Is Less Enough? 100,000 Homes for San Francisco

Yale School of Architecture

Advanced Studio

Spring 2015

IS LESS ENOUGH?

100,000 Homes for San Francisco

Pier Vittorio Aureli, Emily Abruzzo, Michael Cohen, Tamrat Gebremichael, Karl Karam, Adil Mansure, Peter McInish, Nicholas Muraglia, Phillip Nakamura, Mahdi Sabbagh, Sofia Singler, Sarah Smith, Melody Song

The new house is a social enterprise.

Hannes Meyer, 1928

INTRODUCTION

Is Less Enough?

INTRODUCTION

Less is more: this dictum has been the most successful slogan of modernist design. The call for ‘less’ was not only a call to embrace formal restraint, but also the desire to make architecture a sober place where life could happen in all its unpredictable unfolding. Mies van der Rohe, who famously pronounced this dictum (borrowing it from the poet Robert Browning), considered architecture not a formal composition, but a frame whose goal would be to support and enable in the best way possible the life of its inhabitants. Far from being just an aesthetic goal (or worse, a style for architecture) ‘less is more’ implied a spatial revolution wherein the “destructive character” of modernization would be manifested in a space where inhabitants could start anew. Today the ethical implications of ‘less is more’ are ambiguous at best, if not deeply sinister. The slogan can be seen to summarize the ethics of contemporary capitalism, wherein exploitation consists of pushing people to do more with less: more work and less money, more precarity and less affordability. In this way, ‘less is more’ appears to be the most concise representation of post-recession real estate strategies. Since the recession, the real estate industry can no longer rely on the indebted masses, and as such is increasingly shifting towards the development of two kind of houses: luxury homes and what, in the absence of a better term, we might call “minimal” dwellings. The latter is a peculiar typology because it reduces the spaces of a “normal” home to an unprecedented small-size whose combined square footage does not exceed an average hotel room.

The studio asks students to take a position on one of the most urgent problems in architecture: the project of housing. More specifically the studio will design 100,000 affordable houses for a city that is at the moment suffering one of the most dramatic housing crises in the US: San Francisco. The main question that the studio will ask is how to rethink affordability within the domain of housing. Is affordability only a matter of extreme reduction of previous living standards? Each project will put forth an affordable model of housing that goes beyond the minimum dwelling, incorporating strategies by which a number of facilities can be shared. This project seeks a strategy in which sharing can replace scarcity as an approach to affordable housing.

The fact that San Francisco is undergoing such crisis may at first sound like a paradox, since in the last 20 years the city has experienced one of the most enduring economic booms, largely thanks to its renowned tech industry. However, it is because of this very economic boom that the city has witnessed increasing real estate pressure that has made housing unaffordable for a large part of the city’s population, particularly middle-income residents. Addressing this condition, the proposition of 100,000 houses to be built over the next 10 years aims to release the city from the burden of housing scarcity. The aim is to redefine affordable housing as a first step towards a more equal redistribution of wealth within the city. In this way, the construction of new housing can be understood not as a palliative within an already compromised and unfair economic system, but as a fundamental structural economic policy, which implies a change within the power relationship of the current neoliberal system.

In addition to the urgency of addressing the housing crisis, the proposition of 100,000 houses for San Francisco provides the opportunity to radically rethink the architecture of domestic space. Since the beginning of its history, housing has been the exclusive embodiment of one type of human association: the nuclear family. In this way, housing has prevented other modes of living based on sharing and solidarity. The studio agenda is not against the nuclear family, but sees it as only one possible form of association among others. Rather than beginning with the design of the family home, the studio will start from the most basic form of living space, the room. We propose to take the room at face value, stripping it of the expectations and preconceptions created by the last three centuries of typological discourse. If we were to free the room from being purpose-intended, perhaps new combinations could arise–and, with them, not only new spatial diagrams, but social ones. Starting a project from the room does not only question the functional subdivisions we normally take for granted, it also means challenging the idea of what is public and what is private within the house. While degrees of openness and seclusion are a constant of living environments, the actual concept of privacy is a relatively recent one. Ultimately, to imagine a city made of rooms means to reject a model of the city as solely an agglomeration of nuclear families.

CITY FORM AND POLITICS

Is Less Enough?

CITY FORM AND POLITICS

The morphology of the urban and political form of San Francisco is defined by a continual cycle of expansion and contraction. The opposing forces of expansion and contraction have not defied the establishment of a synthetic urban whole; in fact, this dialectical tendency characterizes the very nature of the city and defines the unique political and urban project that is San Francisco.

Historically, the settlement and growth of San Francisco is tied to the rapid influx of transient populations, particularly laborers capitalizing on the city’s natural resources and economic opportunity. The structure of the city was first established by Spanish missionaries who arrived with the intention of converting the native population to Christianity and creating a trade route to the Pacific. During the 1849 Gold Rush, the Port of San Francisco was the strategic entry point for the “forty-niners” traveling west to strike it rich. Under the pressure of rapid population growth, the city limits expanded, and civic and residential infrastructure was constructed. Housing development specifically catered to temporary inhabitants. San Francisco’s predisposition to nomadic individuals escalated during World War II and again in the dot-com boom in the 1990’s - the evolution of the city’s form is directly correlated to the inflow of itinerant populations.

The Bay Area’s extreme topography denies isotropic urbanization of the territory. Settlement of the city hills was not possible until the development of modern transportation technology; even the density today of the slopes remains very low. An equally powerful force of opposition are the city’s grassroots movements. Demographically diverse activist movements were particularly effective in preventing uncontrolled urban renewal in the middle of the 20 th century. Despite their initial success, anti-development policy has incentivized the preservation of the city’s status quo, stifling contemporary development and causing a severe lack of affordable housing in the city. The nostalgic ethos of preserving the image of the city is denying San Francisco’s diverse population their right to the city , and denies inhabitance to the precarious worker who is the original character of the city.

MISSION ERA

The Bay was formally discovered by a Spanish exploratory expedition led by Don Gaspar de Portolà and Father Juan Crespi in 1769. Their arrival instituted the colonial era in which Imperial Spain took on the mission to conquer the land and convert the Native American locals into productive members of the Empire and of the Catholic Church. In accordance with the The Laws of the Indies a central plaza, twelve streets and a church formed the structure of the settlement. The new mission sat in the heart of this initial formation as a testimony to the Church’s dominion. Following the American annexation of San Francisco in 1847, the Irish engineer Jasper O’Farrell surveyed the territory and drafted a map of the town. O’Farrell established the diagonal axis of the city connecting the harbor, the Spanish Mission and the Twin Peak Mountain. A 100-foot wide thoroughfare, Market St, was constructed along this axis which reconciled the two grid orientations of the early city and defined outward urban expansion. 1

GOLD RUSH

The Gold Rush of 1849 created a population boom in San Francisco, rapidly filling the grid with urban development. As the San Francisco harbor was a strategic point of access between ship and in-land river transport, the city became the hub of economic life and provisions to the gold fields. The annexation of land, platting, and subsequent speculation was speedy as most of the peninsula was already in private ownership through Spanish or Mexican land grants 2. The intense economic activity and confining topography of San Francisco City encouraged two urban morphological phenomena: the creation of special use zones within the city and diaspora along the San Francisco East Bay. By 1875, the core of San Francisco was demarcated into specialized economic zones with a central business district handling intangible goods, and two wholesaling districts dealing with perishable and nonperishable goods. Residential zones bordered the tripartite economic zones and were bounded by the city’s natural topography. Settlement of the hills did not occur until the introduction of the electric cars in 1900. 3

1 Florence Lipsky, San Francisco: The Grid Meets the Hills (Marseille: Editions Parenthèses, 1999), 107.

2 James E. Vance, Geography and Urban evolution in the San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley: University of California, 1964), 104-106.

3 Brian J. Godfrey, “Urban Development and Redevelopment in San Francisco,” Geographical Review 87 (1997): 309-333.

Mission

Yerba Buena

Presidio

POST-EARTHQUAKE

The 1906 earthquake completely destroyed the core of downtown San Francisco. Despite the opportunity to rebuild the city along Daniel Burnham’s City Beautiful Plan, San Francisco was resurrected following existing property lines due to pressure from land and business owners. Under the supervision of Burnham, several public buildings were rebuilt in masonry and in the neo-classical style including the downtown civic center. After the rapid reconstruction of the city, San Francisco turned its eyes outward, attempting to expand its political influence over the Bay Area. The greater San Francisco Movement of 1912 and the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1916 asserted the city’s economic dominance of the region. 4 During the economic boom of the 1920’s the financial district expanded vertically and horizontally, with the construction high-rise office buildings and extending outward by 40 blocks. Additionally, residential zones expanded along railway lines into the peripheral hills of the city.

WORLD WAR II

With the outbreak of the war, San Francisco once again accommodated the transit and residential needs of temporary dwellers. The Golden Gate was the largest point of embarkation for war in the Pacific. Congruent to the military presence in the city, nomadic workers and African Americans migrated to the port searching for wartime jobs. Temporary housing and a network of single resident occupancy hotels were rapidly constructed to house the influx of new residents. Consequently, the housing stock of the city center was composed of rooms that could be temporarily rented rather than apartments or single-family homes. Due to wartime economic stimulation, the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay Bridge were constructed. After WWII, the arrival of the returning veterans prompted the total build-out of the city grid. As middle-class suburban flight occurred, new demographic districts formed, solidifying the foundation of the 1960’s grassroots movements and counter-cultures. 5 Further supporting the growing urban working-class was the city’s potent labor movement. San Francisco was a point of engendered solidarity between skilled and unskilled workes led by powerful labor leaders. 6

4 Martyn J. Bowden; “Downtown Through Time: Delimitation, Expansion and Internal Growth,” Economic Geography 47 (1971).

5 Godfrey, Urban Development, 309-333.

6 James Brook, Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture:A City Lights Anthology. San Francisco, California (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998).

Is Less Enough?

URBAN RENEWAL

Between 1950 and 1970, the Bay Area experienced sudden urbanization: two million people were added to the region’s population. Prior to 1950, San Francisco and Oakland accounted for more than fifty percent of the coastal population, while census data after 1950 reveal a shifting pattern of growth towards southern counties. The widening of Highway 24 opened up cities such as Concord, Lafayette, and Pleasant Hill and a trend of growth sprang along the Interstate 580 corridor. In 1975 a land inventory conducted by The Association of Bay Area Governments found that 50% of the total land in the Bay area designated for development was exhausted and only 350,000 acres (of the region’s 4.5 million acres) were vacant. 7

Under the auspices of Congressional urban renewal legislation, San Francisco planners and developers formed the Bay Area Council (BAC). Rooted in the Greater San Francisco Movement of 1912, the BAC envisioned the Bay Area as a constellation of economic functions with San Francisco serving as the administrative and financial center. By developing transportation infrastructure, including railway rapid transit and highways, the BAC sought to knit together economically independent cities and to maintain San Francisco’s industrial mode of production. 8

Within San Francisco, the newly formed redevelopment agency advocated downtown expansion. The group’s first project widened Geary Street by clearing Japantown and re-locating the nearby African American community. The second project, the Panhandle Highway, aimed to link the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge with an overpass cutting through Golden Gate Park, but was abandoned after popular revolt. The final project substituted Skidrow with Yerba Buena City Center and a series of single room occupancy buildings (SRO) in the Tenderloin with large hotel chains. 9 The economic boom of the late 1960s further generated the development of 25 million square feet of office space along Market Street. Engendering fear of “Manhattanization,” urban renewal projects provoked popular anti-gentrification and anti-development sentiment and mobilized San Francisco’s activist community.

7 David E. Dowall, The Suburban Squeeze (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 5.

8 Vance, Geography and Urban Evolution, 104-106.

9 Godfrey, Urban Development, 309-333.

Is Less Enough?

