Description

Nearly two decades ago in the early 1990s, the social, cultural, and architectural history of housing over the course of much of the twentieth century served as the focus of the book Modernity and Housing.
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Spanning the post-World War I years and up to around 1990, the narrative explored how the design and production of housing and, more broadly speaking, new urban communities were shaped by two historical moments or turning points that saw the redefinition of social relations and critically questioned architecture’s presumed modernity. The first, dating from the 1920s post-World War building boom, was congruent with the emergence of a technological order that underpinned the mass production and standardization of design in the modern housing that was widely adopted in Europe and the United States. The second coincided largely with the re-examination of modernist principles during the 1970s, or commonly referred to as the rise of the post-modern culture. It gave rise to smaller scale and more familiar forms of housing that embraced a different dimension of modernity in which historicism and pluralistic design emphases opened up possibilities for good modern housing. Since then, much has clearly occurred. This book thus picks up from where Modernity and Housing last left off, taking up with the development of housing since the 1990s, and, indeed, exploring three issues identified in the conclusion that have remained pertinent. These include the relationship between collective-individual action and expression in the design of housing, the need to maintain a diversity of housing stock within a locale, and the integration of housing within a city.

Although only partly visible during this account of housing, there were two key underlying assumptions at work. The first was that it is not very useful, nowadays, to discuss urban housing in isolation from its palpable relationships and embeddedness in cities. In fact, many of today’s purported problems with urban housing are not really about the buildings per se as they are about the manner and making of this embeddedness in cities or the lack thereof. Furthermore, one supposition following on from this underlying assumption was that ‘urban intensity’, variously defined by dwelling density, several conditions of functional diversity, and high degrees of connectivity to other areas and activities within a city, becomes a more healthy and desirable condition generally as it rises and increases. The second underlying assumption was that 1990, or thereabouts, marked a turning point when the urban-architectural production of housing seen broadly in many parts of the world converted to something else with regard to programmatic intent, shape, appearance, mix, and even aspects of typological evolution. Since then, contemporary urban housing saw considerable investment of architectural energy along with market share, and gave further rise to ‘urban intensity’ as an outcome. Behind all of this, however, also lurked broader social and cultural forces shaping physical manifestations of the passage of time and urban experience. Beginning in the late 1960s, for instance, there was considerable social upheaval in many parts of the world around rights, justice, access to power, and environmental responsibility. The wrenching impact of the oil embargo of 1973 followed by economic stagflation only exacerbated the situation, at least in the West.
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As the 1970s wore on, elsewhere in the world China charted a new path forward and the impact of the Second Demographic Shift began to be broadly experienced worldwide. Then towards the conclusion of the 1980s with the end of the Cold War, the unravelling of Bretton Woods and other accords, advances in digital technology, the advent of the World Wide Web in 1993, multinationalism and the rise of what became known as neoliberalism with regard to economic transactions and so-called ‘globalization’, the world continued to change radically. At the risk of oversimplification, with the experience of these events came widespread concerns for diversity, increases in social pluralism, serious questioning of the hegemony of positivistic interpretations of people and their worlds, a rise in the ‘philosophy of differences’, a search for gender equality, and profound changes, as mentioned earlier, in demographic profiles and living arrangements in many countries. In short, a tumultuous period in the social and cultural affairs of the world began in the late 1960s, if not before, and resulted in a changed world by the late 1980s going into the 1990s. Now, returning to the two key underlying assumptions of this book, there are two important ways to assess the impact on urban housing during the post-1990 era. The first is to assess what differentiates contemporary urban housing architecturally from earlier eras much more concerned with narrower production, of putting roofs over people’s heads, and with mass housing provision. The second concerns the metrics of ‘urban intensity’, the leitmotif of this book, and resulting empirical measures of the phenomenon itself now as compared to before 1990 or thereabouts.

