of Thousand Lanes were filled with articles on “Attic Construction, in Easy Stages” and “How to Square Your Kitchen”—referring to a modification many Ranch home owners undertook, removing the inset corner from the kitchen to allow for more space.79 Also featured were people like Mr. Brandon, a general contractor who “executed his own architectural innovations,” giving his home an “oriental touch,”80 and Milt Leavitt, a “Brooklyn High School teacher” who finished his own attic.81 Most larger modifications, however, were not self-built. Because expansions required the approval of the architectural review board, it was much easier to simply buy one of the many expansion packages offered by contractors who had learned to specialize in Levittown homes. Herbert Richheimer, for instance, was a Levittown resident-turned-contractor who built an entire showroom of home expansions, called the “Museum of Modern Home Improvements.”82 Another fellow Levittowner began a business to provide split-level living rooms for Ranch house owners. Both these entrepreneurs were highly aided by the fact, pointed out by the New York Times, that “the original Levittown houses are structurally identical and present no unexpected complications,” allowing for work to be done “on a mass-production basis.”83 Just as the original homes were built with standardized dimensioned parts, their extensions, by following the original 4’ grid and using the same basic components, could be produced extremely efficiently. This meant that businesses like Baglione’s allowed customers to pick and choose parts from a catalog—attics, dormers, garages—that could be ordered and installed within days, and paid for with pre-negotiated FHA home improvement loans (Figure 33).84 The ease of the expansion process meant that within a few decades, almost no homes in Levittown looked alike, their shapes expanded and extended by their inhabitants. Thousand Lanes documented many of the unique changes: a “Taste of California” home complete with a green35

32 - Covers for Thousand Lanes magazine feature an enormous variety of expansions made to Levittown homes. Source: LHC 33 - An ad for Baglione’s Space-Age Home Improvements, from Thousand Lanes 6, no.1.

Just as the original nucleus homes had been mass-produced, this image makes clear that expansions can just as easily be mass-manufactured. Admittedly, the juxtaposition of “space age” with retrograde architecture is somewhat jarring. Source: LHC

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34 - A New York Times article features images of the expansions residents have undertaken.

Note how the original picture window has been moved to the back of the extended living room in the center image.

35 - Winners of the home decorating competition featured in the January 14, 1952 issue of Time Magazine. Contestants were judged by professional New York interior decorators.

Source: Peter Bacon Hales, Levittown Documents

36 - This spread from Thousand Lanes features a “California Life” Ranch home complete with a pool and “tropical room.” Source: LHC 37 - A Zippy comic makes reference to the diversity of resident customizations. Bill Griffith, the cartoonist, grew up in Levittown. Source: zippythepinhead.com

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house-like “tropical room” and a pool with a Cabana;85 an expanded Cape Cod with a fireplace; and the residence of an artist, Edward Glaser, featuring a 3.5-foot side extension and extended eaves that gave him “an individualized, more beautiful home.” Mr. Glaser made many sketches before deciding on a final version to give to the builder;86 his carefully designed home won him the trip to Paris in the 1967 competition,87 and made his house famous for decades. In a 1986 interview, Glaser told the Levittown Tribune that he believed the true historical significance of Levittown lay in the “event” of owner-initiated expansions, in “the art and creativity that was set in motion four decades ago by this entire dynamic […] it was the fresh idea of Levittown that unleashed a virtual upheaval in creative home design; many of the Levitt homes are indeed ‘works of art in a potato field.’” 88 Such a view closely mirrors the findings of Venturi and Scott Brown, whose work on a Yale course examining the home alterations, “Learning from Levittown,” led them to look at the residents as “architects and artists.”89 Glaser concluded the interview by thanking Levitt for “giving this artist the excellent canvas to paint his dreams on.”90 Levitt reciprocated when, on a 1974 visit to the community, he exclaimed: “It’s unrecognizable. It’s so beautiful. It’s a collection of very distinctly individualistic homes with a great many people who are very proud.”91 And yet, despite this celebration of individual expression on the blank canvas of the Levitt nucleus home, how “individual” the Levitt homes really are remains an open question. After all, as much as Thousand Lanes celebrated creativity, it also encouraged residents to “know your building code” and offered prescriptive design rules.92 In his study of the Levittown kitchen, Curtis Miner explains that there are two common interpretations of suburban mass housing. The first, epitomized by the work of Lewis Mumford, emphasizes the way in which large-scale industrial builders “sacrificed aesthetics and consumer choice for production and profit. The resulting uniformity of the houses they ‘imposed’ on new homeowners induced both architectural and cultural conformity.” The second, more a corollary than a counterargument, “emphasizes the role of consumers in individuating mass-produced housing. According to this interpretation, remodeling or simply living in the home were ‘defiant acts’ of resistance to the cultural hegemony that merchant builders sought to impose.”93 This second view is precisely that of French philosopher Michel De Certeau, who, in his The Practice of Everyday Life, claims that consumers use tactics from outside of systems of production to add new, often subversive layers of meaning to mass-produced products.94 In the case of Levittown, however, neither of these interpretations seems to be fully correct. It is true that the Levittown homes were monotonous at the start—as Levitt himself pronounced, “that day has long passed—if it ever existed—when an appreciable number of people could live in individually designed and custom built homes.”95 Though he could not sell a diverse product, however, Levitt encouraged homeowners to customize their dwellings within the framework of rules that governed the development. By devolving post-nucleus construction down to residents, Levitt ended up with the “individually designed” homes he was unable to build on his own. The extensions that were built, in line with the restrictive codes and often mass-produced themselves, could hardly be said to be subversive or rebellious—indeed, many of them, built by the hundreds by specialized contractors, couldn’t even be said to be fully individual, despite the fact that many were advertised as “custom” and, in the words of one resident, people “went out of their way to do something different because of the Levittown image.”96 It seems, then, that Levittown’s architecture, planning, and built-in regulations serve to create a kind of “light conformism”—just enough space for the feeling of individual expression, and just enough control to keep the community stable.

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38 - Architect O’Reilly sits atop a model of the Levittowner, advertising possible expansions to Levittown, PA units. From Look Magazine.

Source: Harris, Second Suburb.

39 - Herbert Richheimer advertises his “custom” attic-building service.

40 - “Know your Building Code!” implores residents to consult codes before beginning any renovations. Source: Thousand Lanes 6, no. 3 41 - Expansion ads from Thousand Lanes. Note again the use of “Custom.” There is clearly a demand in the homogenous Levittown community for “Custom” looks, yet it is clear that even these custom additions are, in fact, mass-produced.

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42 - Juxtaposed images of original and modified Levittown homes. Source: Brush, Sameness and Distinction, 54-55.

An aerial view of the El Agustino barriada, in Turner, Caminos, and Steffian’s book Urban Dwelling Environments.

The Game Living by Levitt’s with Lost Rules Rules

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A settlement as based on industrial production and strict adherence to legal standards as Levittown was hardly imaginable in 1960s Lima, a colonial capital that found itself surrounded by a vast and rapidly expanding informal city built entirely outside of the law. Yet in attempting to craft an alternative to the informal slums, architects working in Peru invoked many of the same ideas that had made Levittown successful. If Levittown represented an era of the expansion and cultural homogenization of the North American middle class, Lima of the 1960s, as anthropologist Jose Matos Mar has documented, was a place where a harsh exclusionary divide prevailed between the existing urban elite and the enormous masses of impoverished Andean migrants flowing into the city.

The slow transformation of these migrants into middle-class Peruvian citizens, Matos Mar’s work argues, is inexorably tied to the environment of the barriadas, the gridded neighborhoods of self-built homes that ring the formal city.97 A series of factors converged to make Lima’s barriadas, which now house over 70% of the population, uniquely successful: a temperate desert climate without precipitation made simple homes feasible; large swaths of desert land of no commercial value, largely owned by the government, provided a blank slate for migrants; and the government’s lax attitude toward the invasions, despite an initial refusal to recognize the new settlements, created a snowball effect as migrants from the mountains poured in with the expectation of obtaining their own home in the capital city.98 In a way, the relationship between the barriadas and the old city is emblematic of a larger trend in Peru and other Spanish colonies, one which underlies any understanding of “rules” in a Latin American context. Under Spanish rule, all cities were guided by the same rulebook, the crown’s Laws of the Indies, which represented, as Timothy Hyde writes, an attempt to encode a desired social structure through the physical order of the grid.99 The Laws’ legacy has been an interesting one: according to Uruguayan scholar Ángel Rama, the adoption of the Laws of the Indies resulted in a split between the ideal “city of letters,” existing only in written form in the Laws, and the actual built city, always a precarious corruption of that text.100 Though Spain’s rule may now be only a distant memory, the legacy of the Laws endures in the basic physical forms of Peruvian cities, all of them based on grids of courtyard homes with public plazas. The split between the official, lettered city and the informal, illiterate city is another lasting legacy, however, that is just as important. Unwilling to adapt their view of an idealized Lima to a mass invasion of Andean migrants, the Limean elite chose to simply ignore them, keeping the recent arrivals entirely outside of the legal construction system, excluded from what John Habraken, an architect active in the 1960s who, in reaction to modernist housing schemes, proposed that architects focus on building enormous “support structures” into which individual customized dwellings could be inserted, called the “game” of housing. Yet even this illegal city, the endless Limean barriadas, contains an aspirational order within it; streets are precisely gridded and lot lines drawn, and architectural styles often imitate those found in the formal city; the model of the “casita con patio,” the house with a patio, remains central—as Habraken writes, “variation on the vernacular courtyard house, a Spanish tradition formalized and transplanted according to the Laws of The Indies, has been perpetuated in extensive informal communities ringing almost every Latin American city.”101 If according to Habraken, “barriadas and favelas” are “a mass attempt by the disenfranchised to force entry into the game, to become players with control,”102 their internal order, in imitation of a formal system, exposes this aspiration.

The barriadas were initially viewed by the Peruvian government, as well as outside experts and architects, as an unwelcome cancer. The 45

43 - One of the stunningly beautiful barriada aerials used by Turner in his AD issue on barriadas, of Pampa de Cuevas barriada north of Lima.

44 - Belaúnde’s magazine, El Arquitecto Peruano, advertises one of Peru’s first modenist projects: a large “unidad vecinal,” the Peruvian interpretation of a neighborhood unit. Source: Gyger, The Informal as a Project 45 - A Time Magazine cover portrays President Belaúnde as “Architect of Hope.” Source: Gyger, The Informal as a Project

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“conventional academic wisdom,” Ana Fernandez-Maldonado argues, “considered informal neighbourhoods by definition as slums, places of delinquency and social breakdown.”103 Early solutions to the housing crisis were thus along the lines of Belaúnde Terry’s CIAM-era UV3 (figure 44), a 1949 neighborhood featuring large, multifamily modernist apartment blocks that were hardly appropriate solutions given the scale of the housing shortage. In the 1960s, however, an anarchist British architect inspired by the ideas of Giancarlo de Carlo, John Turner, would help to shift that view. Hired as a consultant to the Peruvian housing agency, Turner soon came to the realization that in contrast to mass housing, “a pseudo-game in which the pieces are moved for the players,”104 the slums were in fact “the most effective solution yet offered to the problem of urbanization in Peru,”105 and that architects should be encouraging rather than repressing the resourcefulness of the Peruvian self-builder. Barriadas, he found, were in fact highly organized communities of the upwardly-mobile working class, far more stable and successful than Lima’s inner city neighborhoods.106 But there was another, most crucial aspect of the barriadas, Turner found: “the barriada builder,” he wrote, “forms himself in the process of building.” This enterprising homebuilder is “busy consolidating an improved status” for his home, “and, by doing so, he is further improving it and himself.”107 The idea that home improvement went along with self-improvement was in line with the on-the-ground reality—amid rampant inflation, barriada families used their homes as their most stable economic investments—but it also invoked the kind of environmental determinism that had been channeled by Levitt in his championing of the single-family home as a device for upward mobility. Beyond being a platform for upward mobility, it seemed, the barriadas also had a calming and homogenizing effect; barriada children, the progeny of the Andean migrants, reported Turner’s colleague William Mangin, “are strikingly similar in attitude and have very little of the mountain Indian about them.”108 These neighborhoods were far from chaotic cloacas: the committees that organized the invasions and acted as de facto local governments “screen[ed] out potential trouble makers and control[led]” residents, making the barriadas “quiet places composed mainly of hard-working family groups.”109 Referring to the 1960s riots in the United States, Turner remarked that if barriada dwellers were “trapped in the inner cities,” in social housing “devoid of existential meaning,” “like so many of the North American poor, “they too would be burning instead of building.”110 The social benefits of having an incrementally grown house of one’s own were clear to Turner, but the help of architects was needed to direct the barriada-building process, making construction more efficient and ensuring the fulfillment of basic health requirements. Turner invited British architects to join him in developing self-build programs, framing his call as a political obligation: “We cannot avoid this responsibility as our own future depends on the rapid and peaceful development of countries like Peru.”111 While the anarchist Turner’s political views hardly aligned with those of the United States government, the reasoning he used and the kinds of projects he proposed were very attractive to an American state looking to stop the spread of Communism by enforcing its own view of Latin American development. From the mid-1950s onwards, and especially in the wake of the Cuban revolution, Ray Bromley reports, “the US government and associated financial organizations such as the World Bank (IBRD) and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) were seeking meaningful, politically feasible and relatively inexpensive policies to ensure political stability and the continuity of capitalism in developing countries.”112 Indeed, the entirety of early aid for housing in Peru came from the United States.113 Starting with Eisenhower, funding for “aided self47

46 - Turner’s proposal for state-aided barriada construction: with some help from the state, the process could be made much safer and more affordable. From the 1963 AD issue.

47 - The cover of the AD issue edited by Turner in 1963, which brought international attention to Lima’s barriadas 48 - The cover image for a 1962 symposium on housing in Latin America sponsored by David Rockefeller. The cover reinforces the centrality of self-build programs to American aid programs, while suggesting a particular kind of paternalistic image of the indigenous Peruvian as the hard-working, hat-wearing barriada dweller. Source: Gyger, The Informal as a Project

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help housing” became the official US policy toward countries like Peru, with the US providing funding, Latin American governments providing land, and the residents themselves stepping in for much of the labor.114 Willard Garvey, a developer at the head of Wichita-based World Homes, wrote a memo to Eisenhower titled “Every man a Capitalist,” detailing the importance of expanding third world homeownership as a sure way of winning “the little man” over from Communism, and proceeded to tap into US aid by establishing an office for a Levitt-like Peruvian subsidiary, Hogares Peruanos, which built resident-expandable homes in Lima.115 Efforts to stabilize South America became even more prominent under Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, which, according to a USAID director, favored self-help housing programs because they embodied “two fundamental ideals of the Alliance: direct, tangible assistance to the under-privileged combined with rigorous self-help.”116 The return on this investment would be twofold: increased homeownership in improved circumstances would increase political stability, while “a vast lower middle-class market” would develop for American goods.117 Kennedy found a willing ally in Peru’s 1960s architect-president Fernando Belaúnde Terry, whom Time called a “perfect Alianza President” and under whose administration government investment in housing projects grew tremendously.118 Caja de Agua: A First Attempt In the face of changing attitudes toward the barriadas, in 1961 the Peruvian government passed Law 13517, which allowed existing barriadas to be officially recognized on the condition that their dwellings and services be upgraded to acceptable standards. New barriadas, meanwhile, were to be replaced by UPISs (Urbanizaciones Populares de Interés Social) funded by US loans, in which self-build housing was to be closely supervised, as Helen Gyger explains, “allowing architects to control the process from the outset.”119 This was precisely the kind of approach advocated by John Turner, who explained that this kind of neighborhood “coincides with the traditional and economically logical process of the barriadas themselves—but with very important improvements:” better layout, more regular plots, water supply, and faster construction times.120 One of the first UPISs completed in Lima, the test case of Caja de Agua, executed by the newly established Junta Nacional de Vivienda (JNV), was funded by a $22 million loan from the IDB.121 The new neighborhood of 1,612 units was designed as a new home for residents of Cantagallo, a nearby barriada that, with its precarious shacks and lack of services, had some of the worst living conditions in Lima. The project brief stated its goal as “offering a roof to the lower classes, who have no possibility of satisfying their need for shelter… with the end of procuring the elevation of quality of life of the occupants.”122 In reality, the population served was more restricted; because the scheme was based on a loan, Cantagallo residents had to meet certain income requirements to be eligible, their contracts subject to the approval of a bank.123 The basic nucleus at Caja de Agua, built on an 8x20m lot, consisted of a one-story structure on a concrete foundation, built with limestone bricks and organized around a central hallway linking two bedrooms on one side with a kitchen and bathroom on the other. As a Levittown, the intention was to produce large quantities of identical units very efficiently, with the significant difference that neither predimensioned wood nor industrially produced building components were cheaply available in Peru; the homes thus had to be manually assembled block by block, a method that corresponded to informal barriada construction techniques. If the Levitts had enabled and encouraged expansion, the JNV legally required that its residents extend their homes; the contract they signed with the bank stipulated that “under penalty of law,” they were to “complete the 49

49 - Aerial view of Caja de Agua after completion. Note the Peruvian insistence on rectilinear streets despite the steep topography. Source: Evaluación Proyecto (EP) 50 - Plan for Caja de Agua. Most of the areas between the homes are meant for pedestrians and cars are relegated to specific parking areas. Source: EP 51 - Precarious dwellings in the origina Cantagallo barriada. Tha authors chose a particularly unfortunate-looking home to justify the Caja de Agua relocation. Source: Junta Nacional de Vivienda, Estudio De Evaluacion Integral De Los Programas De Vivienda Ejecutados Y/O Promovidos Por El Estado, in Ministerio de Vivienda Archive.

52 - An almost-intact original nucleus. Photo by author.

53 - An original nucleus with modified windows. Photo by author.

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house in the inextensible period of ten years, counted from the day of the present contract,” with a list of specific rooms, “which must be in permanent materials and under the supervision of the Junta.”124 This stipulation went together with the self-help assumption underlying the US funding. Other items punishable by law, according to the contract, were subdividing the home or “making any changes without the knowledge and approval of the Junta,” engaging in conduct deemed not “moral and orderly,” and failing to “comply with all rules and dispositions of the junta.” Much like Levitt & Sons, then, the Junta was to be an omnipotent authority in the project. And exactly as at Levittown, the homes were restricted by contract to single-family residential use.

The expansion plan provided by the Junta was tailored specifically to a nuclear-family expectation, providing for two more bedrooms and a living room. These additional rooms, just like the original construction, were to comply with the official building regulations of the province of Lima, which required minimum sizes of 10 m2 for bedrooms and specified a maximum of 65% lot coverage.125 While the official plan for expansion, to be followed by all residents, provides for a well-lit and well-ventilated home that complies with local building codes, the design hardly follows from the original nucleus. For example, the narrow strip of garden to the right of the living room (in green, Figure A21), meant to provide the kitchen with ventilation, seems like an awkward waste of space; it does not make immediate sense to separate the bedrooms from the main house by a garden; and because the original structure does not come up to the front of the lot, it is hard to discern a pattern for front gardens and setbacks, though later analyses of the project lamented that front setbacks had not been “respected.”126 Because there was no underlying logical grid to the block construction, as there had been at Levittown, and no half-filled or partially complete areas for growth, there was no clear framework for expansion. It seems, then, that the project’s authors were so confident in the power of Junta supervision and contract enforcement that they simply neglected to make planned expansion easily legible. Problematically, however, with a military coup shortly following the completion of the project and the dissolution of the housing agency, the rules were never actually enforced.

The nucleus had other significant issues that rendered it highly ineffective. Because the contract only allowed for a single family to occupy each home, it seems that no provision was made for the addition of a second story. With a concrete block roof and no structural columns (the homes relied on fully load-bearing walls), the expansions were thus rendered much more precarious. Furthermore, if Levitt had included small, shoulder-height windows as part of his project’s larger goals, the Caja de Agua designers installed a one-meter-tall, revealing window on the fronts of both the kitchen and the bedroom. A study done in 1970 reported that windows were by far the most commonly modified element of the homes, generally made smaller and equipped with security grilles. The lack of perimeter fences or walls clearly led to a lack of privacy and security, which the residents remedied by changing their windows, revealing what a later study called “a certain suspicion and lack of trust between the families.”127 Clearly, the designers had failed to study barriadas in the comprehensive way that Christopher Alexander would for his PREVI project (described further below), when he found in his surveys that the first floor facades of Peruvian homes are “always boarded up, painted with whitewash, heavily curtained and screened” to ensure visual privacy and protection against thieves.128 Finally, in the absence of regulation, the nucleus and layout failed to ensure that Caja de Agua would become, according to its original conception, Lima’s “Garden City”129, with deep front setbacks and extensive gardens. In the absence of road and gar51

54 - Expanded homes in Caja de Agua today.

Photos by author.

55 - Comparisons of planned and actual states of pedestrian walks: private walls have replaced the intended sidewalk gardens.

Source: EP 56 - State of project paths today. Photos by author.

57 - Expansions documented in 1970 in the Evaluación.

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den maintenance, nothing prevented residents from expanding into the setback zones—and even into the part of the right of way designated for plantings. And though the plan, in accordance with planning theories of the time, deliberately separated cars, relegated to large lots, from pedestrian passages, this rule has proven hard to enforce as gardens have turned into roads and parking lots.

By the time of the first post-occupancy evaluation in 1970, three fourths of homeowners had undertaken some kind of home alteration, adding an average of 2.57 bedrooms to their nucleus homes, already a number higher than that envisioned in the official plans of the Junta.130 Today, original nuclei are hard to find among the two, three, and even sometimes six-story multifamily residences that have grown over the three-room homes, hardly corresponding to the project’s original design.

Even in 1970, however, two-thirds of owners admitted to having expanded without the use of the plans that came with the homes.131 Today, every home is unique. In total violation of the original contract, Caja de Agua homes are today used as schools, offices, churches, and grocery stores, and many have been split into several homes four or even fewer meters wide. There are few common patterns, save perhaps that many homes have conserved the central hallway between the original kitchen and bedrooms, extending it from front to back. The only home expanded according to the Junta’s plan belonged to Jesuit priests, who had the resources to follow the project’s original rules. For almost everybody else, as the 1970 evaluation suggested, “development of the dwelling was left to the total initiative of the occupants.”132 Tellingly, in the opinion of the evaluation’s authors, the project’s most significant issue was its failure to “create the necessary sense of responsibility in the users with respect to their obligations: to pay punctually, solicit authorization for the expansions, use the JNV’s plans, not transfer the home, etc.”133 The nuclei were designed with a very particular idea of responsibility in mind, one rooted in legal contracts that were, most probably, some of the only legal documents the residents had ever handled. The report exposes what is ultimately Caja de Agua’s biggest flaw: the paternalistic and developmentalist intentions of the US-sponsored housing agency, rather than being well-encoded in the structure itself, were dependent on unrealistic expectations of continuous involvement and resident willingness to comply with the community’s rules. The mismatch between structure, rules, and behavior resulted in an unpredictable pattern of growth.

PREVI Just as Caja de Agua, along with dozens of other UPISs, was completed, Belaúnde Terry assumed political power in Peru. An architect himself and a staunch opponent of the barriadas, Belaúnde believed that more could be done to encourage innovative, scalable architectural solutions to the housing crisis. In 1965, he heard the proposal of British architect Peter Land, who had spent four years teaching at the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería in Lima and had returned to Peru as an advisor to the Housing Bank, to build an experimental low-cost housing project with international participation.134 Belaúnde enthusiastically endorsed the project, which he hoped would “be called the Lima Project and […] have as much a beneficial influence on urban and rural planning globally as the Athens Charter did.”135 From this statement alone it is clear that this was no mere UPIS; PREVI was to be, as Helen Gyger, has written, a transfer of the growing nucleus concept “into the realm of high architecture,”136 meant to make in Peter Land’s words, “an international splash.”137 In doing so, it would ride on the massive explosion of interest in the barriadas launched by Turner’s AD issues on the phenomenon, which, complete with “dramatic” helicopter views of the settlements,138 caused them to 53

58 - This and other images on this page: expansions documented in the Evaluacion report. Some of the highlights from the evaluation’s commentary are included for each.

59 - 92% of the area is built in this case, far more than legally allowed. One bedroom is entirely windowless. The kitchen has been moved backward and enlarged.

60 - This resident has built a restaurant in the front and illegally expanded to the right.

61 - Again, a large amount of built area; the patio is left behind the bathroom. The front setback has not been respected.

62 - This two-floor dwelling includes a shop on the first floor and an additional unit on the second floor with a separate entrance.

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become instant objects of aesthetic and anthropological fascination in the architecture world, so much so that “squatters” were included in Charles Jencks’ timeline of architectural history in Modern Movements in Architecture, in between Archigram and the Metabolists.139 Land and Belaúnde secured UN funding for the PREVI project, consisting of several Pilot Projects: a model neighborhood of nucleus homes, a sites-and-services self-build project, and others focused on seismic safety and industrial production.140 It was this first project, a model neighborhood of low-cost, efficiently-produced housing, that garnered the most attention. Seeking to develop an alternative to Caja de Agua-like projects, Land invited, in line with the international funding for the project, “a truly global selection” of twenty-six Peruvian and international “progressive architects” to submit entries for both individual homes and a larger urban layout. This was to be a perfect opportunity to take the logic and informality of the barriadas and the idea of the nucleus home under the wing of modern architecture. “The dwelling,” explained the competition brief, “was not to be conceived as a fixed unit but as a structure with a cycle of evolution,” with expansions upon a core nucleus of 60 m2 being built by the families themselves. Each architect was asked to put forth instructions and plans for the low-cost, owner-built expansion of his design, and to build increased load resistance into the structure.141 While the initial home was meant for four inhabitants, the final, fully-expanded home was required to fit a three-generation, twelve-member household.142 The winning home would ultimately be built on a huge scale, rolled out thousands at a time over the Lima plateau. In a sense, the competition was focused on developing an almost Levittown-like model of standardization and efficiency for the Peruvian context; participants were asked to align their homes to a basic 1-meter grid and to build them with standardized components which, in the absence of national industry, were to be produced onsite.

Just like the reliably dimensioned lumber of Levittown, these components, coming from special materials banks, would make expansions and alterations of the PREVI homes align to a simple pattern.

Unlike at Levittown, however, the PREVI home was then to be envisioned as part of a larger neighborhood unit, a perfect model of the Low Rise, High Density urban model that Land—along with many others at the time—was championing as a reaction to CIAM and its prevailing tower block model. Indeed, many of the international participants invited by Land—among them, Josic, Woods, Candilis, Van Eyck, Atelier 5, Correa, Stirling, Alexander, and a group of Japanese Metabolists— were actively involved at the time in proposing alternatives to CIAM-style modernism and mass-produced housing, which was being actively challenged at the time by figures such as John Habraken and Yona Friedman. Van Eyck and Candilis in particular, through their involvement in Team X’s activities, strongly advocated for a more anthropologically sensitive architecture, one more flexible and adaptable by its residents. As Van Eyck had complained, “it’s becoming clear that those things that determine the life of a city are falling through the coarse mesh of the four functions.”143 The PREVI competition was thus a perfect opportunity for these architects to apply their urbanistic visions to a very pressing need.