GRASSROOTS MOVEMENTS

Grassroots movements comprised of a diverse range of stakeholders revolted against each renewal project. Notably, the Panhandle expressway was abandoned after the 1965 Freeway Revolt, following a rally at Golden Gate Park. In 1964, new zoning laws restricted building above 40 feet along prominent corridors in order to preserve views from publicly owned lands to the bay. Further, Tenderloin grassroots movements created legislation forbidding owners from demolishing SRO’s or converting them into tourist rental units without providing compensatory housing. 10 In 1979, California State Proposition 13 limited real-estate property taxation and further encouraged slow growth in the residential sector. The insufficient tax return on residential property encourages cities to increase commercial zoning and deter development of residential lots. Although this slow-growth policy was effective in curbing urban renewal, it has had an adverse effect on the production of new housing units, causing a severe shortage in affordable housing on all levels. 11

TECH REGION

Comparable to the Gold Rush, the 1990’s Dot-Com boom attracted an influx of young tech workers to San Francisco. Housing prices increased 40% between 1998 and 1999. Then-mayor Willie Brown encouraged the development of live-work units to house the tech-worker population and encourage business start-ups to locate in the city, however, developers often abused the live-work zoning to build luxury units. 12 Further, lack of affordable housing in the surrounding region – due to zoning plans that discourage housing – stimulated a reverse commuting culture in San Francisco. Tech-workers now drive to their jobs in Silicon Valley and live in downtown San Francisco. The growth of the tech-industry in the Bay Area has exponentially increased in the past 20 years. The industry’s most powerful companies are located in the region and attract a multitude of young professionals and recent graduates. However, San Francisco lacks affordable middle-income housing solutions and cannot accommodate this population growth.

10 Chester Hartman, City for Sale (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

11 Chris Carlsson, “Shaping the City From Below: San Francisco’s History Offers Lessons for the Future,” A Journal of California (2014): 94-102.

12 Godfrey, Urban Development, 309–333.

TOPOGRAPHY

Conflict between the imposed Cartesian grid system and the natural topography of the region generates San Francisco’s existing urban form. The dialectic between the isotropic and the organic is evident on multiple scales throughout the city. The distribution of hills across the entire territory,dictated the morphology of the city and defied formation of a legible urban whole. Consequently, the structure of the city is an amalgamation of neighborhood enclaves which have been occupied by distinct political and demographic groups. The city’s landform enables activist and grassroots groups to control finite districts and develop a unique political consciousness tied to certain neighborhoods. The iconic rollercoaster quality of San Francisco streets is a result of moving perpendicular to the contours of the land while passing between neighborhoods. Landforms such as valleys, saddles and ridges delineate the specific boundaries of independent districts. In recent years zoning battles have occurred in order to preserve hilltop views to the harbor. Enacted under the auspices of environmental protection and historical preservation, this zoning is perceived as an effort by wealthy communities to prevent commercial and residential development in the city.

On a local scale, the clash between the grid and the topography dramatically escalates, causing grid distortions and breaks in the urban fabric. Deformation types fall into three categories: elastic, fractures and denunciations. In an elastic transformation, the orthogonal geometry of the grid is maintained, while its dimensions are altered. When elastic expansion reaches its maximum, the grid snaps, causing fractures in the land. Fractures undermine the rationalizing logic of the grid and allow the organic topography to dictate the formal logic of the street network. Public parks occur when the grid is completely renounced by the organic impulse of the land. Resolution of deformations requires architectural and infrastructural ingenuity. Throughout the city, urban joints consisting of stairs, ramps, tunnels and road forks, provide continuity across the severe terrain. 13 Topography has an unavoidable presence in San Francisco and is a critical oppositional force to the expanding urge of the grid.

13 Florence Lipsky, San Francisco: The Grid Meets the Hills (Marseille: Editions Parenthèses, 1999), 107.

SUBDIVISION

Is Less Enough?

THE CITY GRID

A history composed of the ebb and flow of developments and subsequent oppositions – societal, economic and geographic – has determined who lives in San Francisco. Since the discovery of the San Francisco Bay by Spanish settlers in the 18 th century, land ownership has dictated the right to the city. The San Francisco grid is based on the varas , a surveying measurement unit rooted in the Laws of the Indies and introduced in the area by the Spanish. The Laws did not dictate strict rules for grid-based town planning, but advocated for a basic system in which a central square, twelve streets and a church would form the basis of development. Each grid block of the city comprised six square lots of 50 by 50 varas each.1 As land became commoditized, the varas system was changed to the US imperial system in 1879. 2 The 1870’s also saw a 163% rate of population growth and a rise in speculative building. 3 One 50 by 50 varas lot could be subdivided into five 27’-6” wide lots or six 25’-0” wide lots. The leftover width either became an alleyway or was incorporated into one of the lots.

The subdivision system played a definitive role in the subsequent building of urban life in San Francisco: it became a tool for price speculation and rapid construction. Implemented rapidly and urgently in order to accommodate the soaring population numbers, the subdivision logic of San Francisco has determined the city’s living conditions ever since, and the row house came to define the typological and cultural character of the city. On the scale of the lot, various housing strategies were deployed to define living conditions for the residents. Most row houses in San Francisco today follow the spatial organization principles developed in Victorian 19 th century building 4, whose narrow lots allowed for compact and dense living conditions. However, growth and market pressure resulted in the combining of narrow lots into wider combination lots suitable for larger buildings. As such, each grid block today presents a mosaic-like combination of lots of various widths, all of which are nonetheless rooted in the early missionaries’ varas system.

1 Anne Vernez Moudon, Built for Change: Neighborhood Architecture in San Francisco (Cambridge; London: The MIT Press, 1986), 52.

2 Moudon, Built for Change, 35

3 Moudon, Built for Change, 26.

4 Alamo Square, the residential neighborhood studied by Anne Vernez Moudon in Built for Change, is an exemplary site for understanding the typical San Francisco row house. The wellpreserved neighborhood reveals a multitude of variations on the San Francisco row house, not only in the type itself but in its relationship to the block.

THE MISSION SETTLEMENT

The first permanent dwellings in San Francisco were manifestations of subjugation and control. Imperial Spain set out to conquer and control the land along with the Catholic Church, undertaking a project to convert the local Ohlone population – about 10,000 inhabitants at the time – to Christianity. Traditional thatch-and-reed huts were obliterated to make way for the new adobe complexes built by the Natives under the supervision of Dominican and Franciscan friars.

Misión San Francisco de Asís was founded in the late 18 th century towards the inland of modern-day San Francisco. The Laws of the Indies outlined recommendations for the founding of new towns “to save the godless souls of the aboriginal people.” Each Mission had to be self-supporting. Misión San Francisco de Asís, like all missions, was organized around a central courtyard that contained plots for the cultivation of cotton, maize, sugar, sweet potato, tobacco and yerba mate. A cemetery was laid out to the South of the complex. Framing the central courtyard were the living and working quarters: the convent wing housed the Natives’ sleeping rooms and a guest room, and the East and North wings contained the winery, wool-weaving store, forge shop and soap factory. Two friars – one responsible for the religious education of the Natives, the other for the practical – and a dozen soldiers lived in the South wing of the complex, overseeing the mission’s daily life and ensuring the converts would not escape. The mission’s spatial organization allowed for the omnipresent gaze of the friars to penetrate all quarters. Living, for the Natives, was synonymous to learning the Catholic doctrine and laboring in the name of the Church and the Empire.

Under The Laws, land parcels could not be ceded to anyone other than a direct descendant: “Land was not an exchangeable commodity on which to make a profit, but a gift from God and the King to be cultivated and made to bear fruit.” 5 In the mid-19 th century this understanding was replaced by an Anglo-Saxon conception according to which land could be bought and sold according to the market, and in which today’s housing crisis is rooted.

5 Florence Lipsky, San Francisco: The Grid Meets the Hills (Marseille: Editions Parenthèses, 1999), 107.

Less Enough?

LOT DIVISION AND DOMESTIC COMPARTMENTALIZATION

The Gold Rush catalyzed an era of variations on the theme of the townhouse. The city grid was subdivided into narrower lots and rapidly filled with townhouses erected by the incoming gold prospectors. The new conecptionsof land ownership led to fierce competition over the more desirable lots within the grid. The various pressures in flux throughout the 19 th century – economic, social and political – resulted in a multitude of variations on the standard single-width row house. Expansion and differentiation were necessary to respond to the variety of residents arriving in the city.

In addition to catering to the gold laborer and his family, the townhouse typology came to serve the transient worker. The culture of rooming houses thrived: the typical 19 th century household consisted of a private family house complemented by additional rooms in which boarders and lodgers could reside. Such arrangements called for the subdivision of the townhouse to accommodate multiple dwelling units. This model would later be institutionalized as commercial boarding houses, run officially as inexpensive hotels; the first of these ‘residential hotels’ appeared at the beginning of the 20 th century as new purpose-built rooming houses. This typology was integral to the cultural and economic landscape of early 20 th century San Francisco, where the freedom and mobility of the cosmopolitan life-form – supported, if, not enabled, by the residential hotel – catered to the needs and desires of the new population of transient laborers.

The subdivision of the city blocks into narrow townhouse lots led to the compartmentalization of the city. Adjacent townhouses share no amenities or facilities with each other, becoming isolated entities that merely happen to sit next to each other. Land ownership, defined by lot limits, determines the city’s housing stock and has led to disjointedness among parts of the city and its residents. The segregation of the city into narrow lots and houses impedes sharing; scarcity, then, becomes the modus operandi of post-recession housing development. 6

6 Moudon, Built for Change: Neighborhood Architecture in San Francisco, 24.

Is Less Enough?

TOWNHOUSE TYPES

The row house is organized around a central corridor, typically around 6’ wide. Rooms are connected to one side of the corridor, often referred to as the ‘hall’ as an indication of its semi-public quality. Traditionally, the row house consisted of a parlor, dining room and several bedrooms with a kitchensand bathrooms at the back of the building. The parlor overlooked the street, and the bedrooms and dining rooms faced the backyard. In some layouts, rooms set between the street- and yard-facing spaces were left without access to windows and could only be lit with skylights or a light well; such “middle rooms” were usually attached to the parlor or back-room for additional space.

The semi-detached house evolved as a type that took advantage of the larger lots at the end of each block. The plan layout of the semi-detached unit is the same as the row house’s, but one of its sides is detached from neighboring walls, allowing each room to have access to natural light.

The double row house joins two lots into one. The resultant house appears as two mirrored houses on the exterior but operates as a single building on the inside. Rooms in the double row house are arranged on both sides of a central corridor which contains the house’s vertical circulation: the semi-public corridors of two typical row houses are merged into one shared hallway, allowing for the private rooms on either side to be larger.

The typical apartment house is laid out in blocks of flats connected to a central corridor. The central corridor usually links together two or three blocks depending on the depth of the lot. Light wells between the blocks are 7’ to 12’ wide. The apartments are smaller than the units found in the row houses, suggesting that this type appeared as a result of San Francisco’s densification. This type can perhaps be seen as the precedent for denser buildings types that appear in the 20 th century, in response to the demand for communal living models operating outside the norm of the single-family house.7

7 Moudon, Built for Change: Neighborhood Architecture in San Francisco, 72.

Is Less Enough?

COLLECTIVE HOUSING AND TRANSIENT LIVING

San Francisco was long known as ‘Hotel City.’ Although the bulk of the city’s housing stock erected during the Gold Rush consisted of manifold variations on the townhouse that filled the recently subdivided city grid lots, the prevalence of residents who did not conform to the single-family ideal led to the emergence of various forms of communal living that endowed the city with its reputation as the home of the transient.

In response to large-scale urbanization, eighteenth-century theorists of social utopia focused on the conditions of the precarious city by re-envisioning how different people might live together collectively, most remarkably through the rethinking of architectural form and organization. Charles Fourier’s phalanstère serves as a prototype for this type of radical living, where an alternate reality transcends the idea of individual ownership and reformulates the definition of the urban inhabitant. The phalanstery offers a reterritorialization of the city: to be in the city is to also be in the building. Several collective living experiments in the United States took these conceptions as their starting points, with institutions such as religious communes and the boarding house exploring similar conceptions of living where personal ownership was denied in favor of sharing.