Constants and Trends

To begin with, what appears to have persisted from prior periods are certain dimensional and locational regularities. The depth and width of dwelling units arranged serially in plan, as in the ‘urban block shapers’ or in the more conventional slab buildings, for instance, are nominally 12 meters and seven meters respectively, somewhat larger than earlier examples but not by much. Again, in slab blocks and attached dwellings, there remains general agreement that five floors is a maximum for walk-ups and the use of maisonette units on top floors continues to be pursued. Non-residential functions such as commercial and community services largely remain confined to ground levels and lower floors, although more adventurous locations are also sought more frequently than before at mid-levels in high-rise buildings and on rooftops. If anything, floor-to-ceiling heights are slightly enlarged although again not by a lot. Much of this is perhaps not surprising, given probably only slightly altered ergonometric considerations, sizes of optimal material spans, and the like. Then too, the difficulty in sustaining semi-private or semi-public outdoor spaces, in the absence of high levels of largely independent maintenance, also persists. Indeed, there appears to have been a shift in emphasis to the variety and more tailored provision of private outdoor space integral with units, no matter what the broader building context. Similarly, superblock configurations remained resistant to despecialization of use over time beyond the primary prescription of residential space. Wide roads and coarse-grained street networks commonly associated with superblocks also persist, along with attendant problems of fluid traffic movement and management. There are several notable latter-day exceptions in these regards, however, especially those involving multi-layered ‘ground planes’ incorporating a variety of movement options such as underground entry, parking, and egress. Also, one persistent aspect of ‘slab or tower in the park’ arrangements worth clarifying under superblocks is that the ‘park’ component belongs to the residential units within the precinct and should not be regarded as public open space, even if it seemingly has that aspect to it. Depending largely on landscape provisions, such ensembles either seem to work or they do not. The tendency for figural and formal separation in the appearance of certain housing typologies also persists, allowing stylistic inflections to be made in keeping with matters of taste and fashionability, and the times. This is particularly the case among ‘infill buildings’, ‘urban block shapers’, ‘tall towers’, and of course, ‘indigenous reinterpretations’, which as a class of buildings actively trades on this capacity for separation. Finally, cultural conventions, time-honored or not, with regard to aspects of community and privacy in and around dwellings, also persist, although often becoming blurred in the movement towards more singular yet polyvalent layouts, depicting yet another more or less constant feature but one that is fraying at the edges.

By contrast, what appears to have changed or shifted substantially away from the shape, appearance, layout, and so on of prior periods are a number of conspicuous trends. To begin with, there is a proliferation of work-live, hotel-office, or similar programmatic alignments broadening into more exclusive domestic urban housing environments. Certainly, work-live and similar categories are not entirely new. After all, the Maison de Verre, a classic orthodox modernist house from the 1920s was of this ilk. Nevertheless, the occurrence of these categories of dwelling, particularly those housed in special-built complexes, appears to have risen substantially, further underlining changed conditions in the world associated with erosion of differences between daily activities and being home and abroad, as well as assertions of personal autonomy, diversity of lifestyle, and pluralism. Attitudes towards housing and landscape also appear to have shifted substantially, at least with regard to the sensibility involved. To be sure as discussed here and elsewhere, such attitudes have been shifting for some time, moving generally from ‘town-country mergers’ to ‘dwellings in garden settings’ and ‘slabs or towers in a park’, on to today’s ‘roofscapes’ and similar ‘landscape environments’. Likewise, perceptual sensibilities have also shifted with regard to ‘the natural’ from ones of adjacency and ‘being next to’, on to ‘being within’ and actively involved, to ‘being removed’ and yet empathetically and mentally engaged with potentials. The untouchable grassed roofscape of De Citadel in Almere does not literally have the cows of Lunenberg grazing there, but it can be seen in this light. Moreover, even if nothing much is happening on the sparsely furnished open spaces at Schots, its prolific and active use can be well imagined. Then too, as mentioned in earlier comments about constants, attention to private outdoor space and finding ways to render it effective within otherwise relatively resistant building frameworks, like high-rise towers and slabs, has risen. Again, consistent with social shifts in directions of autonomy, diversity, and pluralism, it is no longer the often weakly-defined community open space that is important as it is the more strictly public and particularly private outdoor realms. Likewise part of one of the earlier constants, indigenous interpretation in various forms and cultural contexts has nevertheless also shifted appreciably away from preoccupations with expressive figuration signaling adherence to a particular tradition. Instead, the question of ‘why do it?’ appears to have arisen more frequently in contemporary urban housing, suggesting a sharpened cultural awareness and selectivity about what should be brought across, returning to one of the original meanings of tradition and its use. These days, on par, formal interests appear to trump figural preoccupations, clearly switching away from earlier post-modern leanings well prior to 1990 in most places.

More directly affecting contemporary urban housing, though, in the context of this architectural discussion is the presence of a number of spatial strategies with outcomes that are somehow collectively distinctive. The strong manipulation of voids through punctuation of various fields, grounds, and other horizontal datums in buildings is one kind of example. It is evident in places like Beijing’s Jian Wai SOHO, for example, with the literal ground plane punctuated at intervals by open courts clearly revealing commercial, parking, and other functions and effectively thickening the space of a ground plane to advantage with regard to organizational clarity and quality of adjacent indoor and outdoor space. Similarly, active engagement with roofscapes and intermediary levels or datums in building complexes as new grounds and fields for activity has similar effects, on display, for instance, in the De Citadel project in Almere. Also, the manipulation of void spaces within buildings in very deliberate manners, as at Simmons Hall at MIT in Cambridge