At the same time as it raised the profile of the project, the participation of First-World international architects only deepened the almost anthropological paternalism inherent in proposing to use “expertise” and foreign funding to improve an indigenous system that was, despite its limitations, quite efficient at providing Peruvians with mass housing.

Indeed, the practice of importing foreign expertise to solve pressing issues had had a spotty track record; while housing advocates like Turner 55

63 - The cover of the April 1970 AD issue that published the results of the PREVI competition.

The image, “Peruvian boys,” is from a photo by G M Dyott from “Peoples of All Nations” 64 - Massachusetts Bay Company’s “Come over and Help us” seal, 1629 65 - The plan of the PREVI estate as built, designed by Peter Land. Source: El Tiempo Construye

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66 - : A street view of the El Agustino barriada, in Turner, Caminos, and Steffian’s book Urban Dwelling Environments.

67 - Photograph of the PREVI contestants at a workshop in Lima. Source: Peter Land 68 - Opening image for the competition results in AD: a view of the PREVI architects is collaged with two of Turner’s photos. The architects beam into the barriada, surrounded by barefoot infants.

69 - View of a dwelling court in the first stage of barriada development, in Turner, Caminos, and Steffian’s book Urban Dwelling Environments.

70 - Supersudaca’s tongue-in-cheek answer to PREVI’s collage: 1969, the year of PREVI and the Lunar Landing. Source: Supersudaca 68

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and Mangin had helped develop successful mechanisms for slum interventions, CIAM-influenced projects such as Sert and Wiener’s plan for Chimbote, attempts to “adopt and adapt the American development model,”144 were overly optimistic about the implementation of first-world ideas in the Peruvian context and largely remained on paper. Strongly influenced by Turner’s call to action, it seems that many PREVI architects did believe they had a duty to serve the needs of barriada dwellers. Aldo Van Eyck, who framed intervention in barriadas as “The Lord” “call[ing] upon a few in the name of all,”145 wrote in his statement “Who are we building for, and why,” featured in the AD issue dedicated to PREVI, “Limeños are neither mute as to their aspirations nor are they passive with regard to effecting them step by step. What they wish is implicitly and explicitly demonstrated in what they actually do.” Given Peruvians’ natural desires, the job of the PREVI architects, Van Eyck proposed, was to “stimulate” and regulate the naturally-occurring “barriada idea and practice” “through the erection of improved dwelling types, construction systems and overall community planning.”146 And who were the “Limeños” who spontaneously built these barriadas? Just as the previous issues of AD had reduced the barriadas to a photogenic aerial view, so did the cover of the PREVI issue reduce the identity of the barriada dwellers to a rather inaccurate stereotype by using a picture of “two Peruvian boys” from a photo anthology entitled “peoples of all nations.” Barefoot and dressed in traditional high mountain shawls, these boys are nothing less than an exoticized, Orientalist vision of Peruvians, primitive and helpless. The photograph accompanying the project descriptions continues this trend (Figure 68). Here, we see the architects, looking proper and academic at their large table, collaged onto one of Turner’s barriada photographs (Figure 66). As if this were not enough, the impression is completed with the superimposition of two barriada girls from another Turner photo (Figure 69). The message is clear: this team of architects has landed, almost like a UFO on a foreign landscape, onto a barriada teeming with barefoot natives crying out for help. The collaged architects do not seem engage with these people; instead, they carefully study their life patterns, their desires, and their “natural,” “native” constructions—the barriadas—and then, back at the boardroom and the drawing table, they come up with architectural solutions to problematic aspects of the barefoot natives’ natural inclinations.

A collage made by Latin American think tank Supersudaca poignantly captures the absurdity of this montage in its own photoshopped image of the 1969 lunar landing in a barriada (Figure 70).

What emerges from the presentation of PREVI is an anthropological attitude toward the Peruvian people coupled with a strong desire to remold them into modern citizens through architecture. In Stirling’s words, the PREVI designs were meant to encourage “the pride and sense of ownership achieved through self building,”147 but more than that, as Silvio Grichener explained in his 1970 assessment of the project, “a fundamental point is that what is being done here—the construction of new housing—presupposes, at its core, an alteration of this culture, as an objective and as a de facto process.”148 The additions that residents were to make to their homes were the perfect example of this: customized by the house owners, they would be far superior to natural barriada accretions, for they would follow the guidance of expansion manuals detailing safe and effective construction methods, built upon homes deliberately designed to counteract the negative cultural and constructional instincts of the barriada builders. The vision of culture held by the jury was a very specific one as well; as Francis Strauven writes, the project brief “suggested the introduction of a certain Western standard of living and the realization of this by means of an economical construction technology, industrial production and standardization,” privileging the “ideas of Western welfare consultants.”149 Although none of the families targeted by the develop-

ment owned cars, for example, the architects were to make provisions for “automobiles, which will eventually be owned by families.”150 Just as a Levittown, there was a sense that low-income housing had to serve the additional purpose of reshaping its residents’ class identities.

While the original intention was to build the projects of the three winners from the thirteen international and thirteen Peruvian submissions as a test and then to deploy the most successful model on a truly massive scale, the military coup that deposed Belaúnde in 1968 severely limited the scope of the project, and the committee opted to instead build around twenty homes in each architect’s design, unified in an urban scheme developed by Land, whose scheme ingeniously tied the homes together on a network of pedestrian paths and public squares. The built neighborhood, however, was far from its original intention, a fragmented museum of housing experiments saved from collapse by its association with the UN and completely neglected after construction, the materials and instruction manuals for expansion never distributed to the residents.

Nevertheless, the PREVI estate as it stands today provides a fascinating laboratory for incremental, informal accretions, an opportunity not lost on architecture students Diego Torriti Torres, Fernando Garcia Huidobro, and Nicolás Tugas, whose thesis project turned into a highly cited book, Time Builds!, which documents the changes residents made to their original homes (not insignificantly, two of the authors have worked with Elemental, bringing their lessons into the kinds of Chilean social housing discussed in Ch 4). Much of the analysis that follows is highly indebted to this post-occupancy study.

Van Eyck Van Eyck claimed his house design to be based on a thorough anthropological study of the culture and desires of barriada inhabitants. Van Eyck’s PREVI homes are perhaps most recognizable for the odd heptagonal shape of the perimeter walls. The walls were in fact the starting point of the architect’s design, in recognition of the fact that even more important than a home was “the inalienable possession of a piece of land” demarcated by a barrier151—a significant Latin American cultural difference from the United States, where a lawn served much the same symbolic purpose. To arrive at the shape of the walls, Van Eyck considered the fact that “in self-built barriada housing,” residents frequently blocked their access to light and air. “The chief advantage of the hexagonal house with its low perimeter wall,” he explained, “is that it discourages further building by the inhabitants in any direction which would result in the loss of external space or internal light.”152 Not only were the triangular backyards odd shapes to build in, but the apex of this wall, which was intentionally non-load bearing, was misaligned with the main structural walls of the home (Figure A36), making, as Helen Gyger writes, “a self-defensive architecture of the house itself, protecting the integrity of its design from the would-be self-builders, thereby protecting them from themselves.”153 Van Eyck’s anthropological adaptations and encoded paternalistic expectations did not stop there; observation of Peruvian households led him to believe that women played a central role in family life, and he thus opted to place the kitchen at the very center of the home.154 This kitchen, which Van Eyck called the “linking element” and “elementary core” of the house, was positioned advantageously in an open-air central corridor to allow breezes to flow from back to front yard. Two more bedrooms could be added on the ground floor within the square shape centered on the kitchen; further growth was envisioned to occur on the second and third floors above. Altogether, Van Eyck boasted, “the houses are designed so that further free development cannot work against the 59

71

72

73

74

75

best interests of the occupants.”155 As Catarino and Bakker explain, these internal rules were further strengthened by the architect’s appeal to universals, “firmly arguing for an idea of what a house should be, and how it should be internally organized, for example the role of the kitchen as central element. His ideas, although built from local expressions, presents [sic] the character of the universal […] imposed with such force that it almost prevents any possible physical change.”156 If Levitt had implanted a particular notion of middle class family life into his homes (compare Van Eyck’s central kitchen to the Ranch kitchen, described by Alfred Levitt as “a control station from which the housewife can reach any part of the house”157), fixed his community’s basic character with strict rules, and then encouraged residents to superficially customize their Ranch homes, Van Eyck embedded within the structure of his homes the rules and universal principles that would guide their healthy and safe expansions—and then encouraged residents to make the homes their own, adding surface treatments or tiles to the walls.158 This would further Van Eyck’s effort “to avoid the appearance of an industrially produced minimum house—which carries with it a stigma not easily overcome by the inhabitants of former barriadas.”159 Despite Van Eyck’s best efforts to impose his principles, however, the actual expansions of the built PREVI homes, admittedly done without any supervision at all, violate many of his rules. One of the first modifications done to the Villegas House, analyzed by the authors of Time Builds!, was in fact the relocation of the kitchen to the front of the house, totally blocking ventilation. The backyard was then built over to expand the dining room, and vertical expansion ensued. In sum, “in its transformation the owner totally rejected the two postulates inherent in the design.”160 Visiting the neighborhood today, it becomes obvious that the Villegas family is not unique—a large number of the homes have expanded into the backyards. Yet many of them do still conserve the ventilated central core, and almost all have preserved the front yards, which, their three-sided walls still intact, give the neighborhood a private, enclosed feeling, perfectly reinforced by the conversion of a corner home’s wall into the castle walls of a day care, complete with turrets. The sides of homes, meanwhile, maintain the narrow window and in some cases the stepped brick gable that gives the homes a slightly Dutch look.

Stirling If Van Eyck’s dwelling had been based on some notion of paternalistic control and assigned, immutable spaces, Stirling’s proposal was more interested in creating a flexible, customizable framework for future growth. Stirling was truly impressed by “the energy and inventiveness of even the most poverty-stricken people taking fate into their own hands,” and recognized the role of the PREVI program as being “to rationalize this energy.”161 Upon visiting a project very much like Caja de Agua (perhaps it was Caja de Agua!), Stirling was amazed at the totally unique homes arising from identical nuclei: “They always seem to change the architect’s windows, they put up wrought iron work, they paint them different colors.

One might in concrete, another brick.” In his house design, Stirling tried to “organize” the “free-for-all” he observed “into something less uncontrolled.”162 Where Van Eyck had tried in vain to preserve a front and back yard, Stirling focused his homes on an internal open space. The original homes occupied square plots, and were organized in groups of four; party walls and loadbearing outside perimeter walls were built with sandwich construction, using precast concrete panels that incorporated window and door openings, erected onsite by cranes. Then, reinforced concrete columns and beams were placed at the center of the house, demarcating the patio area, and a few rooms were finished around the patio. The rest 61

71 - A view of the homes today shows that many have expanded over the backyards, resulting in unusual-shaped extruded volumes.

Most homes, however, have kept the front yards open. Source: Google street view 72 - At this kindergarten grown out of a Van Eyck home, the hexagonal walls motif has been extended into a giant green castle, complete with turrets. The three-story house, meanwhile, is unrecognizable. Source: Google street view (L) and photo by author (R) 73 - An aerial photo of the Van Eyck homes shows how many of the backyards have been filled in. Source: Google 74 - A view of the front yards after completion, emphasizing the fortress-like aspect of the neighborhood. Source: Strauven, Aldo Van Eyck 75 - Garden walls create a zigzag pattern.

Source: Strauven, Aldo Van Eyck

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

of the house was up to the occupant to complete.163 The intended pattern of growth was a spiral around the patio; as all ground floor spaces were filled, the occupant was expected to begin going around again until the second and, if need be, third floors were built. It was not expected that residents use concrete panels to expand the homes; instead, the final home would be a hybrid product, built using traditional reinforced brick and block methods (see the excellent model in Figure 82). The architect’s original structure was to provide the support for a more barriada-like continuation.

Stirling’s homes are often cited as the most successful and most desirable at PREVI, and part of this success is due to the simplicity of the rules communicated by the house, even in the absence of rulebooks. The arrangement of the load-bearing elements—precast perimeter walls, four central pillars, and overhead beams—gives a clear skeletal framework for building around a patio.164 At the same time, the lack of windows in half the precast façade, which, being of one piece, was difficult to modify, encouraged residents to keep a patio open to get natural lighting. Beyond the structure, Stirling’s homes certainly derive some of their legibility from their clear reference to the Peruvian tradition of homes built around patios. While Stirling’s system contains a certain degree of control, the possibilities for customization are infinite, the plans highlighted in the evolutionary “growth plan” diagram (Figure A45) representing only a small sampling. Because they came as part of the precast concrete panels, most of Stirling’s porthole windows and rounded doors—reminiscent of his other major projects of the time, such as the Runcorn housing estate, and intended, at least in part, as cheeky postmodernist references to the ship vocabulary used by the likes of Le Corbusier—are unchanged to this day save for the installation of ornate grilles, remaining, as Gyger writes, “one of the few recognizable features of the entire PREVI PP1 project.”165 One may debate the appropriateness of using these windows in a low-income housing project, but what is remarkable is that these openings have started a pattern, as owners integrate them into further expansions. The Manuel Prado school, for example, a four-story outgrowth of a Stirling house, features two additional porthole windows on the second floor (Figure 80), while a home across the plaza features a wide doorway meant to be shaped like the originals (Figure 79). Even when round windows are not used, square windows tend to follow the façade pattern established in the ground floor panel (Figure 81). This eclecticism is very much in line with Stirling’s vision; the series of drawings of possible expansions produced by Stirling’s assistant Leon Krier, who, it seems, deliberately added diverse stylistic flourishes to indicate the openness of the system (Figure A46) Alexander If the Stirling and Van Eyck homes had largely relied on form to suggest potential patterns for future expansions, the homes designed by Christopher Alexander and his Center for Environmental Structure were based on flexible but site-specific rules, called “patterns,” from the very beginning. As Mendes, Celani, and Beirão explain in their analysis of Alexander’s PREVI proposal, the project is part of a larger trend of the 1960s Design Methods Movement towards “rule based design,” a “systematic approach” in which “rules can encode certain characteristics” of architecture, urbanism, and culture; in its logic, rule-based design was intrinsically tied to the development of the modern computer, and it rooted itself in the experimental architect-programmer collaborations at MIT and Berkeley.166 PREVI was Alexander’s biggest application of pattern-based design to date, almost a decade before his rules were encoded in the magnum opus A Pattern Language.167 His initial design, conceived after 63

76 - A walkway in the project. The porthole windows create a unique and consistent rhythm.

Photo by author.

77 - Stirling’s generous use of porthole windows as well as precast panels in the Runcorn Housing Estate (now demolished). Source: James Stirling, Buildings and Projects 78 - The windows and doors establish a pattern of curved fenestration that is even continued by other homes, as seen at the end of the alley here. Source: Domus 79 - Stirling’s original elements established a consistent pattern. Here, the door on the left is original but the filleted double door on the right is a resident addition in the same style.

Source: Google street view.

80 - Here, as a school has expanded upward from the original Stirling nucleus, it has kept the porthole windows as a persistent motif.

Photo by author.

81 - Even when residents use rectangular windows on expansions, they often follow the rhythm of the original porthole windows.

Source: Google street view 82 - This model by student Katarzyna Markowicz shows the difference in building materials between nucleus and expansion. Source: atlasofinteriors.polimi-cooperation.org 83 - Grille details on the original windows.

Photo by author.

84

a month of “living with low income Peruvian families,” was hardly a fixed nucleus at all. Before construction began, families were to fill out six-page “family choice sheets,” in which they would rate the importance of each daily activity and each room in the house; the sheet even included pricing information for each option (an page is shown in Figure 84). In this way, “no two houses” would be “alike, “the exact form and length of each house[…] determined by a choice process which allows families to fit their houses to their own needs and budgets.” 168 These preferences were then to be processed according to a set of social and spatial “patterns” specifically tailored for the Peruvians, arranged as a twenty-step design template, such as “intimacy gradient,” “activation of patios,” and “long thin house.”

This user-centric approach, coming out of the digital age, implied a very different—and new—kind of architecture as a self-propagating, self-regulating system that, once loaded with appropriate rules by the architect, could generate forms entirely on its own. The ultimate home design process, wrote Alexander, would be “not unlike the process by which leaves on a tree are formed” according to “morphogenetic rules”169 (Trees are, in fact, consistently used as architectural metaphors and test cases; see also Alexander’s essay “A City is not a Tree,” Van Eyck’s famous saying “Tree is leaf and leaf is tree…,” and Le Corbusier’s tree typologies in Figure 8). In 1970, Alexander suggested that “any trained draughtsman” could take “about one hour per house […] to translate the family choice sheet into a set of working drawings” according to “a set of clearly defined rules, one step at a time,”170 (these rules are shown in Figure 85) but today this seems even more like a task for a computer.

Indeed, Alexander’s system is oddly similar to modern-day automated online tools like the Toll Brothers’ “Design Your Own Home” kit (Figure 86), which allows users to vary the proportions of rooms, get a quick cost estimate, and purchase a customized home in a subdivision near them.

The role of the architect in a project such as Alexander’s, then, becomes entirely to write the code of the program rather than design a final building, and that task requires a very acute cultural literacy. Having completed his thorough examination of Peruvian society, Alexander proposed several important patterns: “The people who live in our houses will, because they are all Peruvians, share certain needs and all have similar backgrounds,” he wrote, going on to suggest architectural adaptations to the Peruvian way of life: “Peruvians don’t like being isolated,” so bedrooms for children are replaced with “tiny individual bed alcoves” enclosed by curtains and clustered around common spaces. “Peruvians spend a great deal of time street watching,” so for girls to engage in their “favorite” “traditional Peruvian” “activity:” street-watching. Indeed, if round porthole windows were Stirling’s signature, the mirador became the standard feature of the Alexander house. Honoring the “strong distinctions” between family and strangers “in Peruvian life,” Alexander’s homes are designed as a gradation between public and private spaces.171 Eschewing the more advanced industrial methods of the other entrants, Alexander proposed a very basic fabrication system with bamboo stalk floor planks and beams, load-bearing perimeter walls made from special interlocking bricks that residents could themselves manufacture using special molds kept at the central PREVI office, and sulphur foam for mortar. This system would be “more relevant to people’s needs” than a set of prefabricated components, as it allowed residents to easily reconfigure and obtain the components for their homes on their own.172 In other words, if Stirling’s homes were designed to be expanded according to a structural system entirely different from that of the nucleus, Alexander’s residents were to use the same blocks for both expansions 65

84 - Christopher Alexander’s proposal included a sheet that residents filled out to indicate their room preferences. Source: Houses Generated

by Patterns

85

85 - Christopher Alexander’s proposal included a set of instructions for draftsmen, allowing them to easily create a house plan based on the questionnaire. This constitutes the “rulebook” of the project.. Source: Houses Generated by Patterns 86 - A Toll Brothers online catalog works along a principle similar to Alexander’s plan-drawing rules: the user inputs a series of parameters, and a standardized house plan is produced.

86

87

87 - Some of the rules that Alexander discovered in his study of barriada dwellers, encoded as patterns in his presentation. Note that like Van Eyck, Alexander understood the importance of the perimeter wall. The “Mortarless Block Wall” pattern is a proposal for a flexible system rather than an observation.

88 - Alexander’s “mirador” pattern established the idea that street-facing second floor windows should act as special spaces for girls to engage in street watching.

88

89

90

91

and the original unit—more along the lines of Levittown, where both the original and expanded structures were executed in dimensioned lumber.

Ultimately, Alexander hoped that his “patterns may begin to define a new indigenous architecture for Peru.”173 The jury, however, pointed out that as applicable as these ideas were to a sites-and-services project, “the house design as presented tends to respond to customs and traditions some of which have been already changed rather than accommodating a process of change and improvement as family incomes rise.174 Alexander’s proposal, it seems, was deemed guilty of going against the developmentalist intentions of PREVI, too stuck on enforcing an “indigenous” identity and culture that PREVI was focused on reforming. Indeed, as Helen Gyger points out, it is “legitimate to ask whether the CES was projecting its own vision onto potential residents of their housing scheme—here assumed as local and traditional, rather than a universal modern subject.”175 While a dissenting group praised the project, the majority of the jury found the proposal inappropriate. The cluster of Alexander homes ultimately built was based on the generic design submitted for the competition, and while the structure and patio arrangement provided some rules for intervention, ultimately neither the rules-based approach nor the innovative bamboo beams were ever deployed.176 Other designs had varied degrees of success in the absence of assistance and rule enforcement. In Svensson’s design, for example, the authors of Time Builds! write, “the structure of alternating courtyards provided the owner with clear rules of intervention.”177 As a result, despite building some additions within the courtyards, the owner did ultimately preserve at least parts of them as key features of the house. Yet the legible rules of courtyards failed to convey the building’s structural logic. Originally, each of the staggered precast blocks was to stand on its own, and space between the blocks was provided for seismic isolation, while expansions were to use a special mold to be provided for the use of all residents. In undertaking their expansion, however, the Mendoza family used the space between the modules to insert a wooden post to support a third floor (Figure 91). This unscripted intervention could have tragic consequences during an earthquake, severely compromising what was designed as a seismically secure shelter.178 In a self-build situation, rules left unarticulated can be deadly. Some later projects, such as Los Próceres, a 1970s housing estate in Lima, attempted to apply lessons learned from PREVI and the UPISs, projecting future expansions and attempting to allow structure to stand in for legal rules in a context of lax enforcement, but these had limited success.

It is worth noting that none of the Peruvian projects—neither the UPISs or PREVI—was truly executed according to plan, and in no project were the intended rules ever enforced or even distributed. The architects and housing policy makers of the time agonized over the fine line between control and expression—the 1970 study on Caja de Agua, for example, explained that technical assistance “cannot be too rigid to prevent basic alterations that give variety to the design, allowing to be printed the stamp of his particular responsibility or need, but to be sufficiently controlled so that designs are not made that cannot harmonize within an urban ensemble,”179 while Stirling believed that the “inventiveness and variety of neighbourhood which [self-build] produces (in Peru) is essential for a dynamic community,” and could not be too repressed.180 Yet this concern with an overabundance of control was, in fact, hardly practically relevant in the Peruvian environment of informality and government instability. If the contracts and rulebooks had been followed to the point, these communities might have been very much like Levittown—far more homogenous, their residents much more law-abiding. But in the Peruvian game of lost rules, the built nuclei were left to fend for themselves.

71

89 - The analysis done in Tiempo Construye, looking at how each of the nuclei has been modified and expanded over time.

90 - A page from Tiempo Construye! diagrams the fatal errror made in expanding the Svensson house.

91 - Expansion instructions for the Atelier 5 PREVI house. Source: AD 92 - Prefabricated construction methods used at PREVI. Source Peter Land 92

3

Typology as Nucleus

93

94

One of PREVI’s biggest issues was its failure to encode patterns for growth in a way that was directly legible and enforceable; this is especially true of Alexander’s carefully composed but highly academic “patterns.” Nearly a decade after the PREVI competition, Miami-based architect and planner Andrés Duany, along with partner Lizz Plater-Zyberk and developer Robert Davis, designed the new town of Seaside, Florida around a code designed to be easily understood and administered: “It is interesting to compare the Seaside code with Christopher Alexander’s “pattern language.” We agree with the town that he proposes. He knows what he is talking about as an end, but he is too idealistic about implementation. You must be intelligent and literate, and have a good deal of time, to read Alexander’s book, which is the instrument of implementation. But you can build your part of Seaside without understanding any of the principles because we use a code, not a book. Designers are accustomed to following codes in this country, which is fortunate because they hardly know anything about making urbanism. So if we and Alexander are after the same town, we are more practical about it.”181 Aleaxander had taken an empirical approach, isolating the “patterns” that made towns successful. Seaside’s designers were also interested in isolating and replicating the patterns that had made traditional American towns, but they were also looking for an encoding mechanism more broadly effective than Alexander’s patterns. The success and influence of Seaside, which began as a modest, middle class resort town on a tract of land inherited by Davis and has since exploded in popularity, becoming a poster child for the New Urbanism movement, could be said to be due to its designers’ ability to condense key design principles from the realm of high Architecture into a form easily interpretable by residents, architects, and developers, enforceable through and compatible with existing economic and political structures.

These key principles represented an evolutionary progression from those that had guided PREVI a decade earlier. During the 1970s, the Team X preoccupation with human-scaled urbanism had further developed into an interest in the once-taboo past. Luxembourgian architect Leon Krier, who visited Miami as part of Eisenman’s traveling Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies lecture series, “The New Wave of European Architecture,” had an enormous impact on Duany and Plater-Zyberk.182 His emphasis on learning from traditional European urbanism with its mix of uses, clearly defined public and private realms, and walkable, dense streets would help define key elements of the Seaside plan.183 Aldo Rossi, along with other neorationalists, brought classical elements and an intense study of urban typologies back into the realm of high architecture through his explorations of cities and memory. In the United States, meanwhile, Jane Jacobs’ 1961 Death and Life of the Great American City presented a strong argument against modernist planning and in favor of traditional neighborhoods, at the same time as the negative consequences of suburban sprawl and single-use zoning were becoming clear.184 Influenced by these thinkers, the attack staged by the designers of Seaside was two-pronged: on the one hand, by embracing restrained vernacular architecture, typology, and traditional urban fabric, Seaside would challenge the paradigm of avant-garde modernism from within, proposing an alternative architectural discourse for twentieth-century America. At the same time, the town’s mixed uses, interconnected street network, and walkable features would establish a pattern for challenging the suburban Levittown paradigm, what Duany calls “CIAM’s decline into zoned suburban sprawl,”185 by plugging Seaside and the New Urbanism 75

93 - Dhiru Thadani’s sketch of the Urban Code as the Ten Commandments, from Visions of Seaside.

94 - Leon Krier’s classic diagram: according to his theory, the ideal city is composed of a stable and harmonious fabric of private buildings that blend together, overlaid with a network of more grandiose public buildings. Together, the Public and Economic realms create a Civic realm. This principle was clearly followed at Seaside, where private buildings are strictly regulated while public buildings, for which the color white is reserved, are uncoded.

THE SEASIDE CODE (201 tYPe I

tYPe II & IIa

MIXeD USe

tYPe III

tYPe IV

tY

MIXeD USe

reSIDeNtIAL

reS

YArD

24 ft.

The area outside the Principal Building.

24 ft. min.

min.

TYPE II A

POrcH An unglazed roofed structure.

bALcONY

PORCH

An unglazed overhanging structure.

BALCONY DEPTH: avg. 6 ft. max.

PORCH DEPTH: 8 ft. min.

BALCONY DEPTH: 5 ft. max.

PORCH

OUtbUILDING 6 ft.

the designated portion of the yard.

PArKING An ing of automobiles.