The rooming house, as a powerful model of collective living in the city, laid the foundations for the development of single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels and communes, two building types that have come to characterize San Francisco as a city of the independent, mobile and socially progressive. The origins of collective models of living within the city may indisputably be traced back to economic pressures, but are coupled by social ideals of the benefits of living together: demand and desire go hand in hand. San Francisco, a city famed for its history as a locus of counter-cultures and revolts, has been home to a long lineage of self-defined communities and socio-politically organized groups of people coming together to celebrate and defend their shared life-form. The reterritorialization of precarious workers through architecture produces a new ontology that supports the transient mode of life.

The Embassy Commune, photo by Eric Rogers

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RESIDENTIAL HOTELS

The residential hotel is perhaps the most quintessentially San Franciscan housing type. Rooted in the 19 th century boarding house, which opportunistically accommodated the sudden influx of city-dwellers in rapidly urbanizing America, the residential hotel caters to the resident who does not conform to the single-family norm: the gold prospector, immigrant, artist, day laborer, or single middle-class individual. 8 In the Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotel, the tenant rents a single room, typically furnished with a bed and a small sink, and shares a communal bathroom with other residents on the same floor. In contemporary SRO’s, a kitchen is also shared by the whole building. The configuration reflects the ‘archipelago home’ lifestyle which, in the early 20 th century, was the norm for independent, mobile and socially autonomous downtown living in San Francisco. The SRO model was particularly empowering for young women, who were freed from the demands of domestic housekeeping.

The “congregate form” of residential hotel living has long been denigrated as “a cauldron of social and cultural evil”.9 The 1949 Housing Act targeted residential hotel districts as loci of blight and crime, and eventually led to the wide-spread demolition of residential hotels in the urban renewal programs of subsequent decades.As demolition programs were executed, the demographics of downtown residential hotels changed from laborers and artists to former mental hospital patients and the elderly, in what Joan Shapiro describes as “the beginning of an unplanned and unwilling interdependence between social services and hotel owners.” 10

While San Francisco lost over 15,000 SRO units to demolition and condominium conversions between 1970 and 2000, today the city has one of the most aggressive SRO protection laws in the country thanks to activism and community advocacy groups. The Residential Hotel Demolition and Conversion Ordinance (1980) makes San Francisco unique in its maintenance of an SRO hotel housing stock in the city.

8 Joseph Jay Rubin and Charles H. Brown, Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora (State College: Bald Eagle, 1950), 22-23.

9 Paul Groth, Living Downtown: the History of Residential Hotels in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), x.

10 Groth, Living Downtown, 284.

The National Hotel (1906) - The Delta Hotel (1910)

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FEDERAL AND MUNICIPAL HOUSING

In 1890, photojournalist Jacob Riis published How The Other Half Lives , bringing to public attention the squalid conditions of New York City slums.11 Model tenements had been built as early as the 1870’s, but until the 20 th century governmental involvement in housing was minimal. The 1930’s witnessed the execution of the first permanent, federally-funded housing projects as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933): housing ‘community citizens’ became a moral imperative. By the next decade, public housing projects were the source of civic pride. The Wagner-Steagall Housing Act (1937) aimed to provide affordable housing for the ‘deserving poor’ that is, white families whose financial stability had been shaken by the depression.

In the post-war years, with booming reconstruction industries, municipal officials erected a number of temporary housing blocks to house the migrant industrial workers flocking to San Francisco. As the city’s grid lots began to fill, the challenge of land shortage became acute. The shortage led to workers of different backgrounds being housed in the same blocks, and thus San Francisco became the pioneer of racially integrated housing in the US.

After years of encouraging mass exodus to suburbia, and in the wake of national political restlessness in the late 1960’s, the city of San Francisco returned to the promotion of inner-city housing, with the strategy of purchasing former federal housing sites from the government and executing its own Housing Act. The city turned to private funding for the first time, implementing policies such as Section 23, which allowed for the Housing Authority to take on the responsibility of paying the difference between income-adjusted rent levels and market rates on behalf of low-income families. Another policy, known as the Turnkey Policy, guaranteed developers that housing units were to be purchased at a predetermined price set by the Housing Authority after completion. Since the 1980’s, the city’s involvement in housing has operated exclusively within various public–private partnership models.

11 Jacob Riis, How The Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1890).

Holly Courts (1940) - Potrero Terrace (1942)

Is Less Enough?

COMMUNES

While perhaps less radical than their heavily mythologized predecessors, including the hippy commune or the artists’ creative commune, contemporary ‘tech communes’ in San Francisco have recently gained popularity among the young generation of tech workers eager to extend their participation in the ‘sharing economy’ into the realm of their domestic lives. These communes operate both as residential communities (encompassing shared amenities, resources, and social networks) and working environments. Part dormitory, part think tank, the high-density contemporary commune aims to incubate innovation among residents.

Illustrating the commune’s historic lineage to the early SRO type, most contemporary communes are retrofitted residential hotels or Gold Rush townhouses renovated to house up-to-date facilities. The house is typically subdivided into many small rooms, with a large communal space and kitchen on the ground floor, and bedrooms on the higher levels. The commune is home to members of a self-defined community who share similar interests and careers: what is traditionally understood as a living room is now also a co-working space, networking platform and show room.12

Another type of contemporary commune less attached to a shared career path among residents but more focused on the idea of shared luxury is the ‘palace commune’, whose origins can be traced to the historic ‘palace hotel’ a ritzy version of the residential hotel that offered “perfected personal service, superior dining, sociability as well as privacy, physical luxury, and instant status” 13 to its residents. The palace commune fosters a sense of collective luxury afforded by monumental communal spaces: most include historic grand stair cases, generous roof decks, and grand atria whose splendor communicates a message of civic grandeur. The luxury comes at a high price, however: the commune’s shared spaces may seem far from scarce, but in certain cases, assume a total sacrifice of privacy on behalf of the resident in exchange for shared facilities.

12 Groth, Livng Downtown, 284.

13 Groth, Livng Downtown, 27.

The Palace Hotel (1909) - Panhandle House (1910)

PUBLIC–PRIVATE AND COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENTS

Pre-war housing programs focused on the ‘temporarily submerged’ middleclass, depraved by the depression, whereas programs implemented after the wars catered to lower-income families. Public–private partnerships were partially motivated by the aim to diminish the stigma of moving into ‘the projects’. The Housing and Urban Development Act (1965) introduced rent vouchers for the first time, and Section 8 (1974) encouraged the private sector to construct affordable homes, both illustrating the shift from public to private forms of housing development in the city.

The renewed focus on inner-city housing in the 1960’s led to a resurgence of the traditional multi-storey apartment building, whose popularity had dwindled after the crash of 1929, when SRO’s and residential hotels rose to prominence thanks to their cheaper rents. As an interstitial housing type somewhere between publicly-funded housing projects and privately-owned family houses, it catered for a diverse group of young city workers – flâneurs in Baudelairian-Benjaminian terms – who did not fit the nuclear family norm and among whom a myriad of subcultures emerged.14

The city’s urban renewal program forced apartment-renters out of the city. The Live-Work Ordinance (1988) aimed to protect these residents, and led to the conversion of old industrial spaces into live-work units. However, by the turn of the millennium, most buyers were dot-com boom workers and investors rather than the targeted city-dwellers. In essence, live-work zoning had become a loophole for developers to get away with loose planning regulations. In 1999, a moratorium, still in place today, was imposed on live-work developments. Shortly after the ban, the city’s increasingly high rental levels resulted in the development of the city’s first commercial condominium towers. These developments, funded by investment from tech industry employees, offer residents full services from in-house restaurants to exercise facilities for residents, and now outsell townhouses and single-family residences in the city.

14 Josh Alperin, “Public Housing: A Historical Essay,” Found San Francisco online journal. Accessed 27 January 2015, http://foundsf.org/index. php?title=PUBLIC_HOUSING

Hayes Valley Apartments (2012)- Live/Work Lofts (1989) - Folsom & Beale (2015)

Is Less Enough?

SCALES OF AFFORDABILITY

San Francisco’s inability to expand due to its extreme topography and preservationist legislation complicates and impedes the production of new homes. Annually, the city produces an average of 1500 new units, while the population grew by 32,000 from 2010 to 2013 alone; the city is failing to accommodate the explosive population growth stimulated by the regional success of the tech industry and the resurgence of a cultural desire for urban living.15 Furthermore, the insufficient development that does happen is polarized. Two extremes define the city’s housing developments: luxurious apartment towers one the one hand, and low-density houses spread on the periphery of the city on the other. Programs and initiatives aimed to house low-income residents produce subsidized dwellings for the city’s lowest income strata, and luxury developments cater to wealthy investors and tech employees. The moderate-income individual and family are left without options in-between; the universal fundamental right to the city is threatened.

Two housing types have surfaced in response to the void in middle-income housing solutions: the ‘micro-dwelling’ and the contemporary commune. The former provides little more than a perversion of the typical condominium or apartment unit in miniaturized form, confining the resident into claustrophobic isolation. The commune, on the other hand, harks back to earlier precedents of communal living in the city and offers the promise of productive sharing.and a seanse of community consciousness. Extreme market pressure inhibits the social potential of the building type, condemning the inhabitant to complete loss of privacy. Most contemporary communes are retrofitted SRO’s or townhouses, usually populated by dozens of inhabitants who share a single kitchen and bathroom facilities. Due to the unreasonably high rent levels, however, many communes have become radical dwellings where ideals of communal living are translated, by market pressure, into slum-like living quarters whose density leads to scenarios as extreme as several residents living together in bunk beds, renouncing their right to privacy in exchange for communal luxury.

15 Kim-Mai Cutler, “How Burrowing Owls Lead to Vomiting Anarchists (Or San Francisco’s Housing Crisis Explained),” TechCrunch. com. Accessed 4 Feburary 2015, http://techcrunch. com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/

The Panoramic (2015) - 20 Mission Commune (2015)

MODES OF LIVING TOGETHER

Less Enough?

MODES OF LIVING TOGETHER

The idea of shared living, as explored in a variety of eras, communities and projects throughout history, most fundamentally seeks to answer the question “How to live together?” Minimal dwelling can be seen as an attempt to define and understand the bare minimum of the individual – the personal space, or the cell – in its relation to the community and to the city.

The idea of the minimal dwelling is evoked succinctly by Hannes Meyer in his Co-op Zimmer project (1926). The carefully staged photograph suggests an entire way of life: both sparse and comfortable, the space defies normal associations of economic class and resists the presentation of a fully defined subject.1 The room is simple but full of pleasure; its arrangement is not a prescriptive, economized cell for a worker, but home to a cultivated transient. Further, the objects of this fully transformable interior suggest a reliance on larger structures to which the room belongs.

The dual presence of the minimal and the comfortable provoked by Meyer’s photograph became the central project of a generation of early Marxist architects and writers such as Karel Teige, who advanced a study of modern life and chronicled the development of ‘the minimum dwelling,’ first in Czechoslovakia and then in the Soviet Union. 2 These themes were further explored in the twentieth century by designers such as Le Corbusier, who envisioned a pragmatically economized life of asceticism, tempered by the sharing of ‘cheap luxury.’

As Le Corbusier acknowledged, the refinement of the minimal dwelling has its most fundamental roots in the history of monastic life, and in the reoccurrence of similar forms of living which anticipate social and political change. From the coenobitic cave to the Shaker village, and from the American boarding house to the Soviet kommuna, the projects identified here construct specific notions of both communal living and the place of the individual—testing the assertion originally posed by Meyer that the austerity of the individual supports the possibility of living together.

1 K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: the Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 64-70.

2 Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling. Trans. by Eric Dluhosch (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 17.

Modes of Shared Living

Hannes Meyer, Co-op Zimmer (1926)

MONASTIC CELL

In How to Live Together , Roland Barthes compiles a series of musings on what he calls the fantasy of idiorrhythmy. Idiorrhythmics are “small flexible groups of several individuals who are attempting to live together... while each preserving his or her rhuthmos (any regular recurring motion).” 3 In an idiorrhythmic community, “the cell” acts as an interface between the individual and the collective, and is therefore essential to the preservation of this form of life.

The etymological origins of the word ‘cell’ range from the Anglo-French “ celle ”, meaning hermit or monastic cell, and the Latin “ cella ”, meaning small room, store room, or chamber. In the Christian sense, the term describes the living quarters of monks or nuns. For Barthes, the essential nature of the cell is evident in coenobitic monastic communities. Coenobitic monks dwell in various levels of isolation from one another, living more or less according to their own individual pace. Within the shared space of the monastery, the interiority of the cell provides introspective and secluded space to fight evil and seek peace and God. Barthes describes the cell as a “loose, local constellation (a diagram) of functional spaces: bed, desk, places to store personal effects. Proof that such a structure exists: it can be transported (rediscovered, recreated) anywhere, irrespective of the objects themselves.” 4 The cell maintains the autonomy of the individual monk, but places him within the collective body. In contrast to the conjugal bedroom, which implies dual inhabitance, the coenobitic cell is linked to the biological tempo of the sovereign monk and therefore accommodates domestic relationships beyond the model of the nuclear family.

Monasticism or monachism is defined as the act of dwelling alone, and over time has evolved to mean the lifestyle of a person who lives secluded from the world under a religious vow and subject to a rule. The fundamental concept of monachism in all its forms is seclusion or withdrawal from the world, with the intentional construction of a form of life that is wholly different from the pursuits of the rest of society. The adopted mode, regardless of the particulars, is without exception self-abnegation or organized asceticism.

3 Roland Barthes, How To Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 49.

4 Barthes, How To Live Together, 49.

Certosa di Pavia (14 th Century) - Saint Gall Abbey (7th Century)

Is Less Enough?

SHAKERS

The Shaker village is the development of an alternate form of life based upon a strict religious code that became a counterstream to the precarious conditions of American cities in the 19 th century. A strict covenant was required by all those joining a community. Exploring the architecture of the Shakers reveals a unique political existence and mode of production—the split of the bodypolitic and the lived life is reunited through religion and architecture. The architecture of the Shaker dwelling reflects the Shaker family in contrast to the nuclear family, a family that was established through assignment to the building in which they lived. The architecture thus constituted a new subjectivity that was related to the Shakers’ religious code. In relation to the Shakers’ axiom of gender equality, the floorplan of the Shaker dwelling duplicates circulation and all domestic appliances to reinforce boundaries and order. The exigency of the Shaker religious code is enforced through the furniture which becomes another site of architectural intervention at the scale of the room. 5

BOARDING HOUSE

At the height of a rapid urbanization and expansion of American cities in the 19 th century, boarding houses opportunistically took on the burden of accommodating the sudden influx of urban population. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historians estimate that one-third to one-half of all urban Americans either boarded or took boarders at some time in their lives. 6 Precisely because of its diverse and formless nature, the boardinghouse was seen by 19 th century cultural critics as the antithesis of the single family home. Ultimately, a fierce cultural bias against the boarding house and its reterritorialization into a financial institution in the beginning of the 20 th century led to its eventual demise. Nevertheless, in its short lived form, the boarding house exposed the synthetic nature of the culturally constructed single family home and the ideology embedded in its anatomy. Located within the confines of a single family house, the boarding room prioritizes economic transaction over familial relations. More importantly, however, the boardinghouse introduced a radical form of urban inhabitation in which boarding in of itself became the subject of life in the American metropolis.

5 Philip J. Anderson, “The Simple Builders: The Shakers, Their Villages and Architecture” ( PhD diss., St. Louis University, 1969), 11.

6 David Faflik, Boarding Out: Inhabiting the American Urban Literary Imagination, 1840-1860 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012) 43.

Mount Lebanon North Family Dwelling (19 th Century) - Townsend’s Boarding House (1907)

Is Less Enough?

USSR

In 1932, six years after the circulation of Meyer’s Co-op Zimmer, Karel Teige published The Minimum Dwelling . Part survey and part political pamphlet, the book endorsed a series of projects that sought to establish standards for individual space, along with ideas of communal living to reinforce those standards. A staunch Marxist, Teige threw his support to young Soviet architects like Moisei Ginzburg and Mikhail Barsch, whose dom kommuna proposal—one of several unbuilt versions—interrogated the nature of daily life by suggesting dramatic reductions in private space and in exchange for a guarantee of efficient and totally shared services. 7

The dom kommuna , or communal house, became the architectural prototype for the new byt , or Russian way of everyday life. Couples and individuals could apply for compact units in new housing blocks, which divorced themselves starkly from the existing Czarist city model. Whether superimposed on vacant urban land or tossed onto the rural hinterlands, the early dom kommuna proposals envisioned shelter for hundreds, with the convenience of automated dining halls and a plethora of shared spaces, indoor and out. Children would be reared in a central crèche and health was promoted in community bathhouses and gymnasia: the most mundane and fundamental struggles of daily life would be erased in collective settlements.

The Magnitogorsk was a second housing prototype designed by Ginzburg, this time in response to the state’s desire to abandon more radical ideas of collective living. Ginzburg’s scheme retained the minimum dwelling of the individual but suggested a highly atomized social sphere. The units are selfcontained, with most of the essential activities emerging out of flexible furniture. Certain social programs exist elsewhere in the scheme, but the units themselves are lifted off the ground and are thus free to move, becoming either more or less proximate to those functions. This levitation speaks also to the voluntary nature of martial associations in the USSR, with units becoming tethered as a couple grows closer, but always remaining separable in the event of disagreement. 8

8 Elizabeth Waters, “The Bolsheviks and the Family,” Contemporary European History, Vol. 4, No. 3 (November 1995): 275-291.

7 Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, 13.

The Magnitogorsk (1934)

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LE CORBUSIER

Le Corbusier was also interested in an idea of cheap luxury, but from a stance that seemed more politically ambivalent. The idea was based on a radical redefinition of the individual’s association with society: one that is eqaully inspired by transient life on an ocean liner, Fourier’s utopian Socialism, and the rules of semi-coenobitic monastic life. The separation of traditional domestic functions of the home allowed these functions to remerge as shared: distributed, but mutually enjoyed, and thus prompting new forms of community life. The suggestion of a communal restaurant or canteen, instead of a kitchen in every home, becomes a point of departure for both Le Corbusier and the early Soviet architects.

For Le Corbusier, the most explicit notions of communal living arose from the history of the monastery, which he explored to considerable length in his own travels and writing. From his Voyage d’Orient to his visits at Le Thoronet, a fascination with the balance between inner life, community goals, and personal freedom began to emerge in his work. Although Le Corbusier’s reading of monastic life can be taken as an enchantment with the possibilities of its most basic, outward manifestations, his attitude toward the rigorous life of a monk conveyed his desire to elevate the life of the common man. The commission of a new monastery provided the ideal testing ground for calibrating a vision of living together. At La Tourette the cellular accommodation of the monks is clearly distinct from the less normative, sometimes even exuberant common areas—kitchens, refectories, classrooms, and chapels.

Le Cabanon – Le Corbusier’s seaside retreat in the South of France was the epitome of the form of life he envisioned. The furniture and objects designed in the cabin are space-planning elements, not mere additions to the room. The plumbing, washroom fixtures, and furniture come together as immovable parts of an organism. The only movable piece of furniture was a small storage unit and seat on castors, but the length of this aligned with a ribbon window which looked out onto a rock formation.

Le

CITY STRATEGY

Is Less Enough?

CITY STRATEGY

To create 100,000 houses for San Francisco this project is not a scheme to expand the city, but rather to retrofit the existing fabric. Retrofitting is based on specific strategic criteria that take advantage of available under-utilized land and existing infrastructural necessities such as public transit corridors. Counter to much of the idiosyncratic historical development in San Francisco, this project primarily uses flat parts of the city. Avoiding confrontation with topography escapes the problematic asymmetries and land value inequalities that have been created by building upon the hills. The project, instead, focuses on the transit corridors along Divisadero and 16 th Street, deploying structures in car parks, empty building lots, under-used piers, waterfronts, and streets. Thus, a figure emerges from and in the city: not a master plan, but a system of proximities.

Is Less Enough?

Is Less Enough?

9 PROJECTS

9 PROJECTS

Too Many Streets

A rcade Score

V incula

Zero Degree Core Palazzina Dom-ino Court

TOO MANY STREETS

Phillip Nakamura

1. City and County of San Francisco Planning Department.

“Summary of District Standards Service/Secondary Office (SSO) District.”

2. Robert Selna, “How S.F.’s LiveWork Development Boom Began,” San Francisco Chronicle, 18 August 2008.

A city grid implies subdivision and the delimination of space. San Francisco’s platting in the 1860’s established an organizational grid based upon parcels of land. This delineation of property resulted in an excess of streets that continue to organize the city. This project explores the potential productivity of rethinking live/work housing in San Francisco by engaging the politics of San Francisco’s streets through architecture. The rising costs of rent have reached levels that have created an unaffordable city for business owners and craftsmen. These subjects are cast into a situation of precarity and scarcity, needing both a place to live and work, next to impossible to find in San Francisco proper. Too Many Streets proposes placing live/work slabs in the street as a challenge to the political vestige of land speculation. A series of walls create cells, shared communal spaces and combined co-working spaces in streets. In doing so, the project further proposes a reformulated ethos of collective live/work through densified and pedestrianized San Francisco city blocks structured through the architectural form.

Since the platting of San Francisco in 1861, the parcels of land that established the city grid that still exist today. Plats allowed for monetary value to be arbitrarily assigned to them while residual space became the passage–the street. Through this cycle of ownership, streets can be seen as a tertiary space between two blocks. Thus, to accept the current city grid is also to accept the status quo of exploitation with speculation through land ownership which has only intensified in the present. These resultant streets create a redundancy in transportation infrastructure, catering primarily to automobile traffic. To this end, this project attempts to prioritize the live/work ethos and counter reliance upon the automobile in San Francisco.

Presently, it is illegal to live and work in the same dwelling in San Francisco. Legally, live/work refers to housing that an occupant can use as a workplace. 1 The reason for its prohibition stems from past abuse of requirements outlined in planning policy. Live/work units in the late 90’s resulted in lofts that were too expensive for middle-income salary to rent, while developers were able to provide luxury housing while avoiding typical city requirements and fees such as parking per unit. 2 To this end, live/work continues to perpetuate the land crises spurred by speculation. Work and living were not delineated in the architecture as crucial, but incidental.

Is Less Enough?

At the heart of this issue is the blurring distinction of public and private life. Paolo Virno’s Grammar of the Multitude explores this post-Fordist condition: “That which was rigidly subdivided now blends together and is superimposed upon itself. It is difficult to say where collective experience ends and individual experience begins.” 3 Arguably, existent live/work housing typologies contributed to the ease of exploitation by casting life and work into the same architecture while assuming a normative mode of living. Through this complex history of exploitation and lack of identification of life and one’s means of production, specifically through the architecture, the current live/work pattern is not only ineffective, but it privileges an extant economic disparity. Furthermore, automobile reliance decreases the potential for live/ work in an urban center by creating extra expenses disguised as convenience..