PARKING REQUIREMENT SATISFIED

PARKING REQUIREMENT SATISFIED

2 required

TYPE II

TYPE II A

HeIGHt 25 ft. reqd.

22 ft. max.

Optional

reqd.

Place

22 ft. min.

reqd.

Alley

These are large lots that line Seaside Avenue connect spatial act. Type I buildings are the tallest in Seaside, up and ideas. Gallery and roof heights are measured from and are intended for residential use above. The space they

suitable for large private houses, small apartment build

gallery heights. The lots for the taller Type II buildings

Central Square and the Seaside Chapel. Type III buildings

restricted by recorded covenants and restrictions. The

be permitted. The prototype for this type is found in main streets throughout the South, although seldom in so con

Both Type II and IIa buildings have pitched roofs and

streets.

innovative structures to continue to be used, structures on

Virginia.

arcade is required. Type I buildings are intended for retail mandated for the street front, should result in buildings

empt from all requirements of the Code.

mansion of the antebellum South.

DUANY PLATER-ZYBERK & CO. TOWN PLANNERS

URBAN CODE

E 14) (2014)

YP

tYPe V

tYPe VI & VIa

tYPe VII

tYPe VIII

SID

reSIDeNtIAL

reSIDeNtIAL

reSIDeNtIAL

reSIDeNtIAL

6 ft. min. (North Side)

5 ft. min.

enue connect

The street faรงade shall extend along the front yard line a minimum of the designated percentage

6 ft. min.

2.

24 ft. min.

6 ft. min.

min.

25% of Bldg. Width (South Side)

6 ft. min.

VI along the street and footpath property lines. path property lines.

4.

The front porch or balcony shall be the desig 2. Balconies are optional in Type I and required in Type III. shall not be enclosed, screened, or have railings.

PORCH DEPTH: 8 ft. min.

PORCH

PORCH DEPTH: 8 ft. min.

TYPE VIII: An outbuilding is 4 ft.

4 ft.

for the primary building.

2. Outbuildings shall not exceed 22 ft. in height.

The combined footprint area of multiple outbuild ings on a single lot shall not exceed the designated footprint area.

4. Larger outbuildings may be permitted on a Type VI / VIa if the primary building is underbuilt.

5. Preservation, rather than replacement, of older homes is encouraged to maintain the character of the street. Therefore, For Types VI and VIa the occupy the available unbuilt footprint of the Princi pal Building, be separated from it by a minimum of

2.

A garage is considered an outbuilding and shall

2 required

Heights shall be as designated.

2. There shall be no height limit on structures or 22 ft. max.

(VI)

from the front and rear faรงade.

Optional 2 ft.

2 ft.

These lots are the suburban section of Seaside. They

2 ft.

Type VIII lots are dispersed throughout the residential

the sea at the end of the street corridor. Lots become slightly smaller and buildings become slightly taller

artment build

strictions. The

SPecIFIcAtIONS

density. Type VI generates freestanding houses and encourages small outbuildings at the rear, to become guesthouses and rental units. Required front yards

a more useable side yard, houses are shifted to one

sions are more liberal than those of Type VI and Type VII, permitting greater freedom of placement on the lot.

porch then faces the more generous and private yard

homogenous residential districts.

ult in buildings are permitted to be built. The Charleston single house is the prototype. rural South.

77

SEASIDE ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW COMMMITTEE

RE

THE SEASIDE CODE 2012 LEGEND

TYPE I Commercial and Residential TYPE II Commercial and Residential TYPE III Commercial and Residential TYPE IV Residential TYPE V Residential Special District TYPE VI & VIa Residential TYPE VII Residential TYPE VIII Residential

Primary Frontage Lot Lines

#

Plat Designations are denoted in large, light gray text. followed by the Lot Type.

Lots See Appendix.

*

E-7-VII E-10-VII E-11-VII

9

rest

Fo

et Stre

D-1-VII

D-2-VII

8

C-2-VII

E-1-VII

D-3-VII

D-4-VII

C-5-VII

A-4-VII A-3-VII A-2-VII A-1-VII

F-6-VII F-5-VII F-4-VII F-3-VII F-2-VII F-1-VII

G-2-VII G-1-VII

F-7-VIII* L-5-III F-8-VIII*

E-6-VIII* E-3-VII

E-5-VII

E-4-VII

Smolian Circle

L-4-III

F-10VIII

F-9-VIII*

L-3-III L-2-III

Ruskin Place

L-1-III

K-5-III B-3-VIII*

K-4-III

B-2-VII

K-3-III

H-1-VIII*

K-2-III

treet

rS Butle

A-4-VIII*

4

E-1-VII

E-2-VII

C-8-VII

B-1-VII

A-5-VIII*

8

E-2-VII

7

D-5-VII

C-4-VII

C-7-VII

E-3-VII

E-8-VII

Ly ce um

A-7-VIII* A-6-VIII*

B-2-VII

B-1-VII

A-5-VIII* A-4-VIII* A-3-VIII* A-2-VIII* A-1-VIII*

B-3-VII

B-4-VII

C-1-VII B-6-VII B-5-VII

C-3-VII

C-6-VII

E-9-VII

E-6-VII

E-4-VII

E-5-VII

K-1-III

I-1-VIII*

II

I-2-Ia*

J

I-3-Ia*

J

I-4-Ia*

J

Grayton Street

D-2-VI b* D-1a-VI

C-11-VI

C-5-VI

C-12-VI

C-4-VI

C-13-VI

C-3-VI

C-14-VI

C-15-VI

Odessa Street

D-3-VI

Natchez Street

D-4-VI

B-11-VIa*

B-12-VI

A-8-VII B-6-VIa*

B-5-VI

A-9-VII

A-6-VIa*

A-5-VI

B-6-VIa B-5-VIa

B-13-VI

B-4-VI

B-14-VI

B-3-VI

C-2-VI

B-15-VI

B-2-VI

A-2-VI

B-2-VIa

A-4-VI

C-1-VI

B-16-VI

B-1-VI

A-1-VI

B-1-VIa

B-4-VIa A-3-VI

B-3-VIa

5

II

B-7-VIII*

22 ft. max height

17 22 ft. max height

C-3-I*

A-5-VIII*

A-4-VIa A-3-VIa A-2-VIa A-1-VIa

11 30 ft. max height

VIII*

C-7-I* C-8-I C-9-I

C-10

C-4-I* C-5-I*

Ib* Ib* Ib* Ib* Ib* A-1-Ib*

12

C-1-I* 25 Central Square-I

B-1-I

I-47*

40 ft. max height

I-22*

See Sub-Code for Type I Gu 47 ft. max. height

DRAFT: 25 MAY 2012

C-6-I*

C-2-I*

D-1b-VI

10

Town Ce

A-7-VIa*

B-8-VII

e

6

C-6-VIa*

B-7-VIa* B-9-VII

rcl

B-10-VIa*

Ci

C-8-VII

cy

C-10-VII C-9-VII

Qu in

A-1-VIII* D-5-VII

West Ruskin Street

C-7-VIa*

A-2-VIII*

Pensacola Street

A-3-VIII*

22 ft. maximum

DUANY PLATER-ZYBERK & CO. TOWN PLANNERS

REGULATING PLAN

2

18-V 17-V 16-V 15-V 14-V 13-V

VII

4

E-1-VII

E-2-VII

15

9-V

A-1-VII

A-2-VII

A-3-VII

A-4-VII

12-V

A-5-VII

A-6-VII A-7-VII A-8A-9-VII VII

A-10-VIII

A-11-VIII A-12-VIII

5-V

Forest Street

F-1-VII

G-2-VII G-1-VII

B-1-VII B-2-VII

L-5-III

M-5-III

10-V

11-V

C-8-VIII

C-1-VII C-2-VII C-3-VII C-4-VII C-5-VII C-6-VII C-7-VII

4-V

G-4-IV

7-V

6-V

3-V

8-V

1-V

2-V

Forest Street

N-4-III

K-3-III

N-3-III

K-2-III

N-2-III

K-1-III

N-1-III

I-4-Ia*

J-3-Ia*

G-2-IV G-1-IV

D-1-VIII D-2-VIII

B-3-IV

C-2-VIII

D-4-VIII

J-4

B-2-VIII

F-3-IV B-1-VIII

F-2-IV

C-1-VIII

A-5-VIa

B-4-VIa

A-4-VIII

B-1-VIII

as Se C-11-IV

E-3-I

3

A-9-VIa

C-10-IV

C-12-IV

C-8-VIII

C-7-VIa

C-5-I*

D-10-I D-9-I D-8-I

D-6-I D-5-I D-4-I D-3-I D-2-I D-1-I

I-22*

I-47*

Quincy Circlle

D-7-I

C-13-VIII* C-14-Ic* C-15-Ic* C-16-Ic* C-17-Ic* C-18-Ic* C-19-Ic* C-20-Ic*

14 40 ft. max height

See Sub-Code for Type I Gulf Front Special District 47 ft. max. height

C-5-VIa C-4-VIa

D-10-VIa

A-8-VIa

D-9-VIa

A-7-VIa

D-8-VI

A-6-VIa

2

D-6-VI* D-7-VI*

A-5-VIa D-5-VI* D-4-VI* A-4-VIa D-3-VI

A-10-VIa A-9-VIa

B-2-VIII B-1-VIII

D-7-VIII

1

D-6-VIII

D-5-VI

A-6-VI* A-7-VI* D-4-VI A-5-VI* A-4-VI*

A-1-VIII

C-8-VIII

C-9a- V

C-7-VIII C-6-VIII

C-9b- V

D-3-VI

C-5-VI

C-4a- V C-4b- V

C-3-VI

C-10-VI

C-11a

C-12a

C-11b- V C-11c- V C-12b- V

A-3-VI

A-3-VIa

C-2-VIa

A-2-VIa

D-2-VI

A-2-VI

C-1-VIa

A-1-VIa

D-1-VI

A-1-VI

30 ft. max height

D-8-VIII

A-2-VIII

A-8-VI

C-3-VIa

16

A-3-VIII

B-3-VIII

Grove Avenue

C-9-IV

C-6-VIa

22 ft. maximum height

B-3-VIII

F-4-IV

E-2-I E-1-I

-4-I*

C-3-VIII

B-2-IV

C-10-IC-11-I C-12-I

A-6-VIa

B-5-VIa

B-4-IV

D-3-VIII

Town Center

C-7-I* C-8-I C-9-I

B-6-VIa B-4-VIII

F-1-IV

C-6-I*

A-7-VIa

B-7-VIa

B-5-IV

East Ruskin Street

J-2-Ia*

B-5-VIII

D-2-VI

C-2-VI

A-3-V A-2-V

D-1-VI

C-1-VI

2

1

22 ft. max height

22 ft. max height

A-1-V

Rosewalk

N-5-III

K-4-III

I-3-Ia*

G-3-IV

C-9-VIII

C-10-VIII

Tupelo Street

K-5-III

I-1-VIII*

C-11VIII

Savannah Street

M-1-III

J-1-Ia*

C-12VIII

M-2-III

L-1-III

I-2-Ia*

C-13-VIII

M-3-III

e

-VIII*

M-4-III

nu

L-2-III

Ruskin Place

Av e

L-3-III

ide

L-4-III

F-10VIII

A-4-V A-5-V A-6-V

are not presently coded but are subject to the review process.

2 OF 6 SHEETS

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into “the middle class and the developers who house them, the professionals with their standards and manuals, the politicians and their laws (codes).”186 In other words, Seaside and the New Urbanism proposed to establish a bridge between high Architecture and the housing patterns of the masses, giving disengaged architects the tools to engage with the scale of development that Levitt had mastered so well. “Architects are not designing housing tracts,” complained Duany, “They have become connoisseurs […] our field of action is completely different. We are wrestling with the American middle class.”187 The weapon used in the quest to construct Seaside as a new kind of community, a model for the application of architecture to middle-class housing tracts, was the same one rediscovered by Rossi in his explorations of European cities: typology. This, in turn, was institutionalized through the regulatory mechanism used at Levittown: a set of covenants embedded into the town’s property deeds. Rossi’s notion of type, developed in his work of the early 1970s, originated in a revival of Quatremère de Quincy’s theories of architectural types as containing an intrinsic functional and historic logic. As Rafael Moneo writes, for Rossi, a city was itself a fabric of repeating types: “for him, there is only one ideal city, filled with types… and the history of architecture is none other than its history.188 Seaside would become a uniquely American application of Rossi’s ideas.

Prior to finalizing the design for the town, Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Davis traveled extensively around the American South in search of appropriate architectural patterns. They ultimately settled on a limited palette of eight building typologies (as Duany has said, “a town does not need to be a typological supermarket”189) to use as the building blocks for their new town, all based on precedents they encountered.

If Levittown and PREVI had as their “chess boards” configurations of developer-built nucleus structures that residents could then expand out from, at Seaside these nuclei were encoded types: each lot in the town was assigned to one of the eight typologies, and it was the responsibility of the lot owner to erect a structure according to that typology’s rules. The crucial aspect of Seaside is that these historic typologies were already associated with existing forms and images, so that the invocation of any one immediately suggested the basic starting point for a Seaside home; expansions and alterations could then be made to this basic type to create unique built forms, according to type-specific rules.

Type I, meant to emulate the busy shops and apartments of a Southern main street, applied to Seaside’s main square and required large arcades and party walls. Type II, modeled on New Orleans’ French Quarter, was meant to create a more dignified arrangement of office and residential spaces. Type III was designed for townhomes with small shops, more than anything based on a stuccoed Mediterranean, vaguely Italian prototype; Type IV buildings, with their requirements for full-length porches and generous setbacks, were to emulate antebellum mansions and to serve as homes, bed-and-breakfasts or offices; Type VI was a more generic Southern suburban house; Type VII recreated the Charleston single house; and Type VIII allowed for more expressive designs at key “gateway” locations in the town.190 These types were carefully choreographed within the urban plan, a grid overlaid by diagonal avenues to create a picturesque hierarchy of streets. Throughout, as Duany has said, “everything is fixed on the street,” the “datum” of the urban scheme.191 The rules specific to each typology were encoded in a simple table that, by necessity, had to be easily legible to Seaside’s residents.

As Plater-Zyberk reflects, “the code was written assuming that for second homes in that part of the country, most people would never go to architects; the houses were either going to come out of magazines or be done 81

95 - Perspective views done of the Seaside typologies and their urban fabrics before construction actually began. Left to right,top to bottom, shown here are Types I, II, III, IV, VI, and VII (V is a special case). Note that there are some differences between this vision and the actual implementation. There is a blockier and more constructed quality in these sketches, which have none of the more ostentatious elements that would later dominate parts of the town. Source: Notre Dame Seaside Portal

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on the kitchen table or by plan services,”192 a good many of them built by carpenters or the owners themselves.193 Also distributed as a poster, the Seaside code was also intended as a visual polemic against bureaucratic zoning codes; as Emily Talen writes, “its graphic presentation stood in sharp contrast to previous generations of codes that were not only excessively long and bureaucratic, but failed to provide any clues as to how rules would translate into physical form.”194 A Type VIII Lot homeowner, for example, could easily consult the eighth column in the code table to discover the requirements for a minimum “nucleus” on his lot: it was to have a structure with a street façade at least 50% of the lot width, rising to a maximum of 30 feet tall (with the exception of towers of 200 square feet or less, allowing a view to the sea). The façade was to be 16 ft from the front edge of the lot and at least 6 from the other sides; it was to have a porch at least 8 feet deep, raised 2 feet off the ground, for at least 40% of its width. The lot was then to be encircled by a picket fence 3-4 feet tall.195 Also specified in the table was a minimum 4:12 pitch for roofs and a requirement that windows be square or vertical. What the Seaside code table proposes is fundamentally different from the kinds of rules used by Levitt or the Peruvian housing authorities. In those projects, the nucleus had been a kind of starter shape that was often unrecognizably transformed by later additions. At Seaside, however, the code ensures that additions scale, rather than completely alter, the basic form of a building. An owner seeking to expand a most basic Type VIII “nucleus” would also need to scale up the porch to be 40% of the new width, and either scale up the original gable roof to cover the new area or add a new 4:12 pitched roof to the addition. In this way, the code provides, in the words of Keller Easterling, “coherent guidelines for controlled incremental growth”196 while allowing the overall choreography to remain more or less the same. This kind of consistency is ensured by what Duany calls the code’s “proactive” nature: rather than give a minimum setback, the code gives a clear build-to line.197 In addition to the typological urban code, Seaside also includes an architectural code that, in Duany’s own view, has been “less important to the development of Seaside.”198 It is this code which restricts the town’s architecture in ways that the Avant-Garde so despises, although it is important to note that, as the introduction to the code maintains, “it seeks to ensure that all buildings are harmonious with each other and with the language of the traditional architecture of the region. However, the Code does not require traditional architecture, and invites modernist interpretations within the structure provided by the Code.”199 In keeping with the urban theory of Krier, the code’s primary purpose is to ensure that homes “blend together to create a pleasing and harmonious streetscape.”200 To that end, siding materials, roof pitches, window proportions, structural materials, and even column proportions are governed by the code in an attempt to generate a more consistent urban structure. Both codes are enforced by the Town Architect, who heads the architectural review process for the Seaside Community Development Corporation, which maintains, by force of property deed, the right to regulate for perpetuity all new construction in the town.201 But why, ultimately, are these codes so important, and why does adherence to the typologies carefully curated by the town planners matter? If the point of the Levittown code was to induce middle-class behavior and domesticity, the Seaside code’s goal is a different kind of social engineering: it was meant to produce, through an urban plan and accompanying guidelines, walkability and traditional community. The typologies handpicked from Southern cities all had one commonality: they came from neighborhoods that encouraged pedestrian activity and interpersonal interactions, and they supported mixed uses. In fact, Duany saw his 83

96 - The first test run of the Seaside code was done on college students at Catholic University of America, who collaboratively created the model shown in this image. Source: Visions of Seaside 97 - A Le Corbusier sketch for a project in Rio perfectly illustrates the Modernist notion of a posessive gaze over a vast landscape enabled by the horizontal window. Source: The Home of Man

primary role in Seaside as being a social one; the architectural code, he claimed, came only at Davis’ request, being “the attempt, principally at Robert’s urging, to make Seaside a well-built town architecturally, not only a well-working town socially, which was Lizz’s and my interest.”202 Davis himself was intent on making a place whose residents would be able to walk anywhere: “Seaside’s social engineering would focus mainly on liberating those without drivers license from dependency on those with them, on enticing people into the public realm.”203 Thus, the elements coded into each typology—the inviting porches and street-defining picket fences—were planned with a specific purpose in mind. The idea of using traditional typologies is itself an important part of the scheme; as Renee Chow writes, sharing creates a sense of community, and “types support sharing through a collective recognition of these patterns and understanding of their use.”204 Moreover, the typological unity of the Seaside homes, while accommodating diversity, also emphasized a kind of neighborly conformity; thanks to the code, Seaside’s homes are similar enough to sustain polite conversations with each other. As the code says, “homes should not fight for attention but instead should blend together.”205 In much the same way, it is implied, the homes’ residents themselves can come together to form an ideal community.

A required element for most of the typologies, Seaside’s porches are a key component of the push to, in Duany’s words, “reform society on the level of having people meet.”206 The code describes the porches as “essential to the southern town as a type, and a positive influence on the street.”207 In fact, porches are a key feature in many subsequent New Urbanist projects, touted as the ideal interface between private and public, a neighborly element that instantly makes a house amenable to passing pedestrians and puts eyes on the street. An extension of a window into the third dimension, the porch suggests an interstitial space for neighborly interaction. Moreover, in line with Davis’ original vision of Seaside as a modest retreat with compact cars, clotheslines, and natural ventilation in lieu of “politically incorrect” air conditioning, summertime porch-sitting while waiting for the house to cool was intended to become a “revered ritual,” much as it had been historically in the South.208 Today, most of Seaside’s homes boast air conditioning systems, and it is hard to say if the porches have truly achieved their environmental and social aims.

Yet, according to Robert Stern, this is perhaps irrelevant: “In post-World War II America, public life was pushed to the back of the house. All that was left out front was a picture window and a hurricane lamp. Maybe people don’t want to sit on a front porch anymore. At Seaside it may just be a gesture. But the porch makes the street a public space. It makes for an agreeable townscape.”209 In Stern’s view, it seems, taking a stance against the Levittown brand of privacy-obsessed suburban development is already half the battle. Even just the gesture of a porch—as opposed to the perfunctory hurricane lamp—projects a desire to bring back more than just the semblance of the pre-AC days. But is the image of an unused porch viable as a tool to mold a certain kind of behavior and shape the values of those who own homes in Seaside? This is precisely the root of the “porch problem” pointed out by Kathleen La Frank, who asks if “a revival of image alone” can “successfully revitalize a cultural system without reinforcement of experience.”210 Along with the porch requirements, the Seaside window regulations are one of only a few architectural details that figure prominently on the urban code poster. According to the design code, windows must be

either square or vertical in a proportion of 1:1.5 or greater.211 Plater-Zyberk maintains that the window regulations were needed to give some order to the chaos of self-designed homes in the area, which often featured “six different window types” on one façade.212 Duany, meanwhile, asserts that the standardized windows were part of a plan to allow mixeduse to function in the town. “The issue with mixed use,” he believes, “is the typologies are so different;” office buildings with horizontal windows or curtain wall facades “aren’t wanted in a neighborhood.” By masking all uses under standard typologies with standard window sizes, Duany claims, he could much more easily justify putting non-residential uses in residential settings. This logic extends to many parts of the code: the consistent, more inflexible features of Seaside buildings create a flexible datum that accepts a wide range of uses, “achiev[ing] mixed use even if a lot of freedom must be sacrificed.”213 Both these justifications, however practical, nevertheless understate the extent to which the Seaside window rules act as a powerful form of social engineering and deliver a strong critique of modernism. In his essay “Questioning the View: Seaside’s Critique of the Gaze of Modern Architecture,” architectural historian Neil Levine expands on previous literature on the modernist ribbon window, such as Bruno Reichlin’s classic “Pros and Cons of the Horizontal Window,” to show how the vertical window goes against the modernist attitude toward vision in architecture and urbanism. Le Corbusier’s horizontal windows corresponded to a view of landscape and nature that implied a kind of ownership and control through the gaze; the windows in his homes, such as the lakeview window in his parents’ Geneva home, were always meant to open up possessive views to landscapes rather than overlook urban streets. As Reichlin writes, horizontal windows make the landscape omnipresent.214 And yet, Levine maintains, Seaside totally rejects the valuation and constant possession of the view. If nearby resorts are based on picture window, floor-to-ceiling views of the sea, their room rates directly correlated with the quality of the view being “purchased” for the duration of a guest’s stay, Seaside totally alters that perspective. As Levine writes, in a Seaside home perforated with vertical windows, the perceptual process is “incremental and time consuming [...] You get a sense of the place bit by bit [...] Inside your house, the intermittent window openings, some shaded by deep porches, allow glimpses of the street in front, or alleys to the side and rear.”

You view a lot of images at once, which come together into a collage, a “scenario of summer vacation life that you slowly piece together.” The specification of vertical windows thus represents an attempt to change the mode of vision that Seaside’s residents use to experience the place; Seaside is the world of the glance rather than the gaze.215 In Davis’ eyes, “the view of the sea through the picture window or sliding doors of a condo is too much like an image on a TV to make living in such a place preferable to living in a Seaside cottage.”216 This attitude naturally goes along with Seaside’s larger aim of generating sociability and reclaiming the urban street—an element largely discarded by modernism—as a public space; as Levine concludes, the “coded hierarchy of social behavior,” the gradation of public to private space provided by the porch, “could only reoccur with the disappearance of the picture window.” It was by outlawing “large expanses of glass,” with their “anti-social character,” that Seaside’s designers could provide an alternative visual experience, one in which urbanism becomes a continuous experience rather than a landscape meant to be consumed as a single image.217 By allowing for more privacy at higher density, vertical windows make the view from a closeby sidewalk much less intrusive, functioning, in Reichlin’s words, to “reassur[e] distance and individual privacy.”218 Moreover, at Seaside, the vertical window provision serves to unify 85

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what is mostly a set of detached dwellings into a larger ensemble that feels far more urban; it is no accident that Duany, in justifying his belief that “towns considered beautiful are made of buildings which share an attitude towards the proportion of openings and towards roof type,”219 invokes places like Charleston and New Orleans; there is a certain urban aspiration, in addition to a social one, that seems overly optimistic given Seaside’s actual size and economic situation.

Just as Seaside countered the modernist notion of possession of nature through the gaze, it also rejected the domestication of nature inherent in a fundamental component of the American dream: the lawn.

Developed under the influence of landscape architect Douglas Duany, Andrés’ older brother, the landscaping provisions of the Seaside code explicitly prohibit mulch and grass, limiting plantings to those already existing on the property and a very limited set of approved native plants.

As Michael Pollan writes, “Seaside’s landscaping may well be the most revolutionary thing about the place.”220 In requiring that all native vegetation stay intact—in fact, the code explicitly allows clearance of only a five-foot-wide area around any construction site—Seaside quite literally roots itself in its location. Just as the architectural guidelines attempt to emulate the local vernacular and respect local tradition, the landscaping rules reject the climactically inappropriate importation of the lawn. Moreover, the rejection of the lawn can certainly be seen as part of a larger effort to dissociate Seaside from any possible ties with suburbia. If the lawns and non-native plantings of Levittown acted as well-kept moats that ensured the privacy of each homeowner, the coastal scrub on the small open spaces in the Seaside lots is part of a unique urban identity. And if the Levittown landscape practically forced inhabitants into routine domestic chores, Seaside’s untended vegetation demands that homeowners spend their time elsewhere—theoretically, in more social and community-based activities.

Moreover, where Levittown had banned fences for fear of breaking up the “park-like” landscaping, Seaside requires fences as an assertively urban feature. The code mandates that picket fences be built in all areas abutting pedestrian walks, painted a specific shade of white; it goes so far as to specify the spacing of posts and pickets, and to stipulate that no house on a street have the same fence design.221 While this requirement has been lambasted as a kitschy, retrograde element, Duany defends the fence as being part of his larger vision: “The fences are there not to be cute or nostalgic, and not only for territorial definition, but for spatial definition.”222 By defining the public space of the street, Duany argues, picket fences create the kind of pedestrian-friendly proportionality that is lacking in American towns; if a European town easily creates a 1:1.5 horizontal to vertical proportion, even 1:3 in some Italian towns, an American town, he believes, can only approach that kind of cozy, room-like ratio through the use of street trees or fences. Here, too, Duany reveals a very urban aspiration that is hardly surprising considering that Leon Krier, the biggest influence on Seaside, worked largely in the European context, at much higher densities. The Seaside fences thus serve, at least in part, to move Seaside’s low-density single-family homes a little closer towards European-style urbanism. Yet ironically, the image of a low, wooden, white picket fence is hardly urban, much more evocative of a nostalgic Tom Sawyer-era small town. Too low to offer protection or any kind of visual separation, the fences create yet another layer in the permeable gradation of public to private space (house door to porch door to fence gate), encouraging casual neighborly interactions.

The simultaneous enforcement of strict rules on fence types and requirements for fence diversity makes a larger statement about the fun87

98 - A view of one of the “Krier walks,” so called because they were added at his suggestion, complete with a space-defining fence.

Source: Visions of Seaside 99 - Dhiru Thadani’s study of Seaside fences reinforces the point made by Pat Pinell. .

Source: Visions of Seaside 100 - Fences at Seaside. Source: Mohney, Seaside 101 - Fences help create a more urban, streetlike feeling. Photograph by author

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damental basis of the typological Seaside code. Duany asserts that the requirement for creativity in fence designs “seems to absorb that instinct for customizing that is otherwise asserted by elaborate carriage lamps, fake shutters, and the like.”223 In other words, at Seaside, fences become a perfect example of a typologically encoded element that allows just enough personalization to permit an expression of individuality while ensuring overall consistency and cleanness. In his essay on Seaside, Pat Pinell uses the fence as a synecdoche for the town as a whole: “Seaside has many fences but no fence. It is a little community whose chief planer was not Robert Davis or Andrés Duany or Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk but, secretly, Aristotle.” According to Pinell, Seaside operates according to a very Aristotelian notion of type: the basic features of types are defined by the code, but every built fence—or every window, or, by extension, every building—becomes a new iteration that “subtly shift[s] the centerline of the type.”224 It is here, perhaps, that another significant distinction between Le Corbusier and Duany Plater-Zyberk emerges: Le Corbusier had believed that efficiency was a rule in its own right, a force that, over many iterations and with industry as the main driver, would naturally guide the evolution of the house toward an ideal, machine-like standard—much like a refined car. DPZ had a very different set of rules; their focus was not on the house as machine for living, but on the urban ensemble as a mechanism for community and on the individual homeowner and architect as a contributor to that ideal. Each element of this ensemble was an aspirational type whose rules needed to be clearly set; each built iteration was unique, but in being built, became part of the definition of the “Seaside type” itself. As one example, the towers permitted by the code have generated a highly unique and endemic typology.

DPZ’s user-based strategy represents an attempt to deal with typology in a practical, if somewhat paternalistic way. Rafael Moneo asked in 1978, just as Seaside was being conceived: “did not the historical awareness of the fact of type in architectural theory forever bar the unity of its practice? […] Hence the extreme difficulty of applying the concept of type to current architecture, in spite of our awareness of its value in explaining a historical tradition.”225 Moneo’s question echoes Habraken’s assertion that most systems of architecture “exist without codification in a formal context,” the systems approaches of modern architects often failing to be appropriated by the larger social body.226 These concerns point to an inherent property of the kinds of types that DPZ employ in Seaside: they are productions of a vernacular mindset. How can a modern-day specialized architect even attempt to put typology into “practice,” when its history is so much more anonymous? Just as Stirling and Alexander relied on the formerly-barriada-dwelling inhabitants to customize and individualize their PREVI homes according to a vernacular building logic already present in Peru, Seaside attempted to counteract the overly systematic bias of a top-down code by harnessing what Duany calls the “randomness in the air,” guiding through a series of rules an environment that is ultimately user-generated—and better off because of it.227 This is precisely why DPZ, originally invited to design the entire town and its architecture, decided to “write a set of rules and invite lots of people to design;”228 DPZ itself has yet to design a single building. Instead, to borrow a metaphor from Alexander’s PREVI proposal, DPZ writes the DNA for a tree and then lets the tree sprout unique leaves according to that built-in logic.

While the architectural code does go far in specifying proportions and materials for everything from porch railings to French doors, the alleged “kitschiness” and “fakeness” of Seaside are due, to a large degree, not to the code but to the encouragement of resident involvement in home designs, as Duany explains:

“In New York they tolerate almost anything. In the rest of the country they love cute—gingerbread, pastels, and pretty things. I don’t subscribe to this. If I did Seaside my way it would be quite fascist. But at Seaside you are seeing America voting as to how they want to live. The people in control are the buyers.”229

102 - A New Urbanist pattern book by Urban Design Associates, praised by Duany as an example of efficiency in his article in Visions of Seaside.

Seaside’s ostentatious Victorian gingerbread homes, which have themselves begun to define a kind of type, are hardly the simple Key West cottages originally envisioned for the town (a comparison of Seaside’s built form with the original sketches for each typology, Figure 95, is revealing), but just as Stirling and Krier tolerated and even encouraged eclectic additions to the PREVI porthole-windowed courtyard house, Duany, too, has resigned himself to accepting user-generated diversity, no matter how tacky, as long as it complies with his urban rules. In fact, the traditional architecture is justified, in Duany’s view, because the underlying urban agenda is so forward-thinking: “Why the traditional architecture? Must it be so? Well, yes. A comfortable style is the camouflage that eases the acceptance of our radical reform agenda. The New Urbanism is ambitious enough to have taken on the reform of urbanism. Architecture becomes our tool, not our end.”230 What Duany’s statement seems to imply is that architects with urban visions cannot have their cake and eat it too; if the ultimate goal is quality urbanism, architecture can be sacrificed to meet it. As long as at least the town corresponds to the larger “fascist” vision, as long as the reform agenda is implemented on a larger scale, the homes can be built in the style that the middle classes—the targets of the reform agenda—desire.

The crucial aspect of the house is that it serve as a “tool” in the plan to build a particular kind of community.

For being just tools, the homes in New Urbanist communities in Seaside and beyond have become surprisingly refined. One of the side effects of the requirement, for most of the single home typologies, that construction be done in wood, is that Seaside’s homes were immediately plugged into a system of standardized components. Just as at Levittown or in Alexander’s projects, both the original unit and any expansions can be made with a standard set of materials. If standardization of elements had been a trend that Levitt took full advantage of, by the time Seaside was built, most components of the wood building industry had become nationally standardized. And while more traditional wood elements—cornices, molding, and the like, had always remained in production, Seaside and the many New Urbanist communities that followed provided a further impetus for the mass production of elements that the Avant-Garde might dismiss as retrograde. This has resulted in the ironic situation of Seaside-like towns, based on historic, hand-built precedents, often being much more mass-produced and much efficient to build than more minimal-looking modernist buildings. Duany sees this as another victory: “Around the New Urbanism’s thousands of commissions have arisen a number of superb traditional architects … they are becoming organized around pattern books and guilds that deliver quality with an economy and efficiency commensurate with modernity’s true definition: “the problem of large numbers.” They have taken the territory abdicated by modernists who are flummoxed by the middle class.”231 There is another critical element of the Seaside focus on typology—relevant to Moneo’s discussion—that deserves some mention: the historical contexts in which the kinds of typologies used at Seaside arose.

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Kathleen LaFrank goes so far as to accuse Seaside’s designers of totally misreading the meanings of typologies, washing away “the real conditions of wealth, ethnicity, race, class, and climate” and replacing them with “the heroic values and motivations of a mythic past.” She is particularly disturbed by the way that the plantation house, a form of housing for sharecroppers, is abstracted by the Type VI categorization to become a form linked to “certain attitudes, behaviors, and ways of life,” “extending the virtues of form to the virtuous citizen.”232 This problem is much more deeply problematic than kitschy detailing; it calls into question the relationship between form and social behavior, and the level at which this interaction operates. Historical typologies are supposedly invoked at Seaside because they are empirically proven to generate community and walkability; they are part of the larger agenda to revive walking, porch-sitting, and neighborly interaction. But what does it mean to resurrect a building type associated with slave-owning plantations and to offer it up as part of a community that promises its residents a new, physically, socially, and morally superior experience? Can elements be plucked from these typologies in an honest way, or are the porches of antebellum mansions like the elements of ships and factories that Le Corbusier extracted to create his machine aesthetic, more important on the level of symbolism than on the level of actual function? The difference, Duany would argue, is that a ship window is not empirically proven to induce Corbu’s hopedfor new, machine-inspired state of mind, while a porch, regardless of its source, really does create a more walkable environment.

Despite accusations of total conformity and traditionalism, the actual built examples at Seaside manage to achieve a surprising amount of variation within the limits of the code. Although the initial expectation may have been of self-built homes, Seaside’s increased affluence has brought in many top-notch designers. The Type III Townhouses are an excellent example of architectural variety within a strict typological framework. All these homes, which front the pedestrian Ruskin Square, share certain key features: all present full-height, three-story façades to the square, forming one long block, all have balconies rather than porches as their social element, and all are designed as live-work, mixed-use buildings meant to accommodate businesses on the first floor and residences on the top floors. Unlike the more residential buildings at Seaside, they may be clad in stucco (Figure A56). Many of the townhouse architects, in fact, read the Type III rules—balconies, stucco, live-work—as pointing to a particularly European typology. In his Parador townhouse (Figure A59), one of several he designed for the square, Alexander Gorlin writes, he drew his “inspiration from traditional Italian building typologies,” with a commercial ground floor, residential piano nobile, and “use of stucco as the primary material,” “evok[ing] the Italian roots of the design.”233 Despite the intentions and urban aspirations of replicating an Italian town in Seaside, however, the mixed-use typology has not played out in actuality; the Parador, like a good portion of the townhouses, is used entirely as a residence. In that sense, the typology evokes a much more urban feeling than is appropriate to Seaside in its current state.

The Type VIII Typology, on the other hand, has permitted more experimentation within a far less defined volume. One of the most controversial buildings at Seaside is Walter Chatham’s home (Figure 103), which, Dhiru Thadani writes, “helped turn the tide away from Seaside’s early tendency toward Victorian cuteness to an architectural language that was far more exploratory.”234 In Chatham’s words, the building was conceived “as a creative challenge,” “to make the house as unusual as I could and still maintain the code.”235 In accordance with Type VII rules, Chatham built two gable-roofed pavilion structures, which put together form 50% of the lot width; the porch requirement was met in an unusual way, by 91

103 - Walter Chatham’s house design is one of the most controversial at Seaside. Source: Notre Dame Seaside Portal

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Stern House

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placing the raised deck of the porch not in front of but in between the two pavilions. The playful design maintains key elements of the code— the roof pitch, the eighteen-inch overhang, the wood frame construction, and the vertical windows—but does so in a tongue-in-cheek way, for the actual house relies only on an internal structure with sheet metal siding.

The gable roof and wooden columns are not practically necessary, yet it is precisely these elements that turn the two glorified Quonset huts into a house that fits into Seaside’s urban ensemble. Variances were granted for the sheet metal siding and the semicircular windows, but in most aspects the house does conform to code, its roof angles and picket fence allowing it to blend in.236 Victoria Casasco’s Appell Residence, an interpretation of the larger Type VI, is another example of a more subversive interpretation of the code. Seeking to preserve and put on display the beauty of wood framing that, in the other homes, had only been visible during construction, Casasco, like Chatham, externalized the wooden structure. The resulting house still uses wood siding and conforms to code, but it is hidden behind the wood frame skeleton, its siding only occasionally leaping over the frame to float in front of it (Figure A67).237 While Chatham and Casasco turned the wood frame inside out, Deborah Berke’s Hurrah! House consists of a more modern play of volumes that, with their wood siding and vertical windows, nevertheless conform to the standard output envisioned by the code. Rather than think of the home as one mass, Berke created a threefold composition: the first volume is a screened porch that spans almost the entire lot width; the second is the main body of the house; and the third is a tower, disconnected from the rest of the house and playfully rotated, as if the balcony volume had been twisted and placed on its side (Figure 104). The composition creates a pleasing interior space and allows the individual parts to breathe; nevertheless, the view of the house from the street gives the illusion of a single mass. Other designers, such as Aldo Rossi and Leon Krier, have used the code to create rigorous Classical compositions. While most designs found at Seaside are far less daring, with homeowners generally straying toward simpler vernacular interpretations of the code’s typologies, the code has the power to accommodate a great deal of variety.

Thirty-five years on, can Seaside be said to have fulfilled its goals?

It is indeed a walkable community within its small confines, but even today, groceries, beyond a few basic provisions, are inaccessible without a car.238 And while social relations are hard to quantify, the town certainly encourages more on-the-street interactions than a suburban development. Aesthetically, the town presents an incredibly unified ensemble.

These successes, however, are tempered by the fact that a miniscule proportion of Seaside’s homeowners are permanent residents. The vast majority of homes sit empty throughout the year, used only as summer retreats. On the one hand, Seaside’s identity as a transient resort undermines its claims to community-catalyzing design; on the other, as LaFrank explains, resorts have long been associated with rejuvenation and healing, and Seaside’s aim of providing a cultural and architectural cure to the malaise of suburbia fits this notion quite well.239 Duany himself embraces the resort town aspect, claiming that “the idealism of a resort can give clarity to a concept,” allowing it to be a “demonstration project;”240Robert Stern believes Seaside’s resort status allows it to function as a “design laboratory.”241 Seaside’s biggest failure, however, has become its utter lack of diversity. Originally conceived as an informal middle-class retreat of clotheslines, no air conditioning, small cottages, and compact cars, and originally intended—with its provisions for outbuildings, apartments, and live-in workshops—to provide a variety of housing options, Seaside has gentrified at such a rate that it is hardly affordable to the middle class 93

104 - Deborah Berke’s Hurrah!

105 - Aldo Rossi’s Variance 106 - Robert Stern’s Classical oceanside home

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it was originally intended to target. According to Plater-Zyberk, this has created a town character “different than was initially expected.” This, in her view, however, is a failure of policy rather than design: “at some point there has to be some sort of implementation policy to support your insistence on a range of people […] the part of that dual aspect that we can control, the design, rather than the policy, seems to withstand the test in the Seaside code.”242 Inhabited by millionaires from Atlanta, are Seaside’s porches serving a social purpose beyond offering wealthy vacationers the illusion, for the duration of their time off, that they are living in a romanticized vision of an old-time community? These rich homeowners willingly accept the regulations imposed on them by the code, but do they do so for the right reasons? Richard Gibbs, the town architect for Rosemary Beach, another nearby DPZ-designed community, likened that community’s urban code, a refinement of its Seaside predecessor, to “buying a protection scheme, almost like hiring a bodyguard […] You’re trusting that somebody will watch your investment. My job is to watch out for the value of everybody’s construction.”243 Seaside’s code has worked so well at governing physical form—far better, as Duany insinuated, than Alexander’s hypothetical “patterns”—in large part because it was tied to a mechanism traditionally used to ensure stable property values: the codes, covenants, and restrictions advocated by the FHA and so integral to places like Levittown. The reverse side of that coin, however, is that these well-written protections become an instant magnet for real estate speculators. To what extent the code created walkability and sociability is difficult to quantify, but there is no doubt that it has guaranteed an extremely hot real estate market. Ought we be content, at the very least, with the result of Seaside’s vacationers leaving with a heightened sense of community and commitment to reduce their dependence on cars?

Perhaps Seaside’s biggest role really is just that: in Duany’s words, as “a propaganda machine”244 for walkable, mixed-use New Urbanist communities. There is an urban aspiration present throughout the design of Seaside—the rhythm of the consistent windows, the spatial definition enabled by the fences, and the enormous arcades of the town center all speak to a yearning to congeal a European, Krier-style town out of the more suburban elements of single family homes and picket fences. In that sense, Seaside, for the (it must be assumed, mostly suburban) vacationers who come there, represents a slow easing into a more urban way of life, a reintroduction to mixed use and higher density—even if the higher density at Seaside is, to a large degree, perceptual. It is an attempt to show the middle class that there is an alternative, even if on an aesthetic level alone, to its suburban mode of life. When Seaside was planned, it was, by some accounts, the “first form-based code since Haussman’s Paris.”245 Since then, DPZ alone has designed hundreds of new communities around the country based on form-based codes, and its allies in the New Urbanist movement have exerted an enormous influence on city planning. The concept of encoding behavioral expectations into traditional architectural elements has directly informed public housing policy, with HOPE VI public housing now featuring porches and stoops in an effort to counteract the safety issues endemic to modernist housing projects by putting eyes and people on the street. DPZ’s projects have been so successful precisely because its product is not just built architecture but rules designed to fit neatly into the overbureaucratized neoliberal framework of governance of late twentieth-century America. The form-based codes for new communities, for example, are largely enforced by private community development corporations or homeowners’ associations—what Eran Ben-Joseph calls “a new microscale level of government beneath our municipal structures,”246—and they are popular because they ensure the steady growth of property values.

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107 - The SmartCode is a publicly available document that can be calibrated to any community; it is the “virus” which New Urbanism proposes to plant in the bureaucracy.

108 - Illustrations for Miami21, a rewrite of Miami’s zoning code that DPZ played a significant part in. The illustrations begin to define Miami-specific typologies. Source: DPZ. 109 - Hope VI Housing is another New Urbanist victory. The porch lessons of Seaside are applied here in an attempt to create street life. Shown here is Le Moyne Village, TN by Torti Gallas.

110 - Quinnipac Terrace, New Haven, CT. Another New Urbanist Hope VI project.

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Village Homes: A Garden City Alternative Seaside, of course, is not the only model of community that has successfully co-opted the rules structure of subdivision development to enforce a particular social vision (and seen property values grow as a result); Village Homes, a 244-home community in Davis, California completed in 1982, uses codes to do for environmental sustainability what Seaside did for walkability. Based heavily on the Garden City model—in fact, the architects and developers Michael and Judy Corbett expound in their book A Better Place to Live their belief that Ebenezer Howard’s vision of 30,000-inhabitant garden communities is by far the best way to accommodate future growth247—Village Homes represents, in many ways, the opposite of New Urbanism. Village Homes, following in the footsteps of Radburn, New Jersey, turns its back and its garages to its dead-end, cul de sac streets, which don’t even have sidewalks. There are no street-facing porches or “wasted front lawns” here;248 instead, Village Homes’ houses are focused on the common garden and green areas shared by clusters of eight homes and connected by a network of exclusively pedestrian paths (Figure A68).249 The entire idea is to create the feeling of closeness to nature and to the earth, invoking what Mark Francis calls “ecological aesthetics”250 as a way of fostering residents’ pro-environmental and communitarian values.

The rules, encoded in a standard CC&R declaration and enforced by the homeowners’ association, foster this vision. Residents are required to take care of their home’s share of the “common areas” fronted by the groups of eight homes (which also double as slightly depressed drainage devices), preferably planting edible plants, or else, as at Levittown, to pay a landscaping fee; the idea, very unlike Levittown’s, however, is that the enforced cultivation of these shared spaces will induce socialization and cooperation.251 Private outdoor spaces, on the other hand, are found on the street side of the house. One of the most important tools used to highlight these spatial divisions is one also found in the Seaside tool kit: fences. The importance of fences in Village Homes is clearly indicated by the sheer amount of space dedicated to them in the architectural regulations, which describe, over the course of four pages, a variety of design requirements that ensure that fences complement and diversify the volumes of the houses (Figure A72). Along the street half of the house, a fence is required to completely hide a private space at least 12x20’ in size; so sacred is this space that no neighboring windows or decks may have a view into it. Along the common green side, on the other hand, a maximum of one third of the property line may be fenced, and the dwelling must feature a clearly marked main entrance. The result of these policies is that the street is completely invisible from the inside of the house, and the focus of each home, immersed in nature, moves entirely to the common spaces, creating, in the developer’s mind, “an atmosphere of a natural environment within an urban setting.”252 While the fencing requirements control the social and environmental experience of residents, the community’s architectural guidelines regulate the homes’ environmental performance. Most homes were designed from the beginning to be passively heated and cooled, featuring innovative insulation, solar hot water heaters, thermal storage, and natural ventilation.253 To enable homes in California’s Central Valley to function without climate control systems, the design policy requires that rooflines be along the east-west axis, allowing for large south-facing windows with appropriately-angled overhangs to collect heat in winter and offer ventilation in summer; east-west windows are “discouraged.”254 The windows at Village Homes are thus an entirely different species from those at Levittown or Seaside, focused on environmental rather than social perfor97

111 - The Village Homes plan by Michael Corbett. The cul de sacs go against street-focused, Jane Jacobs-influenced New Urbanism.

112 - Windows designed for solar gain. Photographs by Author.

113 - The process for Architectural Review Board approval involves studying models to determine that solar rights are not violated.

Source: Judy Corbett, Village Homes’ Solar House Designs

racterg more ding of mmuniols and fy. It is

37. Fine Grained Shops

36. Pedestrian Street

35. Shielded Parking

33. Roof Top Terraces

31. Hierarchy of Open Space

30. Courtyards Which Live

29. Sequence of Outdoor Sitting Places

28. Positive Outdoor Space

General Information LeanProject Methodology Pattern Languag Language

26. Street Cafe

25. Seasonal Outdoor Skating Rink

24. Tapestry of the Community

23. High Places

22. Bike Paths and Racks

21. Shopping Street

20. Pedestrian Realms

18. Public Art

16. Color and Sensory Stimulation

15. Capillary Courtyards

14. Education and History of the site

13. Sense of Seasonality

12. Public Market

11. Activities for Multi Generations

10. Retail Anchors

9. Cultural Anchor

8. Variety of Parking

7. Acess to Water

6. Public Spaces

5. Industrial Ribbon

4. Main Street Spine

3. Regional Destinations

17. Night Life

Vista Field Pattern

open-ended, focusing on incremental without the knowhow to overcome hurdles, and to small builders or homeownand ongoing improvement. ers who could build well in an economical, Lean Urbanism also recognizes that the low-tech way. master planning process is only the beginning of development, and that it is crucial to set up an effective framework for growth, ,combined with the resources Lean and Sustainability for development by subsidiary entities.

A lean approach is inherently more sustainable. It is financially more sustainable, because it relies on less debt, spending and waste. It is also more ecoA common-sense approach logically sustainable, because it is thriftier The goal of Lean Urbanism is to employ with resources, and it re-uses existing simpler, more efficient, more com- resources in clever ways. mon-sense solutions in the processes of development, building, operation, Of course, nothing about Lean Urbanism and community engagement. It should (or any other feature of this plan) prevents common and conventional be easier for people to start a small busi- more ness, build their own building, remodel a approaches to sustainability - better insuspace – and acquire the necessary skills lation, more efficient equipment, renewable energy sources, etc. (We have not to do so.

BAND A addressed such specific technologies in Lean Urbanism BAND B identifies and makes this report, as they should follow in available tools so that community-build- detailed development plans.) ing takes less time, reduces the resources BAND C required for compliance, and frustrates In fact, Lean Urbanism is highly compleSECTOR 1 fewer well-intentioned entrepreneurs, by mentary to those other systems. Most providing ways to SECTOR 2 work around onerous important, Lean Urbanism complements financial, bureaucratic and regulatory walkable, compact, mixed-use urbanism, which can be the most sustainable stratSECTOR 3 processes. egy of all - following the approach by SECTOR 4 available to individu- which our ancestors built great towns and The tools are freely als, governments and organizations seek- cities to last.

SECTOR 5 done, to entrepreneurs ing to help get things 2. Sense of Arrival

ions of what is called only to infraucracy, – using timeduced cessful

After the community was already built out, a study was done on the residents of Village Homes. It turned out that it was indeed true that the occupants used far less energy and were more likely to socialize, recycle, and garden compared to other Davis residents—but to what extent was this a product of the self-selection that led residents to buy homes in such a unique development in the first place?257 The same question could be asked of Seaside; indeed, unless the rules of communities like Seaside and Village Homes truly get deployed on a large scale, their necessarily broad social visions, instead of actually affecting society, will only serve to further segregate it into pockets of selective utopia.

1. A Long Thin Site

cus on , on a w-debt heard holders eveloppected of real atively e chalsaved st is a e Vista active, people

mance. The social message they send, if any, is about the house owner’s pro-environmental values. So important is the use of these passive mechanisms that one of the community’s most important rules, written into the covenants, concerns windows: “all south-facing glass and solar space heating collectors in each house shall remain unshaded from December 21 to February 21 between the hours of 10 am. and 2 p.m.(solar time).”255 This rule is tested in an unusually old-fashioned way: “before construction begins, a model of each house is made and placed on a large plan of the development. An architectural review board makes certain that buildings do not shade one another.”256 If Seaside’s review board assesses the typological fit of proposed architectural projects and assesses their impact on walkability, Village Homes’ board is much more guided by a vision of environmental efficiency, and where Seaside had defined the ideal citizen as a walking friendly neighbor, Village Homes’ defines its ideal citizen as a communitarian environmentalist.

Existing

SECTOR 6 SECTOR 7 SECTOR 8 SECTOR 9

Infrastructure

SECTOR 10

Strongly Associated Pattern Weakly Associated Pattern Not Applicable at this Scale

Complete

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115

© 2015 DUANY PLATER-ZYBERK & COMPANY

9

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© 2015 DUANY PLATER-ZYBERK & COMPANY

The New New Urbanism: The American Favela?

114 - Part of a table that explains how a project-specific “pattern language” applies across the site.

This desire to implement this vision on a broader scale has guided the more recent work of New Urbanists. Over time, their rules have become more and more capable of taking advantage of larger frameworks. In describing the DPZ-written SmartCode, a platform for encoding New Urbanist principles and typologically-based zoning into municipal codes, Duany explained: “We must understand the system. It cannot be destroyed and replaced. We can only infiltrate it and turn it to our purposes, like a virus does to a cell.”258 It is this emphasis on implementation through regulation has made New Urbanists fit into today’s economic and political structures much more effectively than a monumental modernism reliant on a strong Keynesian state; form-based codes are now in place in cities as big as Miami and Denver. Yet after spending forty years working on specific and rigorous codes, Duany’s latest projects have gone in a markedly different direction. Titled Lean Urbanism, DPZ’s new initiative aims to reduce regulation and red tape, allowing top-down urbanism to thrive, and the firm’s most recent projects are far closer to PREVI and Alexander than Seaside was. Indeed, one of the firm’s current projects, an urban proposal for an abandoned airfield in Kennewick, WA, began with an attempt to define a locally appropriate “pattern language,” which was then applied across the site (Figure 115). The DPZ proposal includes a plan for incremental, low-debt infrastructure rollout, along with suggested “pink zones” with reduced regulatory frameworks that allow immigrants and Millenials to more easily construct buildings and start up businesses, perhaps even using prefabricated or reused parts, like shipping containers, as starting nuclei.259 Dubbed “The American Favela” by Duany, the initial phase of the development is intended to be as user-generated and unregulated as possible, harnessing the same kind of self-build energy invoked by the PREVI projects.260 What will happen now that Lean Urbanism is trying to dismantle the regulatory framework in an attempt to enable something more spontaneous and barriada-like? There are indeed many lessons from New Urbanism that can be applied to barriada interventions and informal urbanism—careful study and encoding of the vernacular, proactive coding, and walkable streets are just a few—but it will take a lot of adaptation to make an approach so fundamentally rooted in meticulously observed rules work in a context of lax regulation.

Project Pattern Language

115 - A proposal for a more incremental, “lean” rollout of infrastructure.

116 - Key to DPZ’s latest project, “The American Favela.”