This prototype explores occupying streets surrounding Divisadero Street. While rumored to be named to denote the division of the Presidio and the City proper, Divisadero serves as one of several major transit corridors running in the north-south direction that physically divides several neighborhoods. 4 Acknowledging the necessity of transit corridors, the project site strategy works to occupy the excess space in the city grid in the east-south directions, framing Divisadero Street. These east-west cross streets already function as pedestrian and bike transit zones as a result of the typically more flat topography relative to the north-south hills. The street in these areas becomes an inactive third space between two blocks. Through this strategic siting along these corridors, the architecture introduces a transformation to the existing city block morphology while establishing an infrastructure to both live and work. This reduces the reliance upon the automobile while encouraging the development of the street. The sidewalk becomes more tangibly a surface for people to meet, no longer divided by the street.

The formal logic of the project is dictated by the tripartite diagram related to the width of the street, sidewalks and surrounding blocks. The parti works to delineate the simultaneous functioning of the individual in the city, the individual as part of the live-work collective, and the individual as a private existence. At the level of the cell, an equal three-part division provides space for sleeping, bathing and a private patio. Storage space and shared kitchens are

3. Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 2004, 24.

4. The San Francisco Gate. “The Stories Behind San Francisco’s Street Names.”

contained in a central enfilade space. The width of the shared central space negotiates distinctly with the collective and with the individual cell in a space that otherwise is too big to be a hallway or circulation. Rather, these spaces are suggestive of communal life structured from the aggregation of the cell. Grand circulation stairs puncture through the floor and the roof every six units, serving as a lightwell and celebrated passage into the living spaces. The roof becomes a habitable collective space for inhabitants while the ground level becomes distinctly coworking space. The tripartite structure produces work spaces for co-working at the ground level. The aggregation of work spaces establishes a unified coworking ground level that allows for business owners to occupy a distinct place of work within a complex for collective living. This configuration permits multiple tenants who live in the building to work in the entire strip of the ground level, transforming live/work into specific parts of the architecture. At the urban scale, the tripartite parti further welds three blocks together, skipping every third street. The result of this grouping changes the block structure along Divisadero.

Ultimately, this prototype proposes that considering the streets of San Francisco as buildable holds the potential for shifting demographics of the city and its morphology. Acknowledging the necessity of major transit corridors, the strategic refitting of housing into the street suggests that the prototype might happen along various blocks over time. Finally, Too Many Streets reframes the live/work ethos by creating explicit divisions between life and work while also attenuating the architecture of public and private life–how to live together and alone–through the experience of communal living.

Is Less Enough?

Site Plan: Divisidero between Grove and Hayes Street

Is Less Enough?

Is Less Enough?

vFleets of people flock to San Francisco to tap into the current economic boom, arriving homeless, possibly destitute and most certainly estranged. They are instantly tasked with the challenges of finding an inexpensive place to live and a place to work. San Francisco has seen several booms and busts in its economy and population. Yet, the city in its spatial and programmatic configurations seems inert to this influx in population. The crisis here isn’t just of a dearth of buildable land and affordable construction, but also of a denial of sorts - of the up-rooted and nomadic character-types that the city has always invited, and in a way also created. The presence of the SRO (single room occupancy) typology shows that the need for temporary dwellings is a historic one. Arcade looks to provide these new citizens of San Francisco with a temporal threshold, a place to dwell, work and establish themselves in their new city, while ardently bringing forth their circumstances spatially.

The relatively homogenous streetscape constituted by facades that look like single family houses is in complete contradiction to the spatial and social structures behind them. They veil its reality as ‘a city of rooms’, occupied by mostly single people, forced into unpleasant associations with each other. The constantly diminishing number of schools is testimony to this myth of familial domesticity. The single residents are condemned to inhabit the spatial remnants of this false image of domesticity, involuntarily sharing their space and time with others. Problematically, most configurations of living together inevitably become spatial traps for an individual, placing the need for solitude and personal space in jeopardy. Arcade, in being conceived of for a singular resident is a celebration of one’s time spent alone; an attempted temporary escape from the network of spatial and social bonds that constitutes the city.

The precarious nature of work today creates an ambivalent circumstance, alternating between subjugation and emancipation. While one doesn’t have the security of a stable yet possibly oppressive job, one also enjoys the liberation and nomadism offered by this condition. The aim here is to create a spatial representation of this issue, where architecture can reflect this condition by giving it explicit form. Arcade celebrates the condition of the city being one’s living room, kitchen and backyard – in other words, the city as an interior, an idea first brought forth by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project.

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For the perfect flaneur ( . . .) it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow (. . . ) To be away from home, yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, yet to remain hidden from the world (…) such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures.1

Benjamin wrote about the flaneur as a character-type created by the city of Paris, who dwelled in the city, thrived in the city, but was also condemned by it because he was always spatially trapped inside this new interior. The societal under-representation of the precarious worker today are similar to Benjamin’s flaneur. A figure that is perhaps the antithesis of the flaneur is the monk, who chooses a solitary way of life. The degree of solitude that pertains to his life and the people that he interacts with are always chosen for him. The psychological alienation extant in both these character-types is manifested spatially for the monk, but not for the flaneur. Arcade emerges from a position of skepticism towards always being subjected to the same and extreme conditions of being, either amidst the flows of the city, or in complete isolation.

This is housing for a flaneur-monk: who dwells in the city, relies on the city for their social life, and escapes into their cell for some much required solitude. The solitude mentioned isn’t a religious solitude of being one with higher powers, but of an escape from the city, and the politics that accompany association with other people. The possibility to revel in the city’s vitality is amplified by a temporary escape into its other – complete isolation, provided by the cell and the corridor that leads to it. The project provides private cells on the second floor, where one lives alone, and collective spaces to work on the ground floor. The cells in the project include a platform for a bed, a washroom, a wall of storage, and a private patio. Where one sleeps there is no daylight which allows one to escape the 24 hour cycle of the day, creating both spatial and temporal isolation. This is something that contemporary work culture has made inevitable, yet is invisible spatially in current forms of dwellings.

The project occupies the parking lane, and the median of several portions of Divisidero Street in San Francisco, amidst the ebbs and flows of the city. I look to explore the untapped potential of generously wide sidewalks and streets of the city. The residents of San Francisco are already responding to these extra spaces of the streetscape by creating parklets – small units that are being installed on the parking

1 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 432.

lane which currently include public benches, café extensions, mini-parks and parking for bicycles. The unit on the parking lane becomes a barrier between the fast traffic on the street and the slow pedestrian traffic of the sidewalk, effectively transforming the sidewalk into a street, or an arcade with buildings on two sides. The factors that dictate where the project is possible are topography/slope, current property use on the ground floor, and width of the sidewalks. City blocks where the sidewalks are at least 12 feet wide and have the ground floor occupied by retail and commercial uses, the project consumes the parking lane, to create work spaces for people in the neighborhood and those living upstairs, also creating a potential revenue hike for the prevailing restaurants and retail units. Integrated into the project are elements that constitute a streetscape, and also an urban public space – lamp posts, trash cans, bicycle parking and places to sit, freeing up the space of the sidewalk. Several large buildings with blank facades face Divisidero Street – here too, the project occupies the parking lane, activating the lifeless sidewalk. The project seeks to occupy the median in the residential portions of the street, effectively shielding existing windows from the gazes of the windows across the street. Its linear and unbroken nature also heightens the effect of the slope, creating vistas of the streetscape beyond. In treating housing as infrastructure that the city provides, the project seeks to give affordable housing distinct urban form, looking to address the question of spatial representation of a burgeoning faction of society that is currently deprived of forms of political, social and architectural representation.

The life structure that Arcade offers is one of cheap luxury – a large bathtub, a bed that’s slightly larger than a single bed, a private patio, and the luxury of not having to spend several hours on domestic labor such as cooking and cleaning. The project provides an incredible proximity to the city, and a rare opportunity to suddenly escape it.

Is Less Enough?

Is Less Enough?

Is Less Enough?

Is Less Enough?

Is Less Enough?

Is Less Enough?

SCORE

Since the latter half of the 20 th century, a series of combative and convoluted real estate laws and restrictions have left the city of San Francisco with few options to house a continuous influx of freelance and highly mobile workers, placing existing housing stock well beyond the reach of new tenants. The micro-unit dwelling, an economized one-bedroom apartment, has been offered as a means of housing these individuals. Predicated on the notion of an isolated subject, the micro-unit preserves the menu of standard domestic rooms that categorize and structure the real estate market and imposes this logic on the individual, excluding the possibility of productive interaction between potential occupants and offering no lasting remedy for affordability.

Despite attempts to create alternatives alongside the growth in dense micro-dwellings, the exploration and interrogation of these practices is limited. Nearly all of the available housing in San Francisco has developed under the umbrella logic of the commoditized room, in which the domestic landscape is shaped by the persistence of the corridor to create and enforce privacy. Further, the spaces of the house are segregated into artificial variety based on the naming of rooms internally, ossifying the social and economic conditions which created them.

Unlike the more fundamental and unifying models of figural space, or the enfilade, which rely on the independence of a subject’s body in space to determine notions of use and distinctions in privacy and comfort, the typologies of housing in San Francisco are predicated on a process of division—from the surveying of land into plats to the charting of hallways, and ultimately, to the market-derived nomenclature of the domestic realm. 1 Problematically, loans for new construction are underwritten partly on the basis of such divisions and their commensurate room descriptions, further limiting the possibilities of living outside the polarities of the single-family dwelling and the un-sanctioned SRO. 2

This proposal rejects the micro-unit dwelling as a development tool that extracts surplus value from the non-cohesion of single workers, freelancers, and entrepreneurs by pursuing the paradigm of named rooms to its logical exhaustion: an unalterable room that must simultaneously function as

2 Michael Dennis, Court and Garden: From the French Hotel to the City of Modern Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988).

1 Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors, and Passages,” Translations from Drawing to Building (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997)

Is Less Enough?

bedroom, living room, kitchen, and study, with little or no space provided for social encounters or co-working, instruction, or collaboration within the domestic sphere. Instead, the proposal seeks a more fundamentally explicit understanding of the household as a matrix of served and servant spaces.

To accomplish this, the project pursues its interiority with a serial and strategic deployment of inhabitable walls. Chambers and alcoves of standardized sizes within each wall give shelter to the banal necessities of domestic functions: cooking, cleaning, storage, personal hygiene, and rest. With the quotidian aspects of reproduction contained within the walls, the resultant open space in between can freely respond to the changing conditions of life and work. Constructed with units of precast concrete and spanned with a series of shallow vaults, the walls become a generic frame for domestic variety. The walls are deployed in three bands to delineate a zone of intimate personal spaces, a zone of shared domestic necessities, and a zone for coworking and entrepreneurialism, suggesting a gradient of privacy across the project.

In an oblique way, domestic variety is prompted by the creation of rhythms: the fundamental unit of the wall is repeated to create a stable armature for difference. It becomes possible to reduce the essential constituents of the project into an almost stenographic notation. Like the notes in a musical score, the walls are arranged parallel in unequal rhythms, with each series creating spaces of a distinct size and proportion, thereby implying a simple gradient of intimacy. Precisely because the frequency of the walls is unequal, the direct hierarchical relationship between the smallest spaces of the individual room and the increasingly larger domestic spaces is shattered. Consequently, the plan creates a rigid but continuously negotiable framework for daily life, both private and public. The methodical repetition of similar elements at these misaligned rhythms produces infinite variety. Though generic and physically self-similar, each space is in fact unique, but does not enforce an aura of uniqueness like the traditional spaces of the domestic interior. Instead, the occupants determine the specificity of the spaces from the functional adjacencies of the walls and from the accumulation of their own domestic habits.

Recognizing the diminishing separation between labor and sociability, each occupant is provided space to both live and work. The resultant sharing of common facilities, equipment, and areas promotes a space of potentially productive encounters and, ultimately, the development of a collective consciousness—the lack of which underpins the rampant exploitation of the precarious individual. The “walls,” therefore, are legible at multiple registers: first as the Shaker-like cabinets that serve a room, second as a threshold of similar spaces, and third as a communal project of urban visibility and difference—the wall as a form of solidarity.