Vista Field Pattern Language

SECTOR BOUNDARY SERVICE BAND REQUIRED PRIMARY ROW

BAND A

4

BAND B BAND C

SECTOR 1

THE SITE PLAN IN GENERAL The patterns are allocated along 10 sectors. Three of the sectors (1, 4, and 10) are designed as single specialized projects as a result of their prominent locations. The other sectors (2-3, 5-9) are essentially normative and can be broken into three bands. These are determined by the existence of the normative pattern of runways. Service bands represent infrastructure corridors. Those thoroughfares and civic spaces located on this plan are to be constructed approximately as shown. All activity is generally described below and is to be approved

2

3

5

6

7

8

9

THE SECTORS

THE BANDS Band C is generally less controlled than the other bands. It is an edge condition and must respond to irregular property boundaries and adjacent small manufacturing and warehouse uses. Band C may be regularly or irregularly designed, depending on context. Incubator business and manufacturing, and self-built housing are most common in Band C.

Sector 1 is located at the intersection with the highest traffic and is the most intensive sector. It contains a large, regular square, which should be fronted by a civic building of regional importance. The tallest buildings should be located around this square. A small, intimate plaza is located in the northeast part of this sector.

This plaza should house outdoor dining, active late into the night.

Band A is generally more intensive than Bands B and C. It is an edge condition and must respond to irregular property boundaries. Band A is more formal and regular in plan than other bands. Parking within Band A should be concentrated into collective parking lots. A thoroughfare along the northern taxiway traverses Band A, serving as the main thoroughfare for the site. Transportation facilities serving pedestrians, cyclists, and pedestrians THE SERVICE BANDS Sector 2 is the first phase to be developed should be provided explicitly.

Two service bands span sectors 2-9 due to its proximity to the existing pedesBand B is generally more picturesque along the swales between the runway trian activity surrounding the convention and taxiways. These carry the infrastruc-

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116 by cranked streets, intimate spaces, and terminated and deflected vistas.

Sector 4 is heavily related to off-site activities, connecting most directly to farther-off thoroughfares. It is configured primarily as an entertainment district, containing active civic buildings, and late-night entertainment and dining.

Sector 9 serves as a major cross-roads, knitting much of the neighborhood-scale fabric to the performing arts area and to offsite areas. It is centered on a square similar in shape to that in Sector 2, but is intended

Quinta Monroy courtyard, Photograph by author.

The Home as Investment Formula

4

117

118

119

Just as New Urbanism was refining its tools, the government of Chile spent the decades that Seaside was being built perfecting a new and innovative housing policy that would permit both large-scale implementation and user customizability within a free market framework. Housing policy in Chile, as in Belaúnde’s Peru, had originally focused on government-built housing blocks and Turner-influenced sites-and-services projects, such as the enormous neighborhood of Villa la Reina (Figures 117-119),261 but this “noble paternalism” came to an end with the CIAbacked military coup that deposed the Socialist Allende in 1973.262 Under the new military dictatorship, the Chilean economy was entirely privatized and rebuilt with the United States as a model (the American-trained designers of this new policy were known as the “Chicago Boys”), and housing was no exception; by 1979, the government’s official role became simply to manage the work of the private housing market, offering subsidized vouchers for poor Chileans—172,218 of whom were forcibly removed from their illegally occupied inner-city campamentos, the Chilean term for what are basically informal barriadas, between 1979 and 1985,263 —to legally purchase privately-built homes in subdivisions on the peripheries of the country’s major cities.264 This new approach was very in line with the revised policies of the IMF and World Bank, international institutions serving as watchdogs over funds available to Latin American governments. In a 1993 report entitled “Housing: Enabling the Market to Work,” the World Bank announced that “The Bank now expects the housing sector, both formal and informal, to contribute to economic growth and public revenues, rather than to be a drain on limited public resources.”265 This idea of housing as an investment and source of economic growth was very much influenced by the work of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, who, in books such as The Mystery of Capital, proposed that, within the economic paradigm of the late twentieth century, the key to economic development in Latin America was the distribution of property rights: the homes of Latin America’s poor, he claimed, could, if formally recognized as property, become generators of capital, sources of credit, and engines of economic growth, turning squatters into smart real estate investors.266 As Mike Davis writes, “de Sotoan panaceas” are immensely popular because they promise to “pump[] life back into the World Bank’s tired self-help paradigms, […] accord[ing] perfectly with dominant neoliberal, anti-state ideology, including the Bank’s current emphasis on government facilitation of private housing markets and the promotion of broad home ownership.”267 Moreover, with the specter of a worldwide Communist takeover largely dissipated by the 1990s, universal property ownership was now advocated for as a way to enable larger swaths of Latin American countries’ populations to participate in a global capitalist economy.

Thanks to its aggressive pursuit of homeownership, the Chilean housing ministry’s policies, at least in terms of raw numbers, are widely seen as a success story. Chile’s informal slum rate is only four percent, compared with a continent-wide average of 33%,268 and it is an unusual country in that Chileans in the lower income quintile are more likely to own their homes than those in the upper range.269 Much of this gain was accomplished in the 1990s, during a period of economic growth under the newly reestablished democracy, when a million homes were built under a housing program that offered an upfront subsidy combined with a monthly low-interest mortgage.270 Focused on quantity rather than quality, the “Basic Home” program often resulted in the construction of mass-produced, tightly-packed 40m2 units. The expenses and size of the subsidized homes prompted the government to also experiment with a very PREVI-like notion: the “progressive home program,” which subsidized two phases of construction, the first being a basic nucleus and the second a larger expansion.271 Once the idea of incorporating incremental 103

117 - Incremental growth at Villa la Reina.

Residents were given materials and assistance to build the initial nucleus; each resident could then decide what to add next. Source: Francisco Quintana, “Urbanizando con Tiza,” Arq 86.

118 - Plan and elevation of original nucleus at Villa la Reina. Note the general similarity to Caja de Agua.

119 - The unusual chevron plan at Villa La Reina is meant to reduce the monotony of a straight street wall.

120 - (next page) Plans and sections for Torreones de la Reina. Source: llanes and Lecaros 121 - (next page): Photographs of the Torreones project. Source: Ana Cristina Vargas 122 - (next page): Images and diagrams of Undurraga’s Ermita San Antonio. Source: urbanistica.it 123 - (next page): Images of the project 15 years later, with expansions, often precarious ones, taking up the interior space. Because these expansions are largely at the interior of the block, however, the street facade remains uniform. Photographs by author.

120

Wooden staircase inside a house

Los Torreon

Arch. Fernando Cast Address: Av. Las Per Egaña Coordinates: 33°27’2

121 pansion on ground floor open space

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123

sndiente. de la copropiedad u otros ne información útil para que su vivienda domésticas. cios comunitarios. r el agua, luz y otras cuentas.

• El retiro de la basura y limpieza del erno ucho riego. estructurales, vigas, pilaresAccompanying y text (translation): ar y mantener el equipamiento uro, periódica, ayuda a vivir mejor. edor de la casa.multicanchas, Remember that a well-kept home has a longer useful lifespan and grows in nes unitario como ns,enveredas, fallas graves, pero en el caso value. In everyday use, it is necessary, in order to live better... daily cleaning of jardines y otros. your kids to collaborate in use and care of the home... l,etarhorizontal o losendemás. diagonal, bathrooms... esout trashteaching los derechos de taking and cleaning the patio.

e el ción, arquitecto o ingeniero que Live better! nes, Since the dream of their own home has been achieved by the rest of the les, nes. families who live in the compound, it’s important that you and your neighbors de

lema de vivienda de la familia. bición de venta de 5 años, es 1. nas vendida. Además, habrá una ana Fondo Solidario de la Vivienda la ando superficialmente alización.

organize and together work every day to make the neighborhood a better place 1.2 Consideraciones generales to live.

GENERALIDADES

The care and maintenance of the home depend on you and your family... if you La casa se va deteriorando need to make expansions, it is recommended that you consult with specialists.

pintura,

s, vigas, pilares y nga su elasticidad en el tiempo,

es, pero en el caso o en diagonal, es ncomendado por cto o ingeniero que a

respec

en forma cuidamos y mantenemos constanteme lentamente. ¡VIVIR MEJOR!

•

el fabricante y

Como el sueño de la casa pro alcanzado por el resto de las fam • conjunto habitacional, es importan n MEJORAMIENTO Y AMPLIACIÓN DE LA VIVIENDA vecinos se organicen y juntos traten, l • barrio un mejor lugar para vivir. e ndo en cuenta su presupuesto, usted puede realizar terminaciones interiores, tales • cialmente pintura, estucos y la pinturas.

También puede cambiar artefactos sanitarios, por ejemplo, atos, lavamanos y ducha. Asimismo, puede redistribuir los espacios, modificando nyrbiques taladro livianos. cidad en elytiempo,

rillos. a realizar modificaciones o reparaciones interiores, tenga en cuenta que: por el fabricante y uecos, no

ivienda está formada por una te colocar ente y por tabiques no resistentes.

2. (evitan la

estructura

HUMEDAD EN LA VIVIENDA

estructura resistente le da ¿Cómo firmeza sea genera la humedad en el interior de la vivienda? da y está constituida por cadenas, losas, La humedad interior tiene su origen en factores como los siguient de cielos, s, vigas, muros y techumbres. Por eso, no ,i mit corteada o elimine estos elementos ya que y ga su seguridad. a pint ur a • Los materiales ualquier ampliación o modificación que tenga construyó la vivie repa sar l a er con la estructura de la vivienda debe contar con agua, la que a aprobación de la Dirección de Obras de su un año en eliminar cipalidad.

124acumulación de • La puede sacar, cambiar o mover los tabiques y elementos no estructurales, tales produce al cocinar puertas y separaciones livianas. ropa, produce hum

growth into social housing was brought in, the question of the regulation and framing of growth, so critical to PREVI and Levittown, immediately became relevant.

Two 1990s projects built under the housing policy in Santiago present early Chilean experiments with containing self-construction.

Torreones de la Reina, designed by famed architect and politician Fernando Castillo Velasco and completed in 1996, suggests one approach: here, units, representing slices of a larger donut, are arranged in towers, entered through interior courtyards. Residents were given the homes, paid for through a 132 UF1 direct subsidy and a 180UF mortgage, with only one complete floor; they then received special courses, like the “Attic expansion” courses offered by Levitt, in painting, electrical installations, and construction that would enable them to complete the second and third levels according to a rigid set of plans.272 Since completing the insides of the shells, however, many residents have also begun expanding into the perimeter gardens with precarious, unguided structures; as a result, while the inner courtyards of each tower, serving as access points to each unit, are kept in their original state, the outside of each “torreon” has devolved into an unpredictable, informal mess that makes the project, from the outside, resemble an informal shantytown, hardly an attractive neighborhood (Figure 121).273 The reverse approach was taken by architect Cristian Undurraga in his 1996 project Ermita de San Antonio, a social housing project constructed adjacent to one of Santiago’s most affluent neighborhoods. Here, it was decided, the façade should remain presentable and formal, while expansions should be hidden at the interior of the block.

Groups of forty units were thus placed along the perimeters of a series of urban blocks, the interior of each block split up by nonstructural walls into backyard spaces. The strategy certainly worked visually—the compound, despite some added balconies and garages, maintains a formal unity on the outside—but the interior of the block provided no skeleton or guidelines for expansions, which range from one-story sheds to precarious four-story towers (Figure 123). This early project, executed under the first iteration of the national housing policy, seems to think of expansion only secondarily, seeing it as a phenomenon to be assigned to a particular space rather than as an integral and well-anticipated part of the original physical and legal structure. Was there a way to combine the lessons of PREVI with legal tools to create a more flexible model for housing?

The failure of many of the small units constructed under the old policy to accommodate expansions, along with the propensity of beneficiaries to forego their mortgage payments, constituting a “hidden subsidy” by the government, fed into an overhaul of the housing policy that, beginning in 2003, established a new set of rules for social housing in Chile. Deciding against mortgages altogether, the Chilean government instead offered to subsidize the entire cost of a new home built by a private developer—up to 320UF—but with a catch: at least 36% of this home would need to be completed by the resident.274 Furthermore, the homes had to follow a specific set of government-set standards and were required to be handed over to residents accompanied with detailed plans for expansions, pre-approved by the municipality’s office of public works, that would allow them to grow from a starting size of 32 m2 to at least 55 m2, in rooms preferably already contained by the initial nucleus’ structure.275 This was a move that went in line with De Sotoan thinking; as a group of Catholic University of Chile policy researchers write, “a good expansion should generate additional value for the home… and for its neighborhood,” allowing the subsidy to “constitute a social investment.”276 To help further the social role of housing, the program also established a 1 the UF is a stable financial unit used in Chile that is correlated with inflation, equivalent to about $40USD 107

124 - Images from the Homeowner’s Manual distributed to residents under Chile’s new housing policy. These images come from the Atacama manual, applicable to the region where Quinta Monroy was built. It is interesting to note how the standard North American image of a family in front of a detached house has been replaced here with that of a happy family in front of a rowhouse. Also notable is the attempt to teach residents the difference between structural and nonstructural walls.

Are the cute cartoonish drawings overly paternalistic?

Barrio Consolidado

Fin PHS

125 63

| CARLOS AGUIRRE | RENATO D’ALENÇON | CATALINA JUSTINIANO | FRANCESCA FAVERIO

Lineamientos generales para la terminación y ampliación de las viviendas sociales dinámicas sin deuda

Reorganización

Ciclo de Vida de la Vivienda Social, en base a las dimensiones antes descritas

Plusvalía

ESQUEMA N° 1

Recambio

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Buenas Prácticas

Entrega Vivienda

Obtención Subsidio Postulación

Promoción

new “social habilitation plan,” designed, through workshops, classes, and distributed literature, to “generate and strengthen” the “productive and participative capacities” of poor residents, allowing residents to “themselves initiate a process of change directed at the improvement of their conditions of life and citizen participation.”277 But this transformation of squatters into citizens capable of helping themselves was not just the product of workshops; it was encoded into both the architectural and legal structures of the housing policy. Under the policy, groups of 10 to 150 poor families, upon receiving their newly completed homes, became part of a housing arrangement known as a Condominio de Vivienda Social, or CVS, under which residents, just as in a more affluent condominium setup, obtain the rights to their own units (nontransferable for an initial fiveyear period) while possessing a share, proportional to the appraised value of their own home, of the common domain.278 Much more than a semi-casual initiative, the CVS structure demands citizen participation, with an administrative committee composed of property owners and general meetings with mandatory attendance. It became the CVS’ responsibility to craft a special “co-property agreement” to define residents’ rights and responsibilities, collect dues, and enforce the mandatory purchase of fire insurance.279 In creating this framework, the policy hoped to initiate the families into a self-organized, participatory form of citizenship, leading them upward into the middle class.

Just as Levitt’s middle class homes had come with an owner’s manual that reinforced the importance of lawn care and value appreciation, Chilean social housing would also now come with special manuals prepared by the Ministry of Housing, using language very similar to that of Levitt and Sons. Along with care tips designed to help “your home’s value grow more every day” and lists of obligations—“share the common areas;” “nobody can appropriate the gardens;” “respect the rights of neighbors”—the manual suggests that residents use the provided pre-approved plans when undertaking expansions, and asks that extensions be structurally sound, “conserve the original architecture” in order to “appear more harmonious and not clash with the neighborhood,” conserve all structural elements, and be approved by the local Public Works office.280 Because of the shared ownership structure, residents in Social Condominiums are encouraged to view not just their own home but the entire complex as their investment and thus not only to make their own extensions of a high quality, but to police their neighbors; if a neighbor undertakes an inappropriate expansion, the manual explains, it is the right of the resident to denounce him to the department of public works, which “by law must receive the complaint and enforce the norms,” and “to order, if it is appropriate, the demolition of irregular construction.”281 In other words, under this policy, the responsibility of enforcing legal construction is now in the hands of the condominium community, and the government’s role is not to monitor the construction of expansions, as had been envisioned by the Junta de Vivienda at Caja de Agua in Peru, but simply to hire a wrecking ball when summoned by the residents themselves.

The new law immediately led to a very different kind of nucleus architecture. Because the policy preferred future expansions to be enclosed within an existing structure, the dominant typology became the construction of two-story, reinforced concrete block walls with some arrangement of solids and voids sandwiched in between. At Gubbins and Fernandez Architects’ 2003 Casas Chubi (“Chubi Houses”) in Santiago, so named because of their bright colors (Chubi is an M&M-like candy popular in Chile), this corresponded, within a 6 meter wide plot roughly divisible into a 2x3 grid, to three initial cubic volumes on the first floor and two on the second (Figure A78). Sandwiched as it was between structural 109

125 - This graph depicts the growth in value of housing over time under new law, which places an emphasis on housing as an investment.

126 - Modified homes at Casas Chubi, based on a grid of partially filled-in cubic volumes.

See also Figure A81.

127 - Modified homes at Mujer de Esfuerzo 128 - Plans for Mujer de Esfuerzo also include, by requirement, future expansions, shown here in green. Original plans above, expanded plans below. Source: Urbanismo Social Chile 128

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elements, the starter unit, built with blocks on the lower level and wood frame on the second floor, allowed a great deal of flexibility in filling in the remaining spaces, permitting many residents to fit in pieces of their former homes in an illegal campamento at Peñalolen into the new framework.282 Because half the front façade is left to the resident for completion, the neighborhood accommodates a great deal of variety; the overall impression is admittedly rather squat, the homes’ horizontality reinforced by the wide shoulder-length windows in the top floor bedroom, many of which—thanks to the light wood frame construction of the upper levels—have been easily modified by the residents, creating a hodgepodge effect in some cases. The initial expansions, as María José Castillo reports, did indeed follow the housing authority’s plans, but families soon outgrew the grid and began filling in the remainder of their 6x11 plots.283 A similar story has played out at Mujer de Esfuerzo, designed by Simonetti Arquitectos (Figure 128), which is based on a similar structure and two-story grid with missing pieces: residents have generally followed the rules set out in their joint property contract to build only in wood and light steel frames, but the small house size and prohibition on third floors have made filling in the designated backyard a practical inevitability.

Elemental: Social Housing Meets High Architecture Elemental, the self-proclaimed “do tank” that catapulted Chilean social housing onto the international architecture scene, arose as a response to what its founders saw as the major deficiency in the social housing being constructed in Chile. As fundamental believers in de Soto’s doctrine—Elemental frequently channels him in its interviews and writing,284 and their book claims that “it is crucial to see housing not only in its physical condition (as a shelter) but also to begin to understand it as an asset with the possibility of having ‘a parallel life as capital,’ as Hernando de Soto puts it”285—the architects of Elemental realized that the biggest issue with social housing was its failure to ensure steady gains in real estate value. Poorly dimensioned components, badly placed doors, inadequate bathrooms, and a lack of emphasis on neighborhood unity were only some of the issues that prevented these homes from “achiev[ing] a middle-class standard,” thus “compromising value appreciation.”286 Led by architect Alejandro Aravena, hosted under the auspices of Santiago’s Catholic University, and funded by the Chilean oil company Copec, Elemental began seeking opportunities to design social housing as a tool for investment.

While Elemental eventually expanded into true PREVI territory by holding an international design competition for Chilean public housing judged by such architectural superstars as Rafael Moneo, Jacques Herzog, and Jorge Silvetti and resulting in the design of seven housing projects across the country,287 it is their first project, Quinta Monroy, that is by far the most famous and significant. Meant as a replacement for the last remaining shantytown in Iquique, a coastal desert town near the Peruvian border, the project had to meet the challenge of rehousing a hundred families on a 5000 m2 plot of land while adhering to the new housing policy’s rules, or else risk relocating families to a faraway suburb. Given the required density, the one-family-per-plot model followed in most other social housing developments was out of the question; any tall structure, meanwhile, would fail to provide room for the expansions required by the law. Elemental thus proposed a stacked typology, taking as their departure point the two-story Latin American Colonial house, but making the house “porous” to indicate clear spaces for expansions to occur within the building volume.288 What emerged is a unique typology: on the ground floor, units consist of 6x6m volumes, 2.5 meters high, with a 3x6m void to one side and a back yard available for future expansion.

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129 - MVRDV’s Borneo Sporenburg Housing Project, The Netherlands. Source: jonestheplanner.co.uk 130 - View of Quinta Monroy as first built. Just as PREVI would never again look as clean and white as on opening day, so Aravena’s project ceased to be this photogenic once residents had settled in. Source: archdaily 131 - Section and Elevation of the Quinta Monroy housing. Source: archdaily 132 - Moisei Ginzburg’s proposal for a lowcost home made from prefab components, 1929 Moscow Green City competition.

133 - Elemental’s explanation for the “stacking” typology they developed. Source: Elemental

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In between the ground and second floor, a reinforced concrete slab runs the entire length of the block, ensuring structural stability. On the upper level, 3x6 two-story apartment “towers” (so named by Aravena) alternate with 3x6m voids meant to hold future expansions. Wooden staircases extending out from the second floor voids connect the ground plane with the duplex units above. As built, the estate looked fairly austere, a collection of minimal, industrially-produced boxes that channels the harsh geometrical aesthetic of Russian Constructivism, bringing to mind Moisei Ginzburg’s 1929 prefabricated, low-cost housing proposal for the Green City (Figure 132) or the work of the Dutch School, exemplified in MVRDV’s Borneo Sporenburg housing project (Figure 129).

The structures as built already seem to suggest certain rules for expansion, but there is ultimately one underlying rule that serves as the premise for the entire project: US$7,500 + US$1,000 = US$20,000. Put in words, “if to the initial 300 UF ($7500) of public investment and 30 UF ($750) of family investment were added, the result was a 1000 UF ($20,000) home.”289 What Aravena proposes to do with this architecture is not, as at Seaside, to create a walkable or sociable community; it is not, as in PREVI, to carefully support cultural practices; instead, Quinta Monroy’s beauty lies in the fact that it fulfills an investment equation. Without a design to make expansion easy, cheap, and safe, Aravena claims, the equation would have been 300 + 300 = 1000. Without a certain neutrality in the initial design to modulate individual interventions, the equation would have been 300 + 30 = 500. Instead, Elemental aims to unite the legal framework of the 2003 Chilean housing policy and the rules of real estate on the free market with an architecture specifically designed to gain value—Elemental later developed a set of rules to assess this, taking into account the location, ease of expansion, and potential to be grown into a middle-class standard home.290 Beyond the architecture alone, what makes the Elemental project special is the way in which the rules and patterns for expanding the Quinta Monroy homes were presented. The rules themselves, largely ignored in media presentations of the project, are similar to those in other Chilean projects; the joint ownership contract prohibits any modifications to the original structure, bans brick, concrete, and other heavy materials from being used on the second floor, and encourages residents to denounce their neighbors’ infractions to the condominium administration.291 Before settling into their new homes, residents were invited to a series of special workshops led by Elemental, with such titles as “Collective Space Workshop” and “A Neighborhood for my Family.” What did residents learn in these workshops? According to Aravena, beyond teaching families what materials and operations were permitted and forbidden292 and informing residents of their legal “responsibilities, rights, and obligations” under the joint property contracts,293 the workshops “sought to create awareness in the future owners regarding their responsibility in the value appreciation of the complex. We needed to explain exactly what aspects influence a rise in value and how to take advantage of them in the project.”294 In other words, residents were being taught how to be smart investors; yet that process ultimately involved more than just giving a few instructions, implying a much larger social shift. Describing a collective space workshop that encouraged residents to cooperate to maintain shared areas, Aravena explains that “Basically, we wanted to alter the collective mindset of the residents, replacing the operational logic of a squatter with that of a citizen… To induce this cultural change, we harped on the idea of value appreciation and the importance of the surrounding environment to value generation… the people quickly understood 113

134 - Quinta Monroy, Winter 2004 vs Summer 2006. The photo at right is very clearly staged, with residents posing at the thresholds of their units. Source for this and all photos on page: Elemental 135 - Quinta Monroy Residents visiting a local University to attend a Collective Space Workshop. “for many of the attendants, this was the first time they had been invited to a university” This was only the beginning of a long journey into legal citizenship and middle class status.

136 - Quinta Monroy Residents play with models of their future homes, testing out different possible expansions, during Aravena’s workshops.

that the best way to increase their home’s value did not necessarily mean making improvements directly to home itself but rather taking care of the neighborhood in which it is located”295 What Aravena’s workshops proposed, then, was nothing less than the transformation of informal squatters into legal citizens, and his treatment of the residents reflected this aspiration. The expansion workshops were held at a local university—many residents had never stepped foot in one before—and residents, dressed in their business best, were addressed

by Aravena, in his words, using “the same materials, concepts and terms … as in academic forums.”296 The image of slum residents at a university (Figure 135), well-dressed and civilized, leaning over meeting tables to draft their own visions for expanding their homes, could not be more different from the barefoot, exotic “Peruvian Boys” and crying barriada infants whom PREVI had envisioned as the beneficiaries of its gathering of architects (Figure 68). There was to be no Alexander-like study of indigenous customs here; the squatters needed to be converted into fully functional capitalist citizens, and Elemental’s architecture and associated workshops would accomplish the job. And the workshops did seem to work; as Aravena reported, the “three registered cases of owners that expanded with inappropriate materials … came from families that did not attend the workshops.” These cases were taken care of by the legal system of the project: “two were demolished and the other is facing a lawsuit for non-compliance with joint-ownership regulations.” But most importantly, “these cases provided an excellent opportunity for the community to test the legal tools available to them, and the case was specially publicized for educational purposes”297 The homes of Quinta Monroy’s residents, along with the joint property legal framework and the workshop component, were designed to “educate” them into becoming well-informed investor-citizens, capable of using legal tools to protect the value of their property and make its underlying equation a reality.

The property itself was carefully designed to limit future expansions in ways to favor the satisfaction of the investment equation. In the bottom floor units, reinforced concrete walls formed the perimeter of the initial unit, with a wide plywood-covered side opening permitting access to a clearly delineated future extension. The structure of the upper duplex units, which comprise two-thirds of the housing stock, is of particular importance: here, the structure of the built “tower” consisted of a C-shaped concrete block wall, open to the side facing the “void.” This side was covered over with sheets of plywood in anticipation of a future expansion.

The voids, three meters wide, were exactly the right size to fit Chilean predimensioned lumber, one of the only acceptable materials for expansion—just as at Levittown, the underlying dimensions of the homes were determined by an industry standard. This nucleus contained rooms that would be expensive for residents to install on their own—kitchens and bathrooms with plumbing—while leaving space for building bedrooms.

Because the joint property agreement explicitly prohibited modification of structural elements, and the C-shaped façade constitutes such an element, this permanently blocks an entire half of the façade from modification. This point is an essential one for Elemental: “among all the building systems, a wall structure is the most desirable from an urban point of view given its higher capacity to define public fronts,” much more so than “linear structures and grids or frames,” which “have lesser capacity to guarantee a framework for the individual interventions over time.”298 The idea of using the initial structure as a kind of armature or framework isn’t the only idea in which Aravena corresponds with architectural theorist John Habraken; just as Habraken had railed against mass-produced housing but advocated for industrially-produced “sup-

port structures” for individual interventions, Aravena too believes that the Elemental model is a unique case in which serial production of structural elements is acceptable. If Van Eyck, in his PREVI project, had intentionally steered clear of the mass production look, for Aravena, “industrialization can be used in good consciousness” because the “regularity” of the industrial-looking blocks defines a “neutral support, key to the appreciation of the investment.” If the criticisms of mass-produced housing blocks and Levittowns had centered on their monotony (although, of course, Levittown did not remain monotonous for long), Aravena claims that he has solved the problem once and for all by using monotony simply as a frame. In order for the complex to grow in real estate value, he writes, the “eventual poor quality” of the residents’ self-built “improvised expansions,” must be “surrounded by solid structure and separated by ‘rations’ of building,” ideally comprising half of the front façade.299 This “framing,” while limiting the creativity of the occupants, was also what allowed the architects to avoid giving their “clients” aesthetic guidance: “it was never our intention to control the aesthetic of the expansions,” writes Aravena.300 Instead, all they needed to be sure to do was “transmit the idea that the building [original nucleus] was a diversity organizer and therefore should not incorporate the characteristics of the individual additions but maintain some homogeneity.”301 The Housing Ministry’s Homeowner’s Manuals had asked residents to make their extensions harmonious with their neighborhood, but in Elemental’s project, diversity is perfectly acceptable because it can be moderated by the organizing structure.

Just as Seaside restricts all windows to a vertical proportion, Quinta Monroy homes are always required to have at least two vertical windows—not because of a window-specific rule, but simply because, as part of the original structural C, they constitute an element that cannot be modified. Just as the Levittown Ranch home’s structure discourages façade alterations, the Quinta Monroy windows remain a consistent element. In their report on social housing, a group of Santiago Catholic University professors writes that “the repetition of an element eventually generates a rhythm that gives unity, and, consequently, strengthens the identity and raises the value of the neighborhood.”302 In Elemental’s projects, windows constitute such an element. In fact, when asked what the main “rule” at Quinta Monroy is, Elemental architect Fernando Garcia-Huidobro responded that it is certainly the windows, whose “rhythm generates the image of a city.”303 This is what sets Quinta Monroy so clearly apart from Casas Chubi, where horizontal windows and an easily modifiable façade have created a sense of squatness and heterogeneity. From the very outset, even before user modifications began, Quinta Monroy already looked like an urban fabric much larger than it really was; Aravena’s choice of the word “tower” to describe the duplex apartments is in fact revealing of the larger effect they create, a feeling of height and grandeur. The flights of stairs swooping up to the second-floor units only accentuate the effect of verticality and themselves maintain an important rhythm. And the structural façade is not uniform or symmetrical; the strip containing the windows is clearly delineated in a lighter, smoother tone; the windows are positioned just slightly off center toward the void, as if reaching toward the future expansion; blocks to the outer edge of the tower are exposed, while the edge facing the expansions is smooth.

There is a very deliberate kind of design here, done with a very limited set of elements, to make the windows and façade the diversity organizer Aravena claims they ought to be. As a result, even after voids are filled in with heterogeneous expansions, the project maintains a visual unity—in fact, it revels in the contained messiness it enables. It is as if Seaside’s designers, instead of writing a strict code, had built on each lot half of a traditional Key West house with its vertical windows, gable roof, and porch, and then hoped that this would be enough to establish a particular urban identity 115

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regardless of what was added to the second half.

One of the key images that Aravena uses to illustrate the workings of Quinta Monroy, Figure 137, is a before-and-after image of the project that reveals the kind of architectural evaluation at work here. It is certainly not one that occurs on a purely aesthetic level—neither the austere, bare-bones “before,” nor the resident-built, makeshift “after” view of the building, carefully staged as they both are, looks like a spread from a high design magazine. Instead, in line with its aim to use “value gain as a way to redefine quality”304 and its placement of the equation directly below the sequence of images, Elemental seems to suggest that architecture ought to be assessed in the same way as a stock option. Aravena wants us to see the value increase. The “before” shot now appears not as a barrack but as a strong and promising economic framework, its carefully defined voids holding the promise of future upward mobility.

The structure is not yet activated and stands lonely, the only character on the scene being a lone street lamp; there is no privacy or enclosure— the unfilled spaces are see-through; the long, black shadows and dark windows emphasize the emptiness of the voids. The “after” shot, on the other hand, is a reverie of color and life, a celebration of $12,500 in appreciated value; the streetlamp has disappeared, to be replaced by a cute lantern. The voids have been filled in; a makeshift picket fence, painted barn red, now defines the property line; and the original outward-swinging window on the second floor has been replaced with a sliding one, leading to a façade arrangement of four unique windows, each one of a different size and style and featuring its own curtain arrangement. Yet this diversity, the photograph seems eager to show, has been contained, absorbed, embraced by the underlying investment equation, becoming part of the home’s steady ascent toward middle class status, toward harmonious wholesomeness filling what was once a void. The shot, and the narrative, wouldn’t be complete without the three children—perfectly color-coordinated and expertly framed by photographer Cristobal Palma— standing in front of the house, gazing up at a tennis ball that hovers, with mathematical precision, on the dividing line between the formal and selfbuilt portions of the house; the boy on the right contemplates it, hand on chin. The ball seems to have dropped from the sky—in fact, it seems that, much like the original units themselves, the ball has been dropped with mathematical precision onto the site. Now the ball is in the court of the inhabitants and their children, who will play the game themselves within the rules and framework set by Elemental.

The initial expansions of the Quinta Monroy homes largely followed Aravena’s plan. He was happy to report that fewer than 10% of all expansions broke the “natural logic of growth” he had envisioned,305 and that in a survey, more than eighty percent of families had said they considered their homes pretty or very pretty.306 Once the main voids were filled, however, growth began to take other, less predictable forms. Downstairs residents could expand into the backyards, but once that was complete, by the joint ownership regulations, the written permission of the upstairs neighbors to block rear windows was required for further vertical expansion. Similarly, upstairs neighbors seeking to build over the patio on the upper floors needed the consent of their downstairs neighbors. Lila, whose large family required additional bedrooms, reached an agreement with her downstairs neighbor: he constructed a two-story extension in the backyard, leaving an interior “patio” to give light to both units (Figure 142). She, meanwhile, constructed a fourth-floor extension (the maximum permissible height) that cantilevers several feet over the back wall of the original house (Figure 140). Meanwhile, Patricio, a duplex unit resident, refused to let his downstairs neighbor build an extension into the backyard that, he says, will unfairly block his kitchen window (Figure 139)307.

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137 - Elemental’s key image to illustrate the centrality of value appreciation to the entire project.

138 - Images of the built project ten years after completion. Note that while the contracts have ensured that all expansions are indeed done in light materials, once residents have filled in the initial “voids,” expansions in other directions have become messy and far less regulated by the original structure. Is Aravena’s model still sound? Photographs by author.

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With the initial voids now almost all filled, these kinds of inter-neighbor decisions are what is guiding further growth in the project. If Aravena’s workshops fulfilled their roles, then these well-informed citizens should be capable of making these kinds of “investment” decisions about their homes on their own—and, indeed, the legal structures of the joint property agreement have given them the right to negotiate for what they see as fair deals. But in the absence of any actual rules for how backyards ought to be built—what Santiago architect Rodrigo Perez de Arce calls the missing “aesthetic norm”—the extensions can get messy and begin to resemble the very shantytowns the project had sought to eliminate; the only saving grace is that they are largely hidden behind the much betterthought-out facades.308 As unfortunate as Quinta Monroy’s backyard extensions are, even more upsetting is the reality of Quinta Monroy’s public spaces. Though the ball-throwing boys in Aravena’s publicity photo stand on a paved surface, in reality the yards in the development are largely dusty, unpaved and unkempt. It seems that Aravena’s push to get residents to invest in their homes has indeed paid off; Elemental’s facilitation of resident participation in maintaining shared spaces—what they themselves call extended “living rooms”309—however, has flopped. The four courtyards that the Quinta units are organized around are nothing more than dusty parking lots, a far cry from the original proposals of gardens, playgrounds, and plazas. With neither the original backyards, paved with concrete slabs, nor the dusty courtyards containing any green whatsoever, Quinta Monroy is an extremely desolate place. Part of the issue, according to neighborhood leader Praxedes Campos, is simply that the public spaces are not regulated by any contract.310 Justin McGuirk attributes the total lack of quality public space in the project—ironic given the architecture’s urban aspirations—to Chileans’ “refusal to think communally,”311 while architect Rodrigo Perez de Arce traces the root of this issue to a lack of community among the inhabitants. The building of community, in his view, is made difficult by the fact that unlike PREVI, where families stayed for generations, Quinta Monroy can be a transitory place. The stable structure, which survived the 2010 8.8 magnitude earthquake without a crack, the fame of the project, and its central location all contribute to the complex’s value appreciation, and many families have already sold their homes, pocketed the cash, and moved on.312 Still others have moved elsewhere and kept the Quinta homes as an investment; by one estimate, a third of the homes are actually uninhabited and boarded up, owned by families waiting for the right time to sell.313 In an ironic twist of fate, by focusing so much on housing as an investment, Aravena may have turned his project into the lower-class Chilean equivalent of a Manhattan luxury apartment, a structure so catered to acting as an investment that it ceases to be a home.

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139 - Patricio’s home at Quinta Monroy.

Patricio has followed Aravena’s expansion plan almost to the letter. The bottom floor of the initial void is a spacious living room with TV, while the top floor has two bedrooms. Source for all images on page: photograph by author.

140 - Lila’s home at Quinta Monroy has expanded one floor above the originally intended volume. While Aravena’s initial facade regulates this from the front, the house presents a very shantytown-like and somewhat prevarious appearance from the back, suggesting there might be a need for more control.

141 - Unlike a crusading modernist, Aravena not only tolerates but even invites the use of traditional or kitschy elements. Here, a traditional baluster has replaced the mass-produced standard one.

142 - One of the advantages of the Joint Property Contract is that all expansions are by requirement negotiated. For example, this view of Lila’s backyard from her third-floor balcony shows a little patio/lightwell that was kept between her home and her downstairs neighbor’s backyard expansion. In return for keeping the lightwell, she allowed him to build up to a second floor and he allowed her to cantilever her fourth-floor extension above.

Agreements like this require both parties to sign, and legal action may result if the contract is violated.

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After Quinta Monroy Elemental has continued to operate in the realm of social housing, but ten years later, a Quinta Monroy is much harder to build for a simple reason: Chile has become a much more affluent country. As the government’s housing subsidy has steadily increased, a home as incomplete as the one at Quinta Monroy has become less necessary. In fact, when given a choice, most residents in later workshops with Elemental much preferred a model with a complete façade to one that they were responsible for completing.314 This development actually upsets Aravena: “I prefer to go to an environment where there’s not enough money, and instead of producing a tiny house you build half of a good one […] And by doing so you’re not only making a more efficient use of the scarce resources, but also creating an open system that allows for families to keep on adding in the way they want.”315 As a result, Elemental has tried hard to make all its projects half-built homes; the strongest expression of this is in the Villa Verde housing for lumber company workers, where residents were literally given half of a classic pitched-roof house to complete (Figure 146). As Justin McGuirk writes, Aravena finds the idea of a housing project that does not allow for some resident customization problematic: “he wants to see the residents’ input reflected on the buildings’ skin.”316 At Renca, a 2008 project in the Santiago region, when it became clear that the subsidies would be enough to fund the construction of full units, Aravena decided that it should now be windows that served as the user-customizable elements.

To “confront” monotony here, he explains, “we had to identify the elements that the families could modify and in this way have a margin of ‘customization’ in the dwelling”317 Thus, unlike at Quinta Monroy, at Renca the facades above the ground floor were built in wood to facilitate customization, and the “expansion workshops” at Renca featured classes in which residents designed their own facades and windows, taping their drawings onto physical models (Figure 142). The repeating element to guarantee a steady pattern in this project was not the window but the rhythm of three-story-high rectangular volumes sandwiched between two-story-tall reinforced concrete structural walls, an arrangement that highlights each individual home volume much more than at Quinta Monroy (Figure 145).

What are we to make of Aravena’s insistence that half the home be incomplete, against the wishes of residents and against the now-real possibility of giving poor Chileans a complete home right from the start?

As Justin McGuirk explains, Aravena’s notion of social housing as an open platform for individual innovation is at the center of his philosophy, representing a “fashionable Silicon Valley rhetoric permeating the urbanism of Latin America.”318 Aravena is interested in coding the rules for a building game, not in designing its final result.

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143 - Model homes at the Elemental Renca project decorated by residents juxtaposed with an image of the actual project. Because there were no voids to fill in here, the windows became the zone for residents to customize.

Source: Elemental 144 - At Renca, the backyard becomes the space for informal expansion; this is problematic, as it means many rooms get left without light as backyard sheds grow in height. Source: Photograph by Author.

145 - Note the strong rhythm established by the vertical window strips in this project.

Source: Ana Cristina Vargas 146 - At Villa Verde, Elemental quite literally constructed half of a house for workers to fill in. Source: arcdaily

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Conclusion

The Rule Writers

For centuries, architecture and urbanism have been defined by implicit and explicit rules. In the realm of the vernacular, representing the lion’s share of the built environment, typologies—the Cape Cod house, the urban townhouse, the Southern Bungalow, the Latin American Courtyard House, the barriada and campamentos’ informal dwellings, as well as, to some extent, the Gothic cathedral—came with their own, often unspoken “rules” for design, evolved locally over many generations (though these rules could certainly respond to top-down legislation as well—the Law of the Indies, which generated the typologies present in most Latin American cities, is the most obvious example). Their often-anonymous builders are the heroes of architectural theorists like Viollet-Le-Duc and John Ruskin, who celebrated the collective creations of craftsmen. In the realm of high design, Classical treatises from Vitruvius onward have long provided rules for harmonious architectural composition rooted in time-tested tradition. Those architects who were most successful at following the rules went on to write their own variations on them in the forms of treatises and pattern books. Inigo Jones, the architect who introduced Classicism to England, for instance, spent many years learning from and drawing designs from Virtuvius, Alberti, Palladio, and Vignola before writing his own influential treatise.319 In nineteenth-century America, as Kenneth Jackson explains, pattern books became the tool for architects to gain credibility “as a cultivated and educated practitioner.”320 By Daniel Reiff’s estimate, up to three-fourths of middle class American homes by the end of the century were the products of carpenters and builders copying and emulating the designs found in pattern books put out by more sophisticated practitioners.321 Together, these rule-based approaches created the townscapes of now-famous historic city centers, ensuring great diversity and user-generated randomness within a certain common conformity.

The rules-based approach to architecture began to shift in the twentieth century, as industry replaced craft and the architectural discourse shifted toward the avant-garde. As Alan Colquhoun writes, enormous social changes—industrialization, changes in patterns of settlement and work, novel materials, and new models for land development—“necessitated a change in architectural rules,”322 while new theories of expression prioritized novelty over respect for tradition. In the modern situation, he wrote in 1976, unlike in the past, “rule systems tend to be invented by individual architects and tend to attain only a limited degree of acceptance. What in previous epochs was part of the langue has become a function of the parole. … The rule system can even extend to the behavior of people within a building… thus annexing to the architectural sphere something which, in earlier periods, belonged to an external rule system (rules of social behavior.)”323 123

147 - a nineteenth-century Pattern Book suggests several designs for a home. Source: Art Institute Chicago 148 - Serlio’s Treatise on the orders, one of many books that attempted to define rules for Classicism. Source: Wikipedia 149 - Le Corbusier’s Five Points constitute a kind of rule system. Drawing by Joe Korniewicz, general-expressions.blogspot.com

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These individually invented rules are in some ways more powerful than their precedents, engaging, as Seaside and Quinta Monroy attempt to do, the sphere of social behavior, but their individuality can cause enormous problems. What happens when every architect feels the need to reinvent the wheel and write new rules in order to gain legitimacy? And what happens when incompatible rule systems collide? When a modernist master believes in the social efficacy of rules his architecture’s residents don’t conform to? As a prime example of this kind of incompatibility, Colquhoun brings up the Pessac estate. Le Corbusier had used his own rules, based on his Five Points, to design the workers’ homes. Every one of these rules was deliberately formulated in opposition to Classical rules: ribbon windows contradicted the classical aedicule; the pilotis reverse the classical podium.324 Yet the project took an unexpected turn when Le Corbusier’s idiosyncratic rules clashed with the “contradictory rule system” used in residents’ transformation of the project according to petit-bourgeois norms.325 Today, the use of rules is even more individualized; if almost all architects and builders had formed the pool of adherents to the rules of Classicism and vernacular traditions in the nineteenth century and a smaller pool followed Le Corbusier’s Five Points in the twentieth, today’s avant-garde architects, especially starchitects of the Zaha and Gehry caliber, are practically defined by the fact that they write their own rules.

Some might argue that it is precisely the ability to boldly break and reinvent rules in a society so obsessed with codes and protocols that makes for Architecture with a capital “A.” An important new tool that has allowed designers to easily play with their own rules is parametric computer design. As Fabian Scheurer explains in his essay “Signal to Noise,” in parametric modeling, “the designer no longer describes a finished design but defines the rules that construct this design.”326 The idea isn’t new—it has been around since the advent of the computer, and Christopher Alexander, with his belief in the power of pre-programmed patterns to generate human environments, was one of its earliest proponents—but the computational power to execute it, and the framework within which it is used today, certainly are. By using a computer program with flexible outcomes, designers are able to inflect their creations with just the right degree of randomness while staying within a typology of their own definition. In the world of blobs, organic shapes, and irregular Grasshopper-generated tessellations, the artist-architect sets rules, uses the computer to generate a set of variations on them, and scrolls through the possibilities to decide on the one ultimate form that will bear her name. There is no longer a need for a pool of adherents to generate variations on broadly disseminated rules; this is the job of the computer.

In this context, the projects undertaken by Aravena and Duany Plater-Zyberk represent fundamental breaks from the trend, proposing the return of the architect to the role of rule-writer on a large scale. These architects are not content with writing rules for their own computers or fellow highbrow architects. Instead of avoiding the unpredictable randomness inherent in outsourcing rule-based design to other designers, builders, and residents, they revel in it; indeed, their polemic against the status quo depends on it. Seaside, as the antidote to standard suburban development, yearns to restore the vernacular building traditions, largely forgotten by today’s developers, that generated the urban fabrics of diverse individual homes found in the American South. Meanwhile, Elemental’s projects, presented as a feasible alternative to both uncontrolled slums and modernist housing blocks, require the individual interventions of residents for Aravena’s vision to be complete—otherwise, they are just as monotonous as the projects they stand to critique.

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150 - Images like this one have become ubiquitous in the media, but what is the role of architects in improving shantytowns? Source: gfmd.org 151 - Equipo Mazzanti’s Biblioteca Parque España, located in a slum of Medellín, has been enormously successful, but it is precisely because it breaks with the rules of the neighborhood instead of following them. While it may have an enormous positive social effect, it is still a lone modernist building. Could, and should, an architectural intervention be made here on the level of rules as well? Source: esferapublica.org 152 - Images like these are all too common: endless sprawl, driven largely by economic formulas rather than human-centered considerations, eating up the American landscape.

Source: travel-studies.com 153 - Unlike Seaside, DPZ’s Kentlands project s a permanent residential community and a successful suburb of Washington, DC. It presents an excellent walkable alternative to sprawl, but is the solution scalable? After all, Kentlands is still fairly affluent and homogenous. Source: DPZ 154 - Rem Koolhaas’ collage exposes the ultimate incompatibility of the rule systems used by starchitects in creating their masterpieces.

Source: archi.ru

These architects thus take a very different approach than academic and avant-garde architecture’s general pattern of interaction with the phenomena of sprawl and slums. In the middle class subdivisions that represent the battleground of Duany’s New Urbanism, economic rules rather than optimal design considerations govern the bland, developer-led construction of suburban housing, shopping malls, and offices.

High Architecture’s engagement with suburban sprawl, beyond Venturi Scott Brown’s Levittown and Las Vegas explorations, is minimal at best. By inserting itself into the existing development paradigm and rule structure, the Seaside model attempts to have a larger aesthetic impact than purely a building could. In the Global South, meanwhile, much new construction is occurring informally in the kinds of slums, shantytowns, favelas, and barriadas that Elemental’s projects seek to replace. Despite their enormous infrastructural, economic, and health issues, these “self-generating,” “spontaneous” urbanizations, governed by the rules of necessity but otherwise completely lacking in any sort of regulation, are more than ever being held up as objects for aesthetic appreciation—the “favela fetish”—while the deSotoan discourse paints them as an appropriate capitalist solution. Informal settlements, especially those in Latin America, have seen an increasing number of architectural interventions in recent years—from Koolhaas’ favela paint jobs to Mazzanti’s libraries in Medellín slums to Herzog and de Meuron’s shantytown sports facility—but these interventions have, in large part, sought to generate change by breaking existing rules rather than working with them. Mazzanti’s Biblioteca Parque España, for example, is a successful intervention precisely because it is based on rules so alien to the architecture of the neighborhood, an iconic modern design dropped into a user-generated barrio fabric. Aravena’s project is entirely different: his architecture actively intervenes in that fabric, setting rules to control it and its residents.

What is it that makes these rules more likely to be successful on a larger scale compared to those Le Corbusier used at Pessac? One could argue that DPZ’s success lies in its ability to mask the communities it designs as historic towns and its notions of walkability and community as universal values; the comfortable familiarity of the townhouse or the Southern bungalow typologies make the code much easier, and more natural, to follow while reinforcing the desired social behavior. One could argue that Aravena’s housing works because, as he says, expansions that go against his rules are “self-excluded” by the form he designs. But there is another model at play here, an undercurrent through both these projects: this study has attempted to demonstrate that that missing link is the Levittown model of a purposefully designed, standardized nucleus paired with a set of legal and social rules that originate in the idea of the single family home as an investment. At Levittown, this combination is meant to achieve the desired outcome of the creation of middle-class homeowners resistant to communism; through sets of rules encoded in both structure and covenants, homeowners’ energy is channeled into customizing their home interiors and tending to the lawns and gardens that reinforce the pastoral identity of their suburb. The ultimate effect is to achieve a balance between individual expression and conformity while guaranteeing an accompanying rise in real estate values.

The Levittown model, this study has argued, provides a base case and a framework for user-modifiable housing projects that double as tools for the enforcement of social agendas. PREVI, the stated precedent for DPZ and Aravena, was an attempt—doomed, unfortunately, by the collapse of the government—to design a Levittown-like system for Lima, to roll out tens of thousands of cheap, expandable homes with standardized components while shaping barriada dwellers into formal citizens. While PREVI failed to meet its initial goals, it did provide important launching

points for later architects: Van Eyck and Stirling demonstrated how structure could encode rules in a Peruvian barriada context, directly feeding into Elemental’s work, while Alexander had his first opportunity at PREVI to develop A Pattern Language, which would become an essential inspiration for Seaside. A major purpose of the pattern and typology-based Seaside urban code, enforced by property deed, is to generate a walking, socially active citizen by making the home he builds for himself (or, as the case may be, commissions for himself) as sociable with its neighbors as its occupant. Seaside’s buildings, united by common typological features, engage in a polite conversation with each other; they are open to the public realm of the street; they encourage, as Neil Levine analyzes so well, a different kind of visuality. Another development in this vein, Village Homes uses its deed restrictions to enforce pro-environmental citizenship. At Elemental, the agenda is the fulfillment of a very specific investment equation, enabling the transformation of residents from squatters to legal citizens with capital, and this is supported by the legal system of the Social Condominium and the Shared Property Contract. The randomness and unpredictability of squatter self-build are carefully framed between slices of regulating façade, like stable long-term bonds that enable their owners to undertake less predictable investments.

It takes a particular aesthetic appreciation or reformist inclination to want to comply with Le Corbusier’s rules at Pessac. By encoding their rules in covenants, deeds, and restrictions, elements that are traditionally associated with the maintenance of real estate values and neighborhood identity, however, Levitt, DPZ, and Aravena incentivize cooperation with an economic benefit. Not everyone understands the appeal of the machine aesthetic; most everyone can understand the appeal of an aesthetically unified neighborhood that rises in value. The rules are embraced for that very reason: Levittown’s residents launched a fierce campaign to keep the original covenants in place when they began to expire, while a cohort of Seaside residents filed a lawsuit against the Seaside Community Development Corporation for making changes to the code that, they felt, might compromise the quality of the neighborhood.

Moreover, because the social makeup of these communities is selective from the beginning and continually reinforced, compliance with the rules becomes a part of residents’ social identities such that it behooves them to conform—in the case of Elemental, the legal structure even makes fellow neighbors enforcers of the norm. If Le Corbusier had famously said of Pessac “it is always life that is right and the architect who is wrong,” in these communities, rules are meant to become one with life because they form such a strong pairing with each project’s social aspects. The story of each project is tied, to some degree, to a collective narrative, and each project emphasizes some aspect of “community.” At Levittown, the myth is of newly suburban GIs slowly growing themselves into a middle class community; the Levittown “Our Town” booklet demonstrates the pride that Levittown owners felt about the Levittown homeowner being “on his way up.” Similarly, Elemental’s project, as a replacement for a shantytown, is meant to collectively increment its squatter residents up the class ladder, each improvement they make to their home and neighborhood an additional step toward middle-class status. Both these projects would probably lose their power—and their linear narrative—if implemented as mixed-income communities. Seaside was originally intended to be more diverse, but as a real estate investment, it has appreciated even more than any of the other projects, to the point that its “residents,” the vacationing families who spend some weeks there each summer, are a homogenous and increasingly wealthy crew.

Levittown achieved an enormous scale because it debuted in a historical era when a homogenous middle-class, white American market made its 127

model feasible; but can these models apply at a larger scale than niche communities?

The aspirations of Aravena and Duany Plater-Zyberk ultimately go far beyond the demonstration communities they have built. Just as early modernists had dreamed on an enormous scale, these rule-writers both propose nothing less than a recodification of the built environment. For Andrés Duany, “scale is a prime problem, but it is also THE reality of modernity. It cannot be avoided. If we return only to the crafting of cities, what we do may be of high quality but it will not be important… what we must craft now are not the communities, but the programs that create them quickly and automatically, … Once we control the protocols they can be made to yield the communities humans desire.327 Aravena proposes to work at a similar scale: “People are moving towards cities quickly and massively … the scale and speed needed to accommodate properly these new city dwellers requires innovative knowledge and particularly bold strategies… Efficiency and economy of means will be achieved by a balanced combination of a closed, rigid, centralized initial construction giving way to open, incremental and decentralized interventions afterwards.328 These are impressively broad visions indeed, but they raise a major question: even if they require the creativity of many hands to be completed, Seaside and Quinta Monroy are still decidedly the products of their architectural masters, and their models are hardly universally applicable. This is not quite Aldo Rossi’s city of historical typologies; both these projects have urban aspirations, and they are collective works, but there is a master rule-writer and a rule implementation mechanism in a way that there never was in a vernacular town or a barriada. Ironically, the very socioeconomic homogeneity that makes these projects’ rule structures successful also seems to rule out the possibility of them becoming real, complex cities.