If the City of San Francisco chooses to view housing as a vital piece of its internal infrastructure, it must allocate space and resources to sheltering its newest and most vulnerable residents. But consistently, this outlook has been met with considerable opposition, particularly from constituencies concerned with the preservation of the city’s low-lying fabric and visible edges. As recently as 2014, in the “Waterfront Height Limit Right to Vote Act,” the city suspended the further vertical development of its waterfront, subject to public approval. 3 Despite this imposed restriction, the developable area of port-owned land should be utilized to address the crisis of housing. As linear spaces, San Francisco’s neglected piers offer a territory for the deployment of the score on an infrastructural scale, with sites that are simultaneously within and outside of the traditional boundaries of the city. Tethered to the Embarcadero transit loop, the piers remain advantageously connected to other districts, but maintain the possibility of seclusion for the uprooted occupant, just as within the score, the individual room remains a space of private life within a wall of collective living. Alongside the possibility of participation in a collective, the project preserves the potential for quiet separation, at the scale of the individual or the liberated community.

3 “Waterfront Height Limit Right to Vote Act,” Department of Voting and Records, City of San Francisco. June 2014.

Is Less Enough?

Is Less Enough?

Mahdi Sabbagh and Sarah Smith

1 Definition according to the Oxford English Dictionary web page, as of April 27, 2015

2 Privacy is understood as a right in and of itself, not private property. That right is often sacrificed in smaller living quarters due to economic necessity.

Vinculum : “A bond of union,” from the Latin vinc(ire) : ‘to bind.’ 1

We are proposing a dwelling that encourages togetherness, sharing and solidarity while respecting the individual’s fundamental right to privacy. 2 The shared and the private components of the proposal are legible in the architecture not through demarcation or division, but through a gradient that allows the subject to transition from the most private to the most shared aspects of the dwelling. In the current economic and political climate of San Francisco, only through sharing can one achieve gradients of life, from solitude to sociability, that domesticity requires.

The current condition of housing in San Francisco is often described as a “crisis.” The condition of the housing crisis is coupled with a crisis of legibility of form-of-life. In cities like San Francisco, apartments and houses designed for nuclear families are being occupied by groups of 8 to 10 precarious individuals, sharing bathrooms and bedrooms and sacrificing their privacy. Housing has become a burden, and sharing is perceived as an undesirable and desperate survival tactic. There is a disjuncture between the increasingly precarious form-of-life and San Francisco’s built fabric; the form-of-life is masked, hidden and thus not legible. As a result of this illegibility, the housing crisis is met with apathy and dismissal.

Our project addresses the growing wealth schism in San Francisco and the resulting disenfranchisement of the middle class subject. The middle class, a loose term at best, perhaps better described as the politically disenfranchised majority, is a fractured group of people with common goals but no solidarity. The subject is the precarious individual who desires to remain in place, form a community, parent or co-parent without the typical sacrifice of lifestyle, space and privacy. Through a new dwelling condition, the subject is able to live, work and raise children without forced mobility, sacrifice of privacy and disenfranchisement. Dwelling is defined by the material components and activities of domestic necessity. Through a careful analysis of both, we arrive at a tactical remapping of domestic life that provides us with a gradient of privacy and sharing possibilities within the dwelling. Some activities require privacy, either because of a wanted or needed isolation: there is a co-

Is Less Enough?

dependency between sharing and privacy. Sharing results in more generous social spaces, including living, cooking, eating, laundry and storage facilities, allowing the individual to maintain privacy while also reducing the burden of domestic labor.

The typical 400-sqft apartment is roughly broken down into 270-sqft of private space and 130-sqft of social space. In comparison, the micro-dwelling is comprised of 275-sqft of total space – but what is being touted as a new formof-life is merely shrinking the living quarter and maintaining a proportional division of private and social space. The underlying economy is unchanged, and, in fact, results in an increase in the construction cost per square foot. 3 Besides the reduction of space, there is a reduction of legibility within the dwelling. With the exception of an over-sized bathroom for explicit bodily functions, every other activity is layered upon itself in one microspace, so that sleeping, cooking, entertaining, relaxing, privacy, and socializing are overlaid with each other in one gray zone of illegibility. The individual, our precarious subject, is forced to compromise space, quality of life, and the legibility of his or her domestic sphere.

Our project reconsiders the typical apartment by deconstructing its framework and reconstructing it in order to make legible the privacy and sharing of the precarious subject. The 400-sqft apartment is broken down into its constituent zones, with a gradient from the inherently private – what we call the cell – to the inherently social. The multiple social spaces pool together into a generous communal space while maintaining the privacy of the individual cell: what develops is a mutually beneficial system of gains. Each vinculum produces a gradient of privacy from the intimate cell to the shared communal space. One unit is two stories high, and consists of eight private cells and one large shared space. The private cell can either be inhabited by a single person, a couple, two roommates, or children. The minimum amount of people housed in one unit is 8, and the maximum is 16. When this formula is applied to the San Francisco block proportions, we are able to linearly fit 5 units side by side and stack three units tall; this gives us a prototypical configuration for the vincula buildings’ deployment in San Francisco. The grouping of cells aggregates to provide a larger, shared social sphere and, in turn, guarantees the individual

3 According to Panoramic developer Patrick Kennedy, the market rate of a micro-dwelling in San Francisco is $2500 per month at least.

4 Common Land refers to common land tenure and common pasturage. In the Levant, common land ownership by villages is known as Musha’. The UK Foundation for Common Land defines the “Commons” as “areas where certain people hold beneficial rights to use land that they do not own.” (“Rights of Common,” Foundation for Common Land, accessed April 27, 2015, http://www. foundationforcommonland.org. uk/rights-of-common)

privacy. The solitary, the bodily, and the explicit are given their designated zones. By proposing the coexistence of privacy and sharing, we allow for the individual to remain in place and avoid forced mobility due to lack of space, lack of privacy or a combination of both. The proposed dwelling offers the possibility of celibacy, relationship, and child care to occur in one place while maintaining the right to individual privacy.

We observed a datum of underused and inaccessible waterfront zones. The deployment of the vincula , tested on the Presidio and Dogpatch areas, returns the waterfront to the public. Based on the model of Common land 4 we propose the idea of Common Garden. This is neither traditional public space, nor private domain. It occupies an in-between space that simultaneously requires residents to take part but does not allow them to claim ownership or parcel the land. The shared amenities include access to open space and park space, urban farms, sports facilities and shared common rooms, meeting rooms and office space. What is ultimately considered as the common garden includes not only the ground floor of the buildings and the land in-between different building groups, but also the uninterrupted access to the San Francisco waterfront. The gradient from the private cell to the shared space then extends to the site and the city. Rather than a relentless deployment of our unit, we use a conversational model to mediate between the existing site condition and the vincula . This allows us to test the flexibility of our unit and the ability of varied unit groupings to yield shared amenities and access to exterior space, green space and views towards the waterfront. The groupings follow three main categories: Bar buildings, Tower buildings and Row House buildings. Each form a different possibility of sharing on an urban scale and test the model of common garden with various population sizes.

Vincula is a system of sharing and mutual gain, a micro and macro approach to a condition of crisis. This project creates a new gradient of the very private to the social sphere: a new concept of sharing that maintains the autonomy of the individual through the promotion of togetherness. The gradient becomes legible through clear spaces of privacy, and spaces of sharing on the scale of the unit, the building and the neighborhood.

Is Less Enough?

Is Less Enough?

Is Less Enough?

Is Less Enough?

ZERO DEGREE

Karl Karam

Zero degree is a housing system for artists configured of cells whose peripheral sliding doors allow for a shift between a state of total isolation and shared living. When the doors are opened, residents share a patio and creationrecreation spaces. The skylights offer an equal and undisturbed view to all inhabitants and the patio access allows for a communal awareness amongst neighbors. Additionally, these elements provide ample light to the spaces below.

Placed below ground, the project respects the downzoning of San Francisco while simultaneously increasing its density. The variation of heights and spaces provides the possibility of multiple uses, while the columns’ configuration maintains a sense of order and provides fixtures for customization.

The proposal addresses the housing crisis of San Francisco by rethinking the house’s organization around the corridor and resisting the residential hierarchy present within the city. Rising rent prices and strict zoning rules have exacerbated the condition of the subject, The Artist, and are driving him further away from the city. San Francisco, eager to maintain its creative and progressive legacy, should endorse a project in support of this community by offering it, for the purpose of housing construction, land that is residual from the conflict of the grid and coast line: flat land that has been downzoned to zero.

The Artist constantly questions any given rule or space. It is paramount for him to be aware of the relationship he holds to his environment and to others; as Henry Van de Velde remarks, “instinctively, he distrusts everything that might sterilize his actions, and everyone who preaches a rule that might prevent him from thinking his thoughts through to their own free end, or that attempts to drive him into a universally valid form...” 1 Artists have had a strong presence in San Francisco throughout its history, and still constitute an important part of the enduring multicultural nature of the city. But today, tall ceiling heights, reconfigurable organization systems and variable room sizes, all of which are essential to The Artist’s work, are either too expensive or contained within educational grounds. Additionally, the majority of current urban renewal housing projects target a market that has no need for large production or

1 Ulrich Conrads, Programs and manifesto on 2oth century architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971): 29

recreational spaces, favoring instead micro-cells where the corridor leads to the commodification and miniaturization of the living unit.

In the 19 th century, corridors were developed as a tool to separate different groups of people. By separating circulation from destination, they increased the efficiency through which people could move through buildings, at the same time turning rooms into hierarchical constructs of controllable and commodifiable entities such as early boarding houses in San Francisco. The correlation of the corridor and ideas of domestic life is described by Robin Evans, in his analysis of the relationship between the nine square floor plan of the 16 th century Palazzo Antonini by Andrea Palladio and paintings of the time, such as Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo . 2 Palladio’s plan, void of the corridor, and Michelangelo’s figures, expressing carnality, reveal ideas of domesticity that are rather different, if not opposite to what is communicated through Edward hoppers painting The Morning Sun (1952). In Hopper’s painting, a female figur sits still and fixed, alone and undefined relating to John Hejduk’s Todre House, of the similar time. Here the 9 square floor plan uses the corridor as a tool of separation.

In response, the proposed cell of Zero Degree , takes on the 9 square grid as its organization. It establishes internal hierarchies by the positioning of the columns. The walls then define different degrees of privacy; finally, the doors seal off the space. The cell’s plan is divided into four parts. At the bottom right, access is given through the patio. The top right holds the sanitary functions; the top left offers a large creation-recreation space; and finally, the bottom left constitutes the bedroom. Doors close off the bedroom and establish ownership of the land on which you sleep. The unit, a double height space, is arranged so that openings and closures negotiate different degrees of privacy for the users.

The project takes advantage of the morphology of San Francisco and sinks into the ground. The morphology of the city, that results from the tension between the grid and the city’s natural topography, creates a graded structure dominated by the view corridors. As Florence Lipsky writes, “Paradoxically, what originally constituted snags in an ideal homogeneous fabric, has become

2 Robin Evans, Figures, Doors and Passages, Architectural Design No. 48 (London: Academy Editions , 1978): 267-278.

9 Projects

the city’s specific spatial asset. The grid is no longer an equalizing factor.” 3 These tensions control density and simultaneously push the city to spread across all available land. Flatland, such as the discarded piers, becomes a scarce condition and the recent downzoning to zero offers new site possibilities. It allows for the project to establish itself as a new datum for the city while maintaining a non-hierarchical organization following its own autonomous 84foot grid.

The system, by colonizing residual sites, offers within its organization the possibility of rearrangement within a stable ground. This, in turn, encourages the subject to gain control and awareness of his state in relation to his environment and others. It pushes him to participate in the politics of space and allows him to exert variable degrees of engagement and action.

“The matrix of connected rooms is appropriate to a type of society, which feeds on carnality, which recognizes the body as the person and in which gregariousness is habitual.” 4

4 Evans, Figures, Doors and Passages, 270.

3 Florence Lipsky, The Grid Meets the Hills (Marseille: Edition Parentheses, 1999).

Section AA

Is Less Enough?

Is Less Enough?

Tamrat Gebremichael and Nicholas Muraglia

The Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotel is an essential, yet repressed, urban housing type ubiquitous in San Francisco that offers a crucial alternative to the domesticity prescribed by the single-family dwelling model. Standing in opposition to the “American Dream” of private home ownership, stability, and familial governance, the SRO hotel fosters social and economic conditions which cater to the mobile, uprooted subject.

This project reinvigorates the residential hotel model for a new generation of precarious workers by reclaiming an object of housing infrastructure lost in the evolution of domestic space: the core. All domestic activities such as sleeping, cooking, eating and cleaning are consolidated within the core, liberating the periphery as a non-typological space without any prescribed functions. The project proposes a system of cores with degrees of sharing and privacy embedded in its organization; a single core is always shared between multiple residents, and operates as a partition that mediates the private and collective spaces. The core is not only reclaimed in terms of its functionality, but more importantly becomes the critical element of collective living that restructures and provides clarity to domestic space and ritual.

The core first emerges as an architectural device of domestic organization in the development of American vernacular housing. In the 17 th century Colonial ‘hall and parlor’ house, a massive, double-sided masonry hearth (which would later also contain vertical circulation) is placed in the center of a single room, operating as an infrastructural element around which the public, social activities of the ‘hall’ and the more private, intimate activities of the ‘parlor’ are defined. 1 In this model of American domesticity, the space of familial privacy is inextricably linked to a space for accommodating strangers, mediated by the central core. This model is rationalized and institutionalized by the work of Catherine Beecher, who in 1869 developed the “American Woman’s Home” as a model for domestic reform. In the project, Beecher consolidates all activities of domestic labor into a unified central service core containing specialized built-in furniture and equipment. 2 The specificity of the core liberates the rest of the house as unprogrammed space; Beecher’s model of domesticity is radical not only in functional efficiency, but more importantly, in terms of the liberation of spaces of inhabitation from the reproductive machine.

1 Mark Gelernter, A History of American Architecture: Buildings in Their Cultural and Technological Context (Hanover: University of New England, 1999), 57.

2 Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984), 96.

Is Less Enough?

As economic stability and cultural standards of privacy evolved, the central service core disappeared from the domestic space, and was replaced by a partitioning of the home into rooms with specific prescribed functions and an organizing corridor. This introduction of the partition and the corridor becomes crucial in the effective management of domestic space and in its translation into an economic apparatus; the boarding house, and later, the residential hotel, reflect this transformation in social and economic conditions. The corridor was used to manage the new social circumstances of living with strangers in the most economically efficient manner possible, allowing the organization of isolated, individual units within a single structure.

San Francisco has a rich history of residential hotel living, originating in the late 19 th century, when residential hotels were crucial to the casual labor supply and its culture. Throughout its history, SRO hotels have accommodated a range of subjects, from unskilled laborers and immigrants to artists, writers and students, who collectively contributed to the economy and culture of San Francisco. SRO living became synonymous with urban living; residential hotels were not only temporary and affordable, but more importantly, offered these inhabitants the independence, mobility, and socially progressive lifestyle they desired. In the SRO model, an individual rents out a single room, typically of absolute minimum proportions for habitation; just large enough to fit a bed, a dresser, a microwave, and a sink. A bathroom down the hall is shared with the other residents. In more updated SRO hotels, there may be a kitchen shared by the whole building. This reflects the “scattered home” 3 lifestyle of the early 20 th century in which the SRO resident’s “home” extended into the urban network of spaces for assembly (restaurants, billiard halls, and bars) which, over time, disappeared from the city.

As ideological bias, real estate speculation and the push to build a financial hub accelerated SRO demolition in the seventies, several grassroots campaigns began to form, aiming to protect SRO residents from displacement. This resulted in the “Residential Hotel Demolition and Conversion Ordinance” of 1981, one of the most aggressive SRO protection laws in the country. Today, about 500 SRO’s, with a total of 19000 rooms, host 30,000 inhabitants in San Francisco. Due to developers’ lack of interest to construct new SRO’s,

3 Paul Groth, Living Downtown: the History of Residential Hotels in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 126.

many of these old buildings are maintained in squalid conditions, and are quite often abandoned and left vacant. Government efforts to seize these properties through eminent domain most typically result in rehabilitation of the existing building rather than new construction, perpetuating the social conditions of isolation and repression produced by the old structures. This proposal sees these 500 SRO’s as the main site of intervention, targeting the most decrepit and abandoned structures in addition to building in the vastly underutilized industrial spaces in the eastern part of the city.

The project sees the potential of the residential hotel model to house a new generation of precarious subjects: the mobile, uprooted workers that require the life flexibility, lightness, and uncertainty that the burden of a home mortgage or even a year-long contract cannot offer. The project reclaims the core as a means to restructure domestic space in terms that are compatible with this new subject. A system of shared cores frees the peripheral spaces of inhabitation from the activities of reproductive labor, allowing the reintroduction of leisure and productive labor into the domestic realm. The cores operate as a threshold between the private space of the individual cell and the space of communal life, re-linking the single-room occupancy model directly to the shared spaces of assembly critical to political organization.

The core system is not predicated on any specific form or typology. As such, the project may be deployed in three different forms specific to three different urban conditions in San Francisco: the high rise tower in the Financial District, the bar building in the mid-scale blocks along the city’s transit corridors, and the one-story building in the former industrial areas. While the scale and form of the project adapt to these different site conditions, the grammar of the core system remains the same, providing a legible urban form to the precarious subject. As opposed to the existing urban structures which conceal the presence of the SRO resident to preserve an illusion of stability, the project offers a form of representation to this new form of inhabitation. The project aims to reconfigure the domestic space as one defined by mobility and collective living, providing both an interior space and a legible urban form through which these subjects can recognize themselves as a new political body in the city.

Is Less Enough?

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PALAZZINA

Michael Robinson Cohen

Palazzina is a medium scale building that offers affordable housing for middle-income freelance workers in San Francisco. Suitable to the existing density of the city, the intermediate scale of the project, which sits between the townhouse and the tower enables independent inhabitants to form residential cooperatives. Limiting the size of the community supports effective sharing of space and domestic tasks, engendering a collective consciousness that is essential for the precarious worker of the disenfranchised middle-class. While the project is contextual in scale, the autonomy of the building is made evident by its cubic form and isotropic façade. The regularity of the exterior clearly marks a limit to the city and conceals the project’s unique spatial and social interior.

The nine-square grid defines the plan of the project. The walls between the square rooms are thickened, to create a poché space that accommodates the biological functions of living. Within this compact territory, private living cells border the façade whereas shared kitchens, storage and dining areas are centrally located. Circular rooms act as inhabitable vestibules that mediate the transition between the private cells and the centralized shared facilities. In contrast to the highly prescriptive poché space, the eight squares on the border of the plan are empty and double height. This type of generic space is particularly valuable to freelance workers who lack the structure of a conventional work environment. Devoid of the demands of household management, the un-programmed, but formally specific outer squares permit sovereign interaction between individuals, engendering entrepreneurial collaboration, solidarity and political action. The center square, which is indisputably unique, contains a monumental circular staircase that establishes a collective center for the community and affirms the wholeness of the architectural object. The distinct formal difference between the generic squares and the compressed realm of biological maintenance legibly communicates the social and political structure of the project.

The projects scale and form are rooted in the building typology of the Italian Palazzina. This housing type transformed the agrarian bourgeois villa into collective housing for middle-class families. Located on the edge of the city, in close proximity yet removed from the downtown financial district, the moder-

Is Less Enough?

ate scale and muted architecture of the urban villa suited the economic needs of the bourgeois class and represented their metropolitan identity. As the prevalence of the Palazzina increased in post-war Italy, modernist architects refined the type’s specific architectural traits. Typically, single-family apartments surrounded a central circulation and service core. While the core was accessible to all inhabitants, its placement was instrumental in compartmentalizing the domestic units and promoting a financial model based on individual ownership. In Rome, Il Girasole designed by Luigi Moretti is a canonical example of the Palazzina’s archetypal spatial composition. As an emblem of the growing wealth of the middle class, the Palazzina typology was coopted by housing developers for speculative real-estate projects. Under the influence of capital investment the Palazzina was converted into a generic type that could be rapidly and inexpensively constructed. The rigidity of the interior layout was often contrasted by kitschy façade treatments that enhanced the marketability of the residence. The building type rapidly saturated urban outskirts and expanded into the surrounding territory, diffusing the divide between the urban and the rural. As a consequence, the Palazzina is now disdained as a mechanism of urbanization and the commodification of architecture. 1

Oswald Mathias Ungers analysis of this typology in Berlin, which he called the Urban Villa, provides a model for the transformation of the Palazzina in a different context and historical moment. Confronted by urban depopulation in the 1970’s, Ungers and a group of Cornell graduate students empirically researched the urban villa typology. The research thesis promoted the building type as providing the cultural and social density of the city while maintaining the desired individual privacy and ownership of the suburban home. Severing the building type from its speculative roots, Ungers aimed to curtail uncontrolled isotropic suburbanization and to provide appropriately scaled, affordable housing for the middle-class. The restrained scale of the type, allowed for inexpensive construction and permitted affiliated groups to establish cooperatives. 2 Despite the radical revitalization of the Urban Villa, the Cornell design studio preserved a financial model of housing based on private ownership and division of inhabitants. Within the contemporary context of San Francisco’s housing crisis, this project reasserts the scalar and social benefits of the urban villa championed by Unger’s, while attempting to re-define the individual

1. Amir Djalali, In Praise of the Palazzina: The Palazzina is almost all right. A project for Rome (Phd Diss., 2014)

2. O.M Ungers, The Urban Villa: A Multi Family Dwelling Type: Cornell Summer Academy 77 In Berlin (Ithaca: Studio Press For Architecture,1977) 8.v

occupants economic and social relationship to the home by re-calibrating the ratio between personal and shared space. A mode of inhabitance based on sharing inverts the compartmentalized organization of the original Palazzina typology, and can accommodate a wider range of residents. The single-family is therefore not prioritized in the reification of this domestic type.

The architectural form and layout of the home crystalize and expedite domestic customs by spatially streamlining an inhabitant’s movement. Domestic hierarchy and ritual is indexed in an architectural plan. The nine-square grid is an archetypal plan of the villa, both urban and rural. In his analysis of Palladio, the art historian Rudolph Wittkower extracted the abstract diagram of the nine-square from particular instances of the Italian architect’s villa design. Further, the diagram is an ordering principle in the ideal villas designed by Claude Nicholas Ledoux for City of Chaux and the contemporary Texas Houses of John Hejduk. In its reoccurrence throughout history, the ninesquare signifies a specific form of domesticity where the distinct reproductive habits of the home occupy the interior space of the nine squares and the diagrams finite boundary delineates singular property holding. Alternatively, The Temple of Solomon, which is the original manifestation of the nine-square, proposes a different spatial model where the interior courtyards of the nine squares remain profoundly empty. This purity of space is achieved by the placement of colonnades along the linear boundaries of the composition allowing circulation and inhabitance throughout the building without disturbing the generic sanctity of the courtyards Alluding to the Temple’s spatial syntax this project preserves the interior purity of the square rooms while providing circulation and services within the arms of the diagram. Applying the formal logic of the Temple of Solomon to the Palazzina typology produces a new form of collective housing where the hierarchy and ritual of traditional domestic space do not exclusively dictate the existence of the inhabitant.

Is Less Enough?

Is Less Enough?

Is Less Enough?

Melody Song

1 The 2020 Intuit report suggests that by 2020, 40% of the US workforce will be contingent workers. For a more detailed characterizion of the contingent worker, see Intuit 2020 Report: Twenty Trends that Will Shape the Next Decade. (2010). Intuit 2020 Research Series. Retrieved April 20, 2015, from http:// about.intuit.com/futureofsmallbusiness/

2 C. Cooper (2014, August 20). Vexed in the city: Tech’s fraught transformation of San Francisco, 2014 CNET.

This project is a tower prototype for a community of 120-200 precarious workers. San Francisco, a city short of housing stock and exaggerated housing speculation, has out-priced the contingent worker. The contingent worker, or the Precariat, is a class fostered by the growth of cloud-based, data-driven work. 1 The Precariat relies on the city for economic survival and cultural sustenance, and they are themselves, important for the city’s survival. Particular to San Francisco is the precarious character of the tech worker or freelancer. The largest in the US, San Francisco’s tech industry accounts for 13% of the city’s private sector jobs; from 2010-2014, it accounted for 30% of the city’s new jobs. 2 Despite their importance as economic drivers, the tech worker and other precarious characters have no protection of their right to live in the city.

San Francisco has a history of progressive movements aimed at making the city affordable for the contingent worker. From the city’s instant birth during the Gold Rush, to the construction of boarding houses and Single Resident Occupancy hotels, and to the formation of cultural and ethnic clusters, San Francisco is city of small communities. The enclaves were not only produced by economic imperative but by desire for community. The “Dom-ino” aims to develop affordable housing for intentional community dwelling that builds upon San Francisco’s latent ethos of achieving more by sharing more, and within which market exploitation is resisted by both the inhabitant and the dwelling place. The need for communities, in particular those that establish the possibility for shared rituals outside of the workplace, is important: these characters face increased individual risk and anxiety, less traditional institutional support, and no rest from market-oriented hyperproductivity in contemporary society.

3 Eleanor Gregh: “The Dom-ino Idea,” Oppositions 15/16 (Winter/ Spring 1979): 61-81.

In circumsances not unlike the current emergency in San Francisco, Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino ( domus = house; ino = innovation) was conceived as a solution to the urgent housing need in post-war Belgium. 3 Now almost a de facto form of construction, the success of the Dom-ino lies in its generic nature as a structural platform that allows any infill. Because of its flexibility, the Dom-ino has a history of lending itself to market pressure and continuing paradigms of domestic dwelling that are problematic for fostering relations

outside the nuclear family. In the dangers posed by flexibility, the Domino model is not unlike the lifestyle of the precarious worker. According to Paolo Virno, precarious workers have the habit of having no habits. It is their adaptability and creative potential – arguably, life itself – that is bought and sold by the current market. 4

The spatial logic of the Dom-ino is derived from its structural elements: the column, horizontal datum, and stair. 5 The proposed new Dom-ino modifies this original diagram into three tectonically distinct elements: structural floor, open floor, and core.

Unlike Dom-ino’s horizontal slabs, which remain generic, the proposed tower has two types of horizontal data: structurally rigid and structurally void. The structural slab is a floor-to-ceiling truss structure which holds individual rooms within. This structure can be seen as a thickening of Corbusier’s horizontal datum, where the rigidity of the structure reserves a densely concentrated and defined space for privacy and concentration. Each resident has their own room with a 2 x 2 meter platform, an open space of 2 x 2 meters, and a bathroom. Rooms can be joined by sliding doors for couples or families. The structurally void datum above serves as communal workspace. It is a space that functions in line with the original Dom-ino: the generic open floor plan of the industrial factory or productive workspace. The two planes reflect the existing conditions of young precariat life: minimum time at home and minimum possessions coupled with maximum productive output that occurs in the shared workspace, café, or library.

The columns of Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino have minimal presence and the stairs are located outside the floor to preserve the integrity of the horizontal planes. The proposed tower inverts Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino with a central monolithic core that supports the floors. The core is hollow: the stairs wrap within the double-wall structure preserving a third space within. This vertical space takes precedence over the horizontal plane, as one must move around it in order to re-enter the workspace or room floor. The space acts as a cloister for shared performative programs of cooking, dining, nursery, theater, sauna and chapel. These ritual-based facilities have a long history in various religious and social

4 See Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertolleti, et al (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004).

5 For a close reading of each component, see Peter Eisenman, “Aspects of Modernism: Maison Domino and the Self-Referential Sign in Architecture,” Oppositions 15/16 (Winter/Spring 1979): 118-28. Reprinted in Log 30: 135-47.

6 The range falls within anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s suggested human cognitive limit of establishing meaningful relationships. Robin Dunbar, “Social Network Size in Humans,” Human Nature 14 (2003): 53-72.

7. Pier Vittorio Aureli makes the observation that the spatial organization of Dom-ino dervies from the logic of its structural elements. He quotes, “this is why the Dom-ino proposal is a system with the potential for total reorganization of the city.” See Aureli, Pier Vittorio. “The Dom-ino Problem: Questioning the Architecture of Domestic Space,” 153-69.

communities such as the Kibbutz in Israel or the Shakers in the United States. The cloister has its own sectional logic with mezzanine levels and a unique time-schedule (sauna, café, and nursery open certain hours of the day). While each floor has a relation to its nearest kitchen and dining facility, the sectional dispersion of other amenities encourages the use of the entire tower as one dwelling place.

The size of the community limits the size of the prototype. While the horizontal dimensions of the prototype are fixed in order to maximize infill sites, specifically unbuilt parking lots along Divisadero and 16 th Street, its vertical size is capped at 120-250 people. This makes it 6-10 stories for a single tower and 6-8 stories for two combined towers. 6

While Le Corbusier differentiated the bottom slab of Dom-ino by elevating it on a square base, the tower continues the workspace to the ground floor. The workspace, a tabula rasa and productive space to be shared by residents, is seen as a continuation of the city. The tower aims to be a pixel of a city that, when propagated, can strenghten the ethos of San Francisco as one community. 7 The tower is generic in terms of its non-descript form, non-frontality, and system of modular construction. The different tectonic dimensions of the three spaces, especially the difference between the open-ended spatiality of the workspace and the closed quality of the core as communitarian space, promote a legible rhythm of life and ethos of sharing.

The original Dom-ino was a radical thesis in reconceptualizing the flexibility of architecture and home ownership as DIY entrepreneurship. This Dom-ino aligns itself with the intention to not only offer an economic solution to the problem of affordable housing, but also to present itself as an approach to architectural practice which, in the rigidity of its structure, frames a rhythm of life and dwelling as common use rather than private possession.

Is Less Enough?

Is Less Enough?

Is Less Enough?

Prior to the 18 th century, land in California was seen as a gift from God, inherited from one generation to the next and taken care of communally. The Laws of the Indies, introduced in California by European missionaries and settlers, established the idea that parcels of land could be assigned to individuals: land became an exchangeable product. 1 The city’s grid layout, a product of Spanish and Anglo-Saxon rules of land division, was claimed to be a neutral division of land, but the compartmentalization of the city resulted in housing inequality that has defined San Francisco ever since. As migrant workers flocked to the city during the Gold Rush, the square grid was further subdivided into narrow townhouse lots, with each house claiming a backyard of its own. Today, the backyards form dead centers in the city-blocks, separated from each other and from the city outside. San Francisco has become a city of disjoined rooms and yards; land is no longer merely a gift from God, but an exploitable commodity.

Court subverts the lot division logic and reclaims the center of the city block as shared space, the courtyard. The scheme comprises groups of open-air courtyards, around which the housing units are organized. The court is a space that can be claimed by no one and thus belongs to everyone – the land becomes a gift yet again. For monks, the cloistered courtyard provided separation from the distractions of laymen and the life of the city outside. In similar fashion, the shared outdoor space of the Court expresses and defines the rituals of the residents living around it, endowing the complex with a sense of organization as a city within a city.

In Nordic kollektivhus models of communal living, a housing block was seen as a built manifestation of a particular life-form that the building’s residents shared – the ground floor was dedicated to activities defined by residents themselves, and living units were set on higher floors. The ground floor broadcast the rituals that the residents in a particular block shared: politically organized female office workers ran a bar on their ground floor, whereas craftsmen dedicated their lower level to workshop spaces. Rituals, by definition, are collective, and the enactment of ritual defines orthopraxis among a group of individuals. In this manner, the ground floor spaces that enclose the Court reflect different residential groups’ forms-of-life: young families in one court transform them

1 Florence Lipsky, San Francisco: La Grille Sur Les Collines. The Grid Meets the Hills. Translated by Cynthia Schoch. Marseille: Editions Parenthèses. p. 47.

Is Less Enough?

into a day care center and playground; artists in another convert them into studio and gallery spaces; tech workers and students in a third mould them into co-working hubs. Domesticism becomes an opportunity to construct a form-of-life where the boundaries between everyday life and shared rituals are eradicated.

In San Francisco, zoning laws dictate that ground floor functions in the Mission District and 16 th Street area must house commercial activity. Thus the shared ground floor not only becomes the common ritual space of the Court’s residents but also links the project to the city outside via entrepreneurialism: the day care centers, galleries and restaurants run by the residents of the Court serve its inhabitants and the general public at once. The residents are part of a social entrepreneurial collective whose members share percentages of ownership and revenue generated by the ground floor functions. The ground floor interiorizes the idea of a cloister: the building wing becomes a hybrid of the room and the corridor at once, inviting passers-by and residents alike to pass through.

The residents also share ownership and responsibility for the kitchens, dining halls and laundry facilities housed in cross-bar wings that cut through the Court . As for the living quarters, residents may purchase or rent a self-defined number of basic units from which they may compose their homes. The size of a ‘house’ is never pre-determined: any number of generic modules may be combined to form a unit. The basic unit is divided into three equal longitudinal sections, of which the central section houses service functions. This central strip forms a core spine that runs through all the units, with partition walls defining the extents of each unit in relation to others. The project thus accommodates a range of resident types; the single individual, room mates, couples and small families.

Rather than stand-alone furniture, the unit provides the occupant with a system of surfaces that can take on the functions carried by traditional furniture objects. Most human activities that involve furniture unfold at two levels, one at the height of a standard chair (sitting, lying down) and the other at the height of a typical table (reading, writing, eating). The idea of use as

the prime determinant of a space or an object, rather than ownership, takes precedence: the Court’s main infrastructure is fixed, and is thus usable rather than exchangeable . The conception of levels used for various activities is present in the Mission architecture of California, where the dormitories of Mission settlements consisted of wooden ledges attached to the walls, and functioned as seating or beds according to need. In this manner, the unit provides occupants with built-in surfaces that can be set at either 45 cm or 90 cm from the floor. The function of the surface is determined by use: with a cushion, it becomes a seat; with a mattress and blanket, it becomes a bed; with books it becomes a shelf; with china and cutlery it becomes a dining table. Neither the use of the surface nor the number of potential sleepers is directly implied by its size; each surface is wider and longer than a single bed, but narrower than a double.

The unit denies the dichotomy of front and back. The occupant may enter the unit from either side with no distinguishing, by size or otherwise, between a main and a secondary entrance. Instead, the two equal entrances gain different characters by responding to the dialectic of inside and outside, the original conditio sine qua non of the house: one side of the unit looks out into the city outside, and the other into the shared open-air Court . Thus each resident belongs to the city outside and to the city inside, and has the freedom to retreat to solitude or to take part in the shared rituals of fellow residents. In essence, the Court transforms the city-block into a space of autonomy and self-enclosure that still retains an intimate connection to the city outside. It challenges the rigid isolation of traditional monastic cloisters and university quadrangles by way of opening up the ground floor spaces to the public, and, as an architecture composed of alternating strips of solid and void, by offering direct visual connections to the court from the outside.

Before the Ancient Greeks, the house and the city were not separated; the political space of the city and the domestic space of the house were the same. By employing the courtyard typology as a device to construct a city within a city, Court rejoins the political with the domestic space, intertwining individuals’ personal lives with the rituals of the community, and fostering a sense of socio-political and economic organization among residents in reference to San Francisco’s history as a locus of neighborhood activism.

Is Less Enough?

Is Less Enough?