At the same time, however, Aravena and DPZ would certainly argue that their projects, as a result of their integration of user participation, are actually much more complex and far closer to real cities than any other architect-designed communities. This is an environment of controlled “messy vitality,” to use a phrase coined by Robert Venturi.

If for Le Corbusier, the immutable built form was the embodiment of the architect’s ideal, Aravena and DPZ work at a different level; their ideals are embedded in the entire system of the rules-based project, of which the final, built-out form is just one component. The actual built gingerbread homes at Seaside may clash with Duany’s taste, but the important thing is that they have been co-opted by an underlying code into fulfilling the desired urban and social functions--what Duany calls a “tool” for making good urbanism. Aravena makes no attempt to hide the ugliness of self-built expansions at Quinta Monroy; the beauty is in the way that the underlying nucleus tempers and stabilizes these expansions, allowing the homes to be investment “tools.” This notion of architecture as a “tool” is fundamentally different from the modernist conception of functionalism; economic appreciation or creation of walkability were certainly not considered “functions” by the early European modernists. The idea that the architecture of a home can be a machine for something beyond simply living, and that architects can encode this function through rules, is extremely powerful. Seaside and Quinta Monroy prove that architects do

not need to singlehandedly build entire neighborhoods in order to guarantee a certain functionality; they can plug rules, along with accompanying legal structures, into existing phenomena of suburban development and squatter self-build. This model goes hand in hand with the paradigm of Neoliberalism. It is no longer possible today to deploy enormous topdown architectural projects--often the most that can be built is literally half a house--but it is possible to tap into the rules and economic frameworks that define the current incarnation of Capitalism.

Ultimately, these projects suggest the foundations for a new pragmatic rules-based architectural approach to tackling the urban issues of the twenty-first century. If architects are to be involved in changing patterns of urbanization, it is clear that they need to return to the role of rule-setters in some capacity; there is no way professional architects can themselves design every suburban home and social housing unit. If architectural rules, embedded in structure or in legal instruments, really can be used to turn poor squatters into middle-class citizens or encourage suburbanites to socialize and walk, this suggests a great deal of untapped potential. Crafting this new approach requires cutting the umbilical cord to modernism, with its necessarily Eurocentric historiographies and outdated ideals, and establishing new, equally weighted precedents like Levittown that provide a model for operation within the contemporary economic paradigm. It requires melding together lessons learned from Seaside and Quinta Monroy. Can New Urbanist neighborhoods finally become more diverse if they adopt an Elemental-like strategy of providing a partially completed home? Can housing projects like Quinta Monroy more effectively control expansions by setting rules based in very familiar historic typologies and construction methods? Can mass production be used, as at Levittown and Elemental, to allow for customization rather than conformity? New technology has given us unprecedented powers for the creation of systems based on user input. Instead of using technology to further alienate themselves from the masses, what if architects put it to use, allowing buildings to respond in real time to users’ needs? This would not be the hardwired approach that Alexander takes at PREVI nor the playful, ironic flexibility advocated by avant-garde groups like Archigram in the 60s; instead, it would be a truly adaptable system with a social purpose.

Creating such a system requires a fundamental shift in our way of thinking, but as the structure of our social and informational networks switches to an open-source model, it is the only way for architecture to stay relevant at the scale of urbanization the world is currently experiencing.

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Endnotes

21 Robert M. Fogelson, Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870-1930, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 78, quoted in Harris, Second Suburb, 239.

Renee Y. Chow, Suburban Space: The Fabric of Dwelling 1 N. J. Habraken, Supports: An Alternative to Mass Hous- 22 ing [Dragers en de mensen.] (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), (Berkeley, Calif.: London : University of California Press, 2002), 31.

43-44.

23 Quoted in David L. Ames and Linda F. McClelland, His2 Alejandro Aravena and Andrés Iacobelli, Elemental : toric Residential Suburbs: Guidelines for Evaluation and DocumenManual De Vivienda Incremental Y Diseno Participativo = Incre- tation for the National Register of Historic Places (Washington, DC: mental Housing and Participatory Design Manual (Ostfildern : Hatje U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service,[2002]).

Cantz, 2012), 41.

24 Quoted in Longstreth, “The Levitts,” 134.

3 Felipe Hernandez, Beyond Modernist Masters : Contemporary Architecture in Latin America (Boston: Birkhauser, 2010), 14. 25 Abraham Levitt, William Levitt, and Alfred Levitt, Levittown (New York: Levitt and Sons, July 1948), quoted in Rosalyn 4 David Harvey, “The New Urbanism and the Communi- Fraad Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the tarian Trap,” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 1 (Winter/Spring, 1997). Suburbs Happened (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000), 143 Levitt and Sons, Homeowners Guide: Some Informa5 Author’s interview with Diego Torres, Santiago, Chile, Au- 26 tion for Residents of Levittown to Help them Enjoy their New gust 2014.

Homes,[1952]).

6 Andrés Duany, “Assuaging Youthful Indiscretions: GenLevittown Property Owners Association, “Our Town— tlemen Rediscovering Urbanism,” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 24 27 Levittown,” 1951, 12-13. Source: LHC (2006).

“Summary of Covenants and Restrictions on Levittown 7 Andrés Duany, “New Urbanism | the Case for Looking Be- 28 yond Style,” Metropolis (April, 2011), http://www.metropolismag. Ranch Homes,” in Lynn Mataresse, History of Levittown, New York com/April-2011/New-Urbanism-The-Case-for-Looking-Beyond- (Levittown, NY: Levittown Historical Society, 1997).

Style/.

29 Levittown Property Owners Association, “Our Town— Levittown,” 1957, 72. Source: LHC 8 Ibid.

Jenni Buhr, “Levittown as a Utopian Community,” in 9 Andrés Duany, “Why Write Codes?” CharretteCenter. 30 net: Online compendium of free information for the community Barbara M. Kelly (ed.), Suburba Re-examined (Westport, CT: Greenbased urban design process, May, 2003, http://www.charrettecen- wood Press, 1989), 72. ter.net/charrettecenter.asp?a=spf&pfk=7&gk=220&plk=606.

31 Harris, Second Suburb, 239.

10 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (New York: Dover Publications, 1985), 124-5 32 Barbara M. Kelly, Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 68.

11 Le Corbusier, Towards, 127.

LPOA “Our Town,” 1951, 12.

12 Philippe Boudon, Lived-in Architecture: Le Corbusier’s 33 Pessac Revisited, English language ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972), 2.

34 Vladimir Rus, “The Magna Charta of Levittown,” Levittown Tribune, May 9, 1997, 12. Source: LHC 13 Le Corbusier, Towards 127.

35 Kelly, Expanding, 63.

14 Le Corbusier, Towards, 263.

36 David Kushner, Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and 15 Clare Christine Cooper and University of California, the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb (New York: Berkeley. Institute of Urban & Regional Development, The House Walker & Co., 2009), 45. as Symbol of Self, Vol. 120 (Berkeley: Institute of Urban & Regional Development, University of California, 1971), 7, 16.

37 Kelly, Expanding, 164.

16 Justin McGuirk, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in 38 A S Freed, “Home Building by Private Enterprise,” adSearch of a New Architecture (London ; New York: Verso, 2014), 75. dress before the Cambridge, MA League of Women Voters Feb 26 1936 cited in Dean, Home Ownership: Is it Sound? (New York: Harp17 quoted in Ted Anthony, “Desperately Seeking Levit- er and Brothers, 1945), 4. town’s Original ‘Look’” The Indianapolis Star, January 12, 1997, H9. Source: Levittown History Collection, Levittown Public Library 39 Buhr, “Levittown as a Utopian,” 72. (henceforth LHC) 40 “The Cape Cod Cottage.” Architectural Forum (March, 18 Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburban- 1949): 98 - 106. ization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 191, 204.

41 Kelly, Expanding, 65 19 RIchard Longstreth, “The Levitts, Mass-Produced Hous- 42 es, and Community planning in the Mid-twentieth Century” in Dianne Suzette Harris, Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania (Pitts- 43 burgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 130.

44 20 Ibid., 125.

Baxandall and Ewen, Picture Windows, 132.

Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 239.

Harris, Second Suburb, 219.

45 National Plan Service, “Select Homes: Horine Lumber Suburb, NY Times, June 12, 2005 Company,” Delphos, Ohio, 1956, 13.

74 Levitt and Sons, Homeowners Guide: Some Informa46 Joseph E Howland, “Good Living is NOT Public Living,” tion for Residents of Levittown to Help them Enjoy their New in House Beautiful (January, 1950): 30.

Homes,[1952]).

47

House Beautiful (January, 1950): 40.

75

“Levitt Service Policy,” LHC.

48

House Beautiful (January, 1950): 38.

76

LPOA , “Our Town,” 1951, 12.

49 Sarah Clark, “A Brief History of Glazing,” http://ezinearticles.com/?A-Brief-History-Of-Double-Glazing&id=6866863.

77 “Same Rooms, Varied Decor: Clever Interiors Win Prizes 50 “Is there a Picture in Your Picture Window?” House Beau- in Identical Levitt Houses” Life, January 14, 1952. LHC tiful, Jan 1950, 35.

78 “New Look for a Look-Alike Wins an Award at Levittown,” 51 Diane Harris, AB Harris Second Suburb, 84.

New York Times, November 19, 1967. LHC 52

“The Utts of Levittown.” Newsday 8 Oct. 1949, sec. M: 2. 79 Harry E Burroughs, “How to Square Your Kitchen,” Thousand Lanes 6, no. 1, 4. LHC 53 Peter Bacon Hales, “Levittown: Documents of an Ideal American Suburb,” University of Illinois at Chicago, (accessed Janu- 80 “Cape Cod with an Oriental Touch,” Thousand Lanes 6, ary 10, 2015) www.uic.edu/~pbhales/Levittown.html no. 3, 18. LHC 54 Neil Levine, “Questioning the View: Seaside’s Critique 81 Jim Wheaton, “A Leavitt—Not Levitt Finished Attic of the Gaze of Modern Architecture,” in David Mohney and Keller Room,” Thousand Lanes 1, no. 2, 14-15. LHC Easterling, Seaside: Making a Town in America (New York, N.Y.: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), Mohney Seaside, 244.

82 “Improve!” Advertisement, Thousand Lanes 6, no. 1, 9.

LHC 55 Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 128.

83 “Variations on a Simple Theme is the Thing These Days 56 Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 127. at Levittown,” New York Times, March 31, 1957, 10.

57

Kelly, Expanding, 26.

84 “Baglione’s Space-Age Improvements,” Advertisement, Thousand Lanes 6, no. 1, 35.

58

Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 235.

59

Kelly, Expanding, 73.

60

Hales, “Levittown.”

61

Kelly, Expanding, 104.

62

Display Ad 296, New York Times, November 13, 1949.

87 “New Look for a Look-Alike Wins an Award at Levittown,” New York Times, November 19, 1967.

63

“Expandable Second Floor,” ad, in LHC.

88

85 Mary Graham Bond, “Recreating a California Life,” Thousand Lanes 6 no. 1, 16. LHC 86 “Small Extension—Big Difference,” Thousand Lanes 6, no. 3, 17. LHC

“Artist at Work,” Levittown Tribune, August 7, 1986. LHC

89 Jessica Lautin, “More than Ticky Tacky: Venturi, Scott Brown, and Learning from the Levittown Studio,” in Harris, Second 65 Town of Hempstead, Building Zone Ordinance, Arti- Suburb, 325. cle XV: Levittown Planned Residence District <http://ecode360.

90 “Artist,” Levittown Tribune. com/14496496> 64

Chow, Suburban, 70.

66

Kelly, Expanding, 149

91

quoted in Anthony, “Desperately Seeking.”

Margery Eliscu, “Know Your Building Code!” Thousand 67 “Welcoming Message from Founder,” Island Trees Tri- 92 Lanes 6, no. 4, 40. bune, December 18, 1947, 2. LHC Curtis Miner, “Pink Kitchens for Little Boxes: The Evolu68 quoted in Christopher Sellers, “Suburban Nature, Class, 93 tion of 1950s Kitchen Design in Levittown” in Harris, Second Suband Environmentalism,” in Harris, Second Suburb, 285. urb, 278.

69 Abraham Levitt, “Chats on Gardening,” Levittown Tri94 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life [Arts de bune, October 7, 1948. LHC faire.] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xviii.

70 Michael Pollan, “Why Mow? The Case Against Lawns,” 95 Quoted in Baxandall and Ewen, Picture Windows, 164.

The New York Times Magazine, May 28, 1989.

96 Quoted in Wendy Schuman, “An Outbreak of Diversity,” The New York Times, October 3, 1976.

José Matos Mar, Perú: Estado Desbordado Y Sociedad 72 Levitt and Sons, Homeowners Guide: Some Informa- 97 tion for Residents of Levittown to Help them Enjoy their New Nacional Emergente, 1st ed. (Lima: Universidad Ricardo Palma, Centro de Investigación, 2012).

Homes,[1952]).

71

Jackson, Crabgrass, 58, 59.

73

quoted in Ted Steinberg, Op-Ed: How Green was my 98

Interview of John F. C. Turner, World Bank, Washington

131

D.C. September 11, 2000.

122

99 Timothy Hyde, Constitutional Modernism: Architecture 123 and Civil Society in Cuba, 1933-1959, (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2012), 7.

124

Evaluación, 27.

Ibid., 49.

Ibid., 217.

100 Angel Rama, La Ciudad Letreada, (Montevideo: Arca, 125 Ibid., 35.

1998), 19.

126 Ibid., 171.

101 N. J. Habraken and Jonathan Teicher, The Structure of the Ordinary: Form and Control in the Built Environment (Cam- 127 Ibid., 146. bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 293.

128 Christopher Alexander and Center for Environmental 102 Ibid., 27.

Structure, Houses Generated by Patterns (Berkeley, Calif.: Center for Environmental Structure, 1969), 179.

103 Ana Fernández-Maldonado, “Barriadas and Elite in Lima, Peru: Recent Trends of Urban Integration and Disintegration, 42nd 129 Author’s interview with Enrique, president of APUPCA ISoCaRP Congress” (Antwerp, Belgium, 19-23 September, 2006).

(Asociación de Propietarios de la Urbanización Popular Caja de Agua), 104 Turner JFC, Fichter R. Freedom to build; dweller control of the housing process. (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 172.

130 Evaluación, 149.

105 John Turner, “Lima Barriadas Today,” Architectural De- 131 Ibid., 155. sign 33, no. 8 (August, 1963), 376.

132 Ibid., 162.

106 Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, 3rd ed. (Ox- 133 Ibid., 214. ford, UK ; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 264.

134 Gyger 210 107 John Turner, “The Squatter Settlement: An Architecture that Works,” Architectural Design 38, no. 8 (August, 1968), 357.

135 Quoted in El Peruano, newspaper report of the PREVI opening speech, June 28 1968, quoted in Manuel Rivero and Félix 108 William Mangin, “Urbanisation Case History in Peru,” Ar- Madrazo, “Supersudaca: ¿Y PREVI? Proyecto De Investigación Para chitectural Design 33, no. 8 (August, 1963), 370.

La IV Bienal Iberoamericana De Arquitectura E Ingeniería Civil, Lima, Perú” (Lima, 25-29 October, 2004).

109 Ibid.

136 Gyger, 14.

110 John Turner, “The Squatter Settlement,” 357-60.

137 Ibid., 210.

111 John Turner, “Dwelling Resources in South America,” Architectural Design 33, no. 8 (August, 1963), 363.

138 Turner, “Lima Barriadas Today,” 376.

112 Ray Bromley, “Peru 1957–1977: How Time and Place In- 139 Charles Jencks, Modern Movements in Architecture, 2nd fluenced John Turner’s Ideas on Housing Policy,” Habitat Interna- ed. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex ; New York, New York: Penguin, tional 27, no. 2 (6, 2003), 3.

1985), 28(diagram), 92.

113 Helen Elizabeth Gyger, “The Informal as a Project: Self- 140 Rivero and Madrazo, 1.05.A Help Housing in Peru, 1954–1986” (Doctor of Philosophy, Columbia University), 154.

141 “PREVI/Lima. Low Cost Housing Project,” Architectural Design 40, no. 4 (April, 1970), 188.

114 Bromley, “Peru,” 3.

142 “PREVI,” AD, 188.

115 Gyger, 167.

143 Koos Bosma, Martijn Vos and Dorine van Hoogstraten, 116 Quoted in Gyger, 152.

Housing for the Millions: John Habraken and the SAR (1960-2000) (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2000), 55.

117 “Self-Help Housing,” Housing in Latin America, quoted in Gyger 152, 53.

144 Sharif Kahatt, “Agrupación Espacio and the CIAM Peru Group: Architecture and City in the Peruvian Modern Project, in 118 Luis Castañeda, “Pre-Columbian Skins, Developmentalist Duanfang Lu, ed., Third World Modernism: Architecture, DevelopSouls: The Architect as Politician,” in Patricio Del Real and Helen ment and Identity, (London: Routledge, 2010).

Gyger, Latin American Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories (New York: Routledge, 2013) 96.

145 From Aldo van Eyck lecture on Barriadas, Delft, October 1970, quoted in Rivero and Madrazo, 1.05.A. 119 Gyger, 131.

146 “PREVI,” AD, 189.

120 John Turner, “Minimal Government-Aided Settlements,” Architectural Design 33, no. 8 (August, 1963), 379.

147 Gyger, 245.

121 Ministerio de Vivienda, Dirección General de Edificaciones, Evaluación integral del proyecto de vivienda Caja de Agua-Chacarilla de Otero (Lima, 1970), 24. In Archive of Ministerio de Vivienda, Lima, Peru.

148 “un punto fundamental es que lo que se está haciendo— construir viviendas nuevas—supone, en el fondo, una alteración de esa cultura, como objectivo y como proceso de facto,” in Silvio Grichener, “PREVI/Perú: Un Intento En El Más Alto Nivel,” Summa, no.

32 (December, 1970), 46.

149 Aldo van Eyck and Francis Strauven, Aldo Van Eyck: The 177 Shape of Relativity [Aldo van Eyck : relativiteit en verbeelding.] (Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura, 1998), 545.

178

Ibid., 95.

150

Evaluación, 234

“PREVI,” AD, 188

179

Ibid., 129.

151 Francis Strauven, Aldo Van Eyck: The Shape of Relativity, 180 Stirling, Buildings and Projects, 142.

Architectura & Natura: Amsterdam, 1998, 547.

181 David Mohney, “Interview with Andrés Duany,” in 152 “PREVI,” AD, 205.

Mohney and Easterling, Seaside, 65.

153

Gyger, 243.

182 Andrés Duany, “The Road to Seaside,” in Dhiru A. Thadani and others, Visions of Seaside (New York: Rizzoli New York, 154 Justin McGuirk, “PREVI: The Metabolist Utopia,” Domus, 2013), 71. Eisenman’s series also brought Massimo Scolari, Rob Krino. 946 (April, 2011). er, and Rem Koolhaas to Miami, along with his traveling assistant Steve Holl.

155 “PREVI,” AD, 205.

183 Mohney, “Interview with Andrés Duany,” 62.

156 Catarino and Bakker, “Expect the Unexpected: PREVI-Lima and the Customization of Home,” Architecture and Dwelling 27 184 Kurt Andersen, “Is Seaside Too Good to be True?” in June 2013, <https://www.academia.edu/6580570/Expect_the_Un- Mohney and Easterling, Seaside, 44. expected_PREVI-Lima_and_the_customization_of_home> 185 Andres Duany, “Ground Zero of New Urbanism,” Visions 157 “The Builder’s House, 1949,” Architectural Forum, April of Seaside, 153 1949, 86.

186 Duany, “New Urbanism,” Metropolis.

158 Gyger, 244.

187 Quoted in Kevin Wolfe, “Endless Summer,” Metropolis, 159 “PREVI,” AD, 205.

October 1988, 84.

160 Fernando Garcia-Huidobro, Diego Torres Torriti and 188 Rafael Moneo, “On Typology,” Oppositions, no. 13 Nicolas Tugas, El Tiempo Construye! : El Proyecto Experimental De (Summer, 1978), 35.

Vivienda (PREVI) De Lima : Genesis Y Desenlace, (Barcelona : GG, 2008), 87.

189 Mohney, “Interview with Andrés Duany,” 65.

161 James Stirling, James Stirling: Buildings & Projects, 1950- 190 Samantha Salden, “The Seaside Code: The Poster that 1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 138.

Started it All,” in The Seaside Research Portal: Archiving the First New Urban Community, University of Notre Dame School of Archi162 James Stirling, Royal Institute of British Architects and tecture, https://seaside.library.nd.edu/essays/the-code Heinz Gallery, James Stirling: [Catalogue of an] Exhibition, Royal Institute of British Architects, Heinz Gallery, 21 Portman Square, Lon- 191 Levine, “Questioning the View,” 243. don, 24 April-21 June, 1974, 2dth ed. (London: RIBA Publications, 1976), 166-67.

192 David Mohney, “Interview with Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk,” in Mohney and Easterling, Seaside, 77.

163 Ibid., 164-65.

193 Mohney, “Interview with Andrés Duany,” 63.

164 Garcia-Huidobro, Torres Torriti, and Tugas, 71.

194 Emily Talen, “The Seaside Code,” in Thadani and others, 165 Gyger, 245.

Visions of Seaside, 194.

166 Leticia Teixeira Mendes, Gabriela Celani and José Nuno 195 Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company and Seaside ArchitecBeirão, “Meta-PREVI Grammar” International Journal of Architectur- tural Review Committee, The Seaside Code 2012. al Computing 12, no. 4, 463.

196 Keller Easterling, “Private Enterprise” in Mohney and 167 Gyger, 227.

Easterling, Seaside, 56.

168

“PREVI,” AD, 193.

169

Alexander, Houses Generated, 38.

170

PREVI AD 194

171

“PREVI,” AD, 193.

172

Alexander, Houses Generated, 27.

173

Alexander, Houses Generated, 6.

201 Doris Goldstein, “The 2012 Charrette,” in Thadani and others, Visions of Seaside, 588.

174

“PREVI,” AD, 189.

202

175

Gyger, 235.

176 103

Garcia-Huidobro, Torres Torriti, and Tugas,

203 Robert Davis, “Prologue,” in Thadani and others, Visions of Seaside, 39-41.

197 2015.

Author’s phone interview with Andrés Duany, February

198

Salden, “The Seaside Code.”

199

Seaside Code.

200

Seaside Code.

204

Mohney, “Interview with Andrés Duany,” 64.

Chow, Suburban, 110.

133

205

Seaside Code.

School of Architecture.

206 Quoted in Joseph Giovannini, “Andres Duany and Eliza- 236 Dhiru A. Thadani and others, Visions of Seaside, 267. beth Plater-Zyberk: Blueprint for the Future,” Esquire, Dec 1988.

237 Ibid., 263 207 Seaside Code.

238 Laurie Volk and Todd Zimmerman, “Seaside, The Movie” 208 Robert Davis, “Prologue,” 31. in Visions of Seaside, 507.

209

Quoted in Wolfe, “Endless Summer,” 86.

239

LaFrank, 113.

210 Kathleen LaFrank, “Seaside, Florida: “The New Town: 240 Andres Duany, “Evolution of the Seaside Plan,” in Visions The Old Ways”” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 6 (1997), of Seaside, 169.

120.

241 Robert Stern, “In Praise of Invented Towns,” in Visions of 211 Seaside Code.

Seaside, 75.

212

Mohney, “Interview with Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk,” 77.

242

Mohney, “Interview with Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk,” 75.

213 2015.

Author’s phone interview with Andrés Duany, February 243 Beth Dunlop, “In Florida, a New Emphasis on Design,” New York Times, December 9, 2001.

214 Bruno Reichlin, “The Pros and Cons of the Horizontal 244 Andrés Duany, “Ground Zero of New Urbanism,” in ViWindow,” Daidalos 13 (1984), 77. sions of Seaside, 153.

215

Levine, “Questioning the View,” 252.

245

Salden, “The Seaside Code.”

216

Davis, “Prologue,” 41.

217

Levine, “Questioning the View,” 253.

246 Eran Ben-Joseph, The Code of the City: Standards and the Hidden Language of Place Making (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 133.

218

Reichlin, 73.

219

Mohney, “Interview with Andrés Duany,” 64.

247 Michael N. Corbett, Judy Corbett and John Klein, A Better Place to Live: New Designs for Tomorrow’s Communities (Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Press, 1981), 32.

Judy Corbett and Michael N. Corbett, Designing Sustain220 Michael Pollan, “Breaking Ground; Seed. Reseed. Se- 248 able Communities: Learning from Village Homes (Washington, D.C: cede,” The New York Times, June 4, 1998.

Island Press, 2000), 37.

221 Seaside Code.

249 David A. Bainbridge, Judy Corbett and John Hofacre, Village Homes’ Solar House Designs: A Collection of 43 Energy-Con222 Mohney, “Interview with Andrés Duany,” 68. scious House Designs (Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Press, 1979), 15.

223 Ibid.

250 Mark Francis, Village Homes: A Community by Design 224 Patrick Pinell, “Organon,” in Thadani and others, Visions (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003), 70. of Seaside, 89 251 Corbett and Corbett, Designing, 141 225 A Moneo 40 252 Ibid., 37 226 Habraken, Structure of the Ordinary, 253.

253 Bainbridge and others, Village Homes’ Solar, 23-35.

227 Author’s phone interview with Andrés Duany, February 254 Village Homes Architectural Review Board, “Design Poli2015. cy,” March 2, 1992.

228 Mohney, “Interview with Andrés Duany,” 63.

255 Village Homes HOA, “Declaration of Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions,” September 3, 1975.

229 Quoted in Kevin Wolfe, “Endless Summer,” 89.

230

Duany, “New Urbanism, The Case for Looking…”

256

Bainbridge and others, Village Homes’ Solar, 20.

231

Ibid.

257

Francis, Village Homes, 52

232

LaFrank, 119.

258 Michael Mehaffy, “A Conversation with Andrés Duany,” Katarxis no. 3, < http://www.katarxis3.com/Duany.htm>

233 Seaside Portal in The Seaside Research Portal: Archiving Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, “Vista Field: Charrette the First New Urban Community, University of Notre Dame School of 259 Architecture, <https://seaside.library.nd.edu/permalink/ARCH-SEA- 2 Report,” February 2015.

SIDE:216 260 Author’s personal communication with Andrés Duany, November 2014.

234 Dhiru A. Thadani and others, Visions of Seaside, 267 Rodrigo Hidalgo Dattwyler , “La vivienda social en Santi235 “Ruskin House,” in The Seaside Research Portal: Ar- 261 chiving the First New Urban Community, University of Notre Dame ago de Chile en la segunda mitad del siglo XX: Actores relevantes y tendencias espaciales,” Santiago en la Globalización ¿una nueva

ciudad? (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones SUR, 2004), 220.

282

262

McGuirk, Radical Cities, 91.

263

Hidalgo Dattwyler, 228.

283 María José Castillo and Nicolás Rebolledo “Procesos informales y componentes constructivos,” in 1906-2006: Cien Años De Política De Vivienda En Chile, (Santiago, Chile: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2007), 252.

264 Ignacio Perez K and Alexander Kliwadenko R., “Un Chile sin campamentos: la vision de un techo para Chile,” in Pablo Allard 284 and Paulina Henoch I., Construyendo Chile: Políticas Públicas En Viviendas Sociales, (Santiago: Ediciones LYD, 2012), 143.

285 265 World Bank, Housing: Enabling the Market to Work 286 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1993), 58, quoted in Gyger, 297.

287

Maria Jose Castillo, “Procesos de producción,” 204.

Rivero and Madrazo, 1.07A Aravena and Iacobelli, Elemental, 487.

Ibid., 79.

Ibid., 41.

288 Ibid., 37.

266 Gyger, 297; Angus Laurie, “Formalisation: An Interview with Hernando De Soto,” Architectural Design 81, no. 3 (2011): 64- 289 Ibid., 190.

67.

290 Ibid., 501.

267 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London ; New York: Verso, 2006), 81.

291 Condominio Social “Violeta Parra,” Iquique: Reglamento de Copropietarios, 2004.

268 Andres Iacobelli del Rio and Slaven Razmilic, “Ajustes A la Politica Habitacional, Un cambio necesario,” in Construyendo 292 Aravena and Iacobelli, Elemental, 459 Chile, 44.

293 Ibid., 121.

269 Ibid.

294 Ibid., 127.

270 Aravena and Iacobelli, Elemental, 55.

295 Ibid., 132.

271 Margarita Greene, “Informe Proyecto – Self Help Housing & Incremental Housing – The Likely Directions For Future Housing 296 Ibid., 123.

Policy” (Santiago: Pontificia Unviersidad Católica de Chile, 2011), <http://web.mit.edu/incrementalhousing/articlesPhotographs/ 297 Ibid., 126. pdfs/M.Greene-CHILE_IncrementalSurvey.pdf 9-10.

298 Ibid., 468.

272 Maria Jose Castillo, “Procesos De Producción Y Gestión Origen Y Consolidación De Tres Casos De Estudio En Pro- 299 Ibid., 492-3. fundidad,” (Master of Architecture: Madrid Polytechnical University), 127.

300 Ibid., 459.

273 Paulina Ibieta Illanes and Santiago Valdivieso Lecaros, 301 Student Project: “Torreones de la Reina,” in Viviendas continuas en lotes de 3x20: Haciéndonos cargo. For Taller de ejercitación, 2010. 302

Ibid., 129.

“Lineamientos Generales,” 55.

274 Carlos Aguirre, Renato D’ Alençon, Catalina Justiniano, 303 Author’s interview with Fernando Garcia-Huidobro, Santiand Francesca Faverio, “Lineamientos generales para la termina- ago, Chile, August 2014. ción y ampliación de las viviendas sociales dinámicas sin deuda,” in Camino Al Bicentenario: Doce Propuestas Para Chile (Santiago: 304 Aravena and Iacobelli, Elemental, 191.

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile,[2006]), 50.

305 275 Decreto Supremo No 174, (V. y U.), de 2005, Reglamento Fondo Solitario de Vivienda, Division Política Habitacional, Repúbli- 306 ca de Chile 276

“Lineamientos Generales,” 51.

277

Ibid.

Ibid., 459.

Ibid., 189.

307 Information gathered from Author’s visit to Quinta Monroy, August 2014.

308 Author’s interview with Rodrigo Perez de Arce, Santiago, August 2014.

278 Silvia Baeza and Magdalena Vicuña del Río, “Tierra de Nadie: el problema de los espacios communes en condominios de 309 vivienda social,” in Construyendo Chile, 169.

Aravena and Iacobelli, Elemental, 495.

310 Author’s Interview with Praxedes Campos, Iquique, Chile, 279 LEY No 19.537 Sobre Copropiedad Inmobiliaria (Ley De August 2014.

Condominios) Diario Oficial de la República de Chile, December 16, 1997.

311 McGuirk, Radical Cities, 85.

280 Ministerio de Vivienda y Urbanismo, Manual De Uso Y 312 Author’s interview with Rodrigo Perez de Arce, Santiago, Mantención De La Vivienda (Santiago: Ministerio de Vivienda y Ur- August 2014. banismo,[2007]), 2, 15.

281

Ministerio de Vivienda y Urbanismo, Manual, 17.

313 Author’s Interview with Praxedes Campos, Iquique, Chile, August 2014.

135

314 Xenia Antipova, “Consejas de Santiago: Stories from Santiago, Chile, the Social Housing Experience,” Summer Field Research, MIT DUSP SIGUS 2010, 112. http://web.mit.edu/incrementalhousing/articlesPhotographs/pdfs/XeniaReportSM.pdf 315

McGuirk, Radical Cities, 96.

316

Ibid., 97.

317

Aravena and Iacobelli, Elemental, 493.

318

McGuirk, Radical Cities, 88.

319 Daniel D. Reiff, Houses from Books: Treatises, Pattern Books, and Catalogs in American Architecture, 1738-1950 : A History and Guide (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 13.

320

Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 127.

321

Reiff, Houses from Books, 303.

322 Alan Colquhoun, “Rules, Realism, and History,” in Essays in Architectural Criticism: Modern Architecture and Historical Change, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 69.

323

Colquhoun, “Rules,” 69-72.

324 Alan Colquhoun, “Displacement of Concepts in Le Corbusier,” in Essays in Architectural Criticism: Modern Architecture and Historical Change, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 51.

325

Colquhoun, “Rules,” 72.

326 Fabian Scheurer, “Signal to Noise—What is Quality in Digital Architecture?” in Structuralism Reloaded: Rule-Based Design in Architecture and Urbanism, Tomas Valena, Tom Avermaete, and Georg Vrachliotis, Ed. (Stuttgart: Axel Mendes, 2011), 269.

327

Michael Mehaffy, “A Conversation with Andrés Duany.”

328 Alejandro Aravena, “Monotony and scarcity as elements for complexity as a gain – The Elemental case,” In Holcim Forum Blue Workshop, edited by H. Foundation, 2010. <http://src.holcimfoundation.org/dnl/ae225e00-c13a-4e7a-9fac-2207037c454c/ F10_BlueWorkshop_Paper_AravenaAlejandro.pdf

Levittown, NY Levittown, Levittown, Levittown, NY NY NY Levittown, NY

Levittown, NY

A2 - A section through Levittown shows the ample spacing

A3 - perspective of Levittown neighborhood

Neighborhood

Neighborhood Neighborhood Neighborhood Neighborhood Neighborhood Neighborhood Neighborhood

Levittown, NY

A1 - plan of Levittown section

100’ 100’ 100’ 100’ 100’ 100’

100’

living living living living living living room room room room room room

garage garage garage garage garage garage

Wood frame assembly based on 4’ grid Load-bearing S and NE walls Stairs lead to unfinished second floor attic

master master master brbrbr master master br masterbr br

master br living room

Nucleus

Nucleus Nucleus Nucleus Nucleus Nucleus Nucleus Nucleus

Wood Wood Wood frame frame frame assembly assembly assembly based based based onon 4’ on4’ grid grid grid Wood frame assembly based on 4’4’ grid Wood frame assembly based Wood frame assembly basedon on4’ 4’grid grid Load-bearing Load-bearing Load-bearing SSS and and and NE NE NE walls walls walls Load-bearing SS and NE walls Load-bearing and NE Load-bearing S and NEwalls walls Stairs Stairs Stairs lead lead lead to to unfinished to unfinished unfinished second second second floor floor floor attic attic attic Stairs lead unfinished second floor Stairs lead tototo unfinished Stairs lead unfinishedsecond secondfloor floorattic attic

kitchen kitchen kitchen kitchen kitchen kitchen bedroom bedroom bath bath bath bedroom bedroom bath bedroom bath bedroom bath

kitchen

garage

5’ 5’ 5’5’ 5’ 5’

bath

bedroom

5’

A4 - plan of original Levittown Ranch home

A6 - perspective of original Ranch home

removable removable removable removable removable thermopane thermopane thermopane thermopane removable thermopane window window window window thermopane window encourages encourages encourages encourages window encourages backward backward backward backward encourages backward expansion expansion expansion expansion backward expansion expansion

Expansion Rules

first expansion occurs in unfinished attic second expansion can occur in carport further expansion “must be similar in color and style to the original”

removable thermopane window encourages backward expansion

maximum lot coverage: 30% maximum height = 30’ carport carport carport is is carport isis carport is 15’ total minimum side yard = unfinished unfinished unfinished room room room unfinished room carport is unfinished room minimum unfinished room back and front yards = 25’

carport is unfinished room

A7 - rules for expansion

A8 - perspective of permitted expansion envelope

Expansion I

Expansion Rules Expansion Rules Expansion Rules Expansion Rules Expansion Rules Expansion Rules The Rules

first first first expansion expansion expansion occurs occurs occurs in inin first firstexpansion expansionoccurs occursinin unfinished unfinished unfinished attic attic attic first expansion occurs in unfinished attic unfinished attic unfinished attic second second second expansion expansion expansion can can can occur occur occur second secondexpansion expansioncan canoccur occur insecond in carport incarport carport expansion can occur in carport in carport in carport further further further expansion expansion expansion “must “must “must bebe be further furtherexpansion expansion“must “mustbe be similar similar similar inexpansion in color incolor color and and and style style style tobe to to similar in color and style to further “must similar in color and style to the the the original” original” original” the similar in color and style to theoriginal” original” the original” maximum maximum maximum lotlot coverage: lotcoverage: coverage: 30% 30% 30% maximum maximumlot lotcoverage: coverage:30% 30% maximum lot coverage: 30% maximum maximum maximum height height height == 30’ =30’ 30’ maximum maximumheight height==30’ 30’ maximum height = 30’ total total total minimum minimum minimum side side side yard yard yard == 15’ =15’ 15’ total totalminimum minimumside sideyard yard==15’ 15’ total minimum side yard = 15’ minimum minimum minimum minimum minimum back back back and and and front front front yards yards yards == 25’ =25’ 25’ back minimum backand andfront frontyards yards==25’ 25’ back and front yards = 25’

A5 - front and rear elevations of Levittown Ranch homes

Expansion II

first first first floor floor floor second second second floor floor floor first floor second floor first floor second floor (original (original (original family family family dwelling) dwelling) dwelling) (rented (rented (rented apartment) apartment) apartment) (original family dwelling) (rented apartment) (original family dwelling) (rented apartment) first floor second floor (original familyadapted dwelling) (rented the apartment) A9 - plan of expansion, from Kelly, Expanding American Dream

first floor (original family dwelling)

A10 - photograph of similar home. Source: Google street view

tropical tropical tropical tropical tropical room room room room room dining dining dining dining dining room room room room room garage garage garage garage garage dining kitchen kitchen kitchen room kitchen kitchen garage

kitchen first first floor floor first floor first floor first floor

tropical room living living living living living room room room room room

living room

second floor (rented apartment)

A11 - perspective of expanded home

tropical room

bed bed bed bed bed room room room room room

bed office office office office office room

garage bed bed bed bed bed room room room room room

bed office second second floor floorroom second floor second floor second floor

A12 - plan of California home, adapted from Thousand Lanes, vol 6 no. 3, 18. first floor second floor

dining room

kitchen

first floor

living room

bed room office

bed room

second floor

A13 - A similar home. Source: photograph by author

A14 - perspective of expanded home

Caja Cajade deAgua, Agua,Lima Lima

Neighborhood Neighborhood

Neighborhood

Caja de Agua

A15 - Plan of Caja de Agua

A16 - View of Caja de Agua ensemble

A17 - perspective of neighborhood

Nucleus

10m 10m

2m 2m

A19 - Front elevation of the nucleus home.

A20 - Perspective of nucleus

A21 - x: expansion intended by the Junta. From Evaluación.

A22 - the nucleus was built to a building code ignored in later expansions

A23 - Perspective of nucleus with intended additions

A25 - APUPCA facade. Photo by author.

A26 - Perspective of nucleus with actual additions

A28 - Priests’ home. Photo by author.

A29 - Perspective of nucleus with actual additions

Expansion II: Sacerdotes

Expansion II: Valerio Family Expansion II: Valerio Family

Expansion I : APUPCA

Expansion I: Stark Family Expansion I: Stark Family

The Rules

Expansion Rules Expansion Rules

A18 - The basic three-room nucleus

BRBR

BRBR

kitchen kitchen

patio patio

BRBR

office office office office

play play area area

A24 - Expansion into a combined business and residence

library library patio patio

kitchen kitchen

office office

BRBR

BRBR

large large hallhall

terrace terrace

office office

A27 - Expansion into a three-story residence for priests

Neighborhood

PREVI / Van Eyck

A31 - Intended neighborhood ventilation scheme.

A32 - View of fortress-like side walls of the home.

A33 - Original nucleus. Source: Cabrera and Regules

A34 - Construction system: blocks and beams

A35 - View of fortress-like side walls of the home.

The Rules

Nucleus

A30 - Neighborhood layout

1978 PLANTAS ORIGINALES ORIGINAL FLOOR PLANS Planta baja Ground floor

Planta primera First floor

A36 - Plan indicating expansion space (orange) and misaligned walls.

Caso 6 / Case study 6 A37 - Intended expansion of home. Source: Cabrera and Regules, Tres Propuestas

Documented Expansion

Caso 6 / Case study 6

Etapa 0 / Stage 0 89 m2 1979 Casa original / Original house

2003 TRANSFORMACIÓN DE LAS PLANTAS FLOOR PLAN CHANGES Planta baja Ground floor

Planta primera First floor

Planta segunda Second floor

Etapa 1 / Stage 1 94 m2 1980 Cocina / Kitchen

Etapa 2 / Stage 2 139 m2 1985 Dormitorios, comercio / Bedrooms, shop

Etapa 3 / Stage 3 163 m2 1990 Sala de estar/comedor / Living/dining room

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

sala de estar / living room comedor / dining room dormitorio / bedroom cocina / kitchen baño / bathroom lavadero / laundry room patio / courtyard jardín / garden terraza-azotea / terrace/flat roof sala de estar / living room biblioteca / library estudio / studio bodega / cellar

Casos | Case studies

A B C D E F G

comercio / shop casa en alquiler / house for rent habitación de alquiler / room for rent oficina de alquiler / office for rent consultorio médico y legal / medical and legal surgery guardería / kindergarten consultorio dental / dental surgery

Etapa 0 / Stage 0 89 m2 1979 Casa original / Original house

Etapa 1 / Stage 1 94 m2 1980 Cocina / Kitchen

Etapa 2 / Stage 2 139 m2 1985 Dormitorios, comercio / Bedrooms, shop

Etapa 3 / Stage 3 163 m2 1990 Sala de estar/comedor / Living/dining room

Etapa 4 / Stage 4 216 m2 2000 Apartamento del hijo / Son’s apartment

Etapa 5 / Stage 5 232 m2 2000

Etapa 4 / Stage 4 216 m2 2000 Apartamento del hijo / Son’s apartment

Etapa 5 / Stage 5 232 m2 2000 89

padres parents hijos adultos adult children hijos niños young children

A38 - Documented home expansion. Source: El Tiempo Construye! inquilinos tenants

88

Casos | Case studies

Neighborhood

PREVI / Stirling

A40 - An elevation of the Stirling home

1978 A39 - Neighborhood layout PLANTAS ORIGINALES ORIGINAL FLOOR PLANS

A41 - Stirling’s section of the project

A42 - Aerial view of the completed homes.

Nucleus

A44 - Intended expansion of home. Source: Cabrera and Regules, Tres Propuestas

Planta baja Ground floor

A46 - Stirling apprentice Leon Krier’s drawings of intended expansions

A43 - Original nucleus. Source: El Tiempo Construye 2003 TRANSFORMACIÓN DE LAS PLANTAS FLOOR PLAN CHANGES

The Rules

Planta baja Ground floor

Planta primera First floor

Planta segunda Second floor

1978 PLANTAS ORIGINALES ORIGINAL FLOOR PLANS Planta baja Ground floor

Documented Expansion

A45 - Expansion patterns for the house. Source: buildings and projects

2003 TRANSFORMACIÓN DE LAS PLANTAS FLOOR PLAN CHANGES Planta baja Ground floor

Planta primera First floor

Planta segunda Second floor

Caso 2 / Case study 2 Etapa 0 / Stage 0 81 m2 1978 Casa original / Original house

Etapa 1 / Stage 1 91 m2 Sin fecha / No date Comercio / Shop

1 sala de estar / living room 2 comedor / dining room 3 dormitorio / bedroom 4 cocina / kitchen 5 baño / bathroom 6 lavadero / laundry room 7 patio / courtyard 8 jardín / garden 9 terraza-azotea / terrace/flat roof 10 sala de estar / living room 11 biblioteca / library 12 room estudio / studio A comercio / shop 1 sala de estar / living 2 comedor / dining room en alquiler / house for rent 13 bodega / cellar CB casa 3 dormitorio / bedroom habitación de alquiler / room for rent

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

cocina / kitchen baño / bathroom lavadero / laundry room patio / courtyard jardín / garden terraza-azotea / terrace/flat roof sala de estar / living room biblioteca / library estudio / studio bodega / cellar

Casos | Case studies

Casos | Case studies

D E F G

A B C D E F G

comercio / shop casa en alquiler / house for rent habitación de alquiler / room for rent oficina de alquiler / office for rent consultorio médico y legal / clinic and lawyer’s offi2 ce Etapa / Stage 2 214 m guardería / kindergarten 1984 Planta baja: comercio, consultorio dental / dental surgery 2

oficina y servicios Planta primera: vivienda Ground floor: shop, office and services First floor: family house

oficina de alquiler / office for rent consultorio médico y legal / clinic and lawyer’s office guardería / kindergarten consultorio dental / dental surgery

73

Etapa 3 / Stage 3 240 m2 1992 Planta baja: comercio, oficina y guardería Planta primera: vivienda Planta segunda: servicios Ground floor: shop, office and kindergarten First floor: family house Second floor: services

A47 - Documented home expansion. Source: El Tiempo Construye!

padres parents

73

Neighborhood

PREVI / Alexander

A49 - Detail of a cluster.

Nucleus

A48 - Intended neighborhood layout, with clusters. Source: AD

A50 - Perspective view of a row of homes. shown at right is a special machine meant to serve as a moving assembly line for construction.

A52 - Some of the rules for generating plans based on home choice sheet inputs

The Rules

A51 - Most generic nucleus. Source:AD

A53 - “Patterns” identified by Alexander, acting as rules in his project. Source: Houses Generated by Patterns

Documented Expansion

1978 PLANTAS ORIGINALES ORIGINAL FLOOR PLANS

Caso 10 / Case study 10

Planta baja Ground floor

Planta primera First floor

Etapa 0 / Stage 0 90 m2 1978 Casa original / Original house

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 A B C D E F G

Etapa 1 / Stage 1 90 m2 1984 Sala de estar/comedor / Living/dining room

sala de estar / living room comedor / dining room dormitorio / bedroom cocina / kitchen baño / bathroom lavadero / laundry room patio / courtyard jardín / garden terraza-azotea / terrace/flat roof sala de estar / living room biblioteca / library estudio / studio bodega / cellar comercio / shop casa en alquiler / house for rent habitación de alquiler / room for rent oficina de alquiler / office for rent consultorio médico y legal / clinic and lawyer’s office guardería / kindergarten consultorio dental / dental surgery

Etapa 2 / Stage 2 134 m2 1997 Cocina, escalera, dormitorio / Kitchen, stair, bedroom

2003 TRANSFORMACIÓN DE LAS PLANTAS FLOOR PLAN CHANGES

Etapa 3 / Stage 3 158 m2 1998 Comedor, dormitorios / Dining room, bedroom

Planta baja Ground floor

Planta primera First floor

Planta segunda Second floor

Etapa 4 / Stage 4 172 m2 2001 Terraza, lavadero, dormitorio / Terrace, laundry room, bedroom

A54 - Documented home expansion. Source: El Tiempo Construye!

Casos | Case studies padres parents hijos adultos adult children hijos niños young children inquilinos tenants

105

Seaside / Type III Neighborhood

L-5-III

VIII*

F-10VIII

L-4-III L-3-III L-2-III

H-1-VIII*

M-5-III M-4-III

Ruskin Place

M-3-III

C-12-

M-2-III

L-1-III

M-1-III

K-5-III

N-5-III

K-4-III

N-4-III

K-3-III

N-3-III

K-2-III

N-2-III

K-1-III

N-1-III

I-1-VIII*

C-13-VIII

I-2-Ia*

J-1-Ia*

I-3-Ia*

J-2-Ia*

D-1-VIII D-2-

J-4

D-4-VIII

Nucleus

A55 - Detail of Type III on Map

A56 - A view of a row of Type IIIs

A57 - Original Type III Concept Sketch

PArKING

YArD

An ing of automobiles.

The area outside the Principal Building.

2 required

POrcH An unglazed roofed structure.

HeIGHt 22 ft. max.

bALcONY An unglazed overhanging structure.

reqd.

BALCONY DEPTH: 5 ft. max.

The Rules

Place

Alley

and ideas. Gallery and roof heights are measured from and are intended for residential use above. The space they

OUtbUILDING the designated portion of the yard.

gallery heights. The lots for the taller Type II buildings

Central Square and the Seaside Chapel. Type III buildings

Both Type II and IIa buildings have pitched roofs and

streets.

Walter Chatham TH

A58 - Code regulations for Type III

A61 - Walter Chatham’s Townhouse

Gorlin-Designed THs

A60 - Because of site constraints, most of the townhouses share a very similar set of drawings to Chatham’s, shown here. Differences are largely on facades.

A59 - Each of these townhomes was designed by Alexander Gorlin, and all have a very similar interior layout and program. Gorlin’s townhouses provide a clear demonstration of the variety possible within the Seaside rules, even when the work is of a single architect!

Seaside / Type VI

1

Grove Avenue

VIa VIa VIa

A-8-VIa

D-9-VIa

A-7-VIa

D-8-VI

A-6-VIa

2

D-6-VI* D-7-VI*

A-5-VIa D-5-VI* D-4-VI* A-4-VIa D-3-VI

A-10-VIa A-9-VIa

D-8-VIII D-7-VIII

D-6-VIII

A-8-VI D-5-VI

A-6-VI* A-7-VI* D-4-VI A-5-VI* A-4-VI* D-3-VI

Tupelo Street

VIa

D-10-VIa

Savannah Street

C-8-VIII

East Ruskin Street

Neighborhood

3

A-9-VIa

A-3-VI

VIa

A-3-VIa

VIa

A-2-VIa

D-2-VI

A-2-VI

VIa

A-1-VIa

D-1-VI

A-1-VI

D-2-VI

D-1-VI

A62 - Detail of Type VI on Map

A63 - A view of a Type VI neighborhood in the student model

A64 - Original TYpe III Concept Sketch

Nucleus

6 ft. min. (North Side)

PArKING

YArD

24 ft. min.

The area outside the Principal Building.

An ing of automobiles.

25% of Bldg. Width (South Side)

POrcH An unglazed roofed structure.

HeIGHt 22 ft. max.

(VI)

bALcONY An unglazed overhanging structure.

2 ft.

The Rules

PORCH DEPTH: 8 ft. min.

These lots are the suburban section of Seaside. They the sea at the end of the street corridor. Lots become slightly smaller and buildings become slightly taller density. Type VI generates freestanding houses and encourages small outbuildings at the rear, to become guesthouses and rental units. Required front yards

OUtbUILDING 4 ft.

4 ft.

the designated portion of the yard. rural South.

Victoria Casasco

A65 - Code regulations for Type III

Other Type VI Homes

A67 - Victoria Casasco’s Roger’s Lighthouse residence.

A66 - Each of these townhomes was designed by Alexander Gorlin.

Neighborhood

Village Homes

A69 - View of a section through one of the common areas.

A70 - Aerial of neighborhood

Nucleus

A68 - Plan of one of the smaller groups of eight homes centered on green

The Rules

A71 - The Solar Rights portion of the community’s CC&Rs is one of the community’s most important rules.

Bryant Residence

A72 - Rules regarding fences are an important component of Village Homes’ Architectural regulations

Solar Reflector Home

A73 - The Bryant Residence, designed by Michael Corbett, features passive lighting and heating.

A74 - The Solar Reflector residence, by DeLapp, Hefacre, and Springer, uses special technology to take the most advantage of the sun, including eight heat collectors.

Casas Chubi, Santiago

Neighborhood

Neighborhood

Casas Chubi

A75 - Neighborhood plan.

A76 - The fabric.

A77 - Perspective of Casas Chubi.

The design for incremental growth of this typology is based on a 3 by 3 meter modular plan. Each family received half a house of 32.18 sqm consisting of: kitchen, bathroom, common area and one room on the second floor with a staircase. The planned expansion can add 48.56 sqm for a total area of 76.52 sqm. The houses were designed to build within structural constraints that help control their incremental growth. A reinforced concrete loadbearing wall was built between each house. The second floor is made of wood beams supported by reinforced concrete columns and load-bearing walls. This strategy helps guide the self-construction phase because it limits A78 - The basic nucleus home A79 - A home still close to its original condition, with just a living room added. the structural growth.

A80 - Perspective of nucleus

The Rules

Expansion Rules

Nucleus

Nucleus

Typical House Plan, in blue initial house

A81 - Intended expansion order at Casas Chubi. Source: Ana Cristina Vargas

A82 - A view of a street in the development: rather squat

A83 - Expansion into a home, with shop taking up front garden

A84 - Irene’s home

A85 - Perspective of Irene’s home.

A86 - Expansion into a home, with shop taking up front garden.

A87 - The modified living room of Marvel’s home.

A88 - Perspective of Marvel’s home

Expansion II: Marvel

Expansion II: Valerio Family

Expansion I: Irene

Expansion I: Stark Family

Incremental growth

Quinta Monroy, Iquique

Neighborhood Neighborhood

Quinta Monroy

A90 - Facades at Quinta Monroy establish an urban rhythm.

A91 - A perspective view of Quinta Monroy.

A93 - Photo of the modern nucleus framing traditional wooden expansions

A94 - Perspective of nucleus

Nucleus Nucleus

A89 - Plan of Quinta Monroy: it is not a large project.

first expansion occurs in unfinished attic

Expansion Rules The Rules

A92 - The basic nuclei for top and bottom at Quinta Monroy

Expansion II: Valerio Family Expansion II: Patricio

Expansion I: Lila

A95 - at right, the anticipated expansion is shown in dashed lines.

A96 - Lila’s expansion of her top unit onto the fourth floor.

A97 - Front and back of Lila’s house

A98 - Perspective of Lila’s house

A99 - Patricio’s expanded top unit. (note his plan is mirrored)

A100 - Front of Patricio’s house

A101 - Perspective of Patricio’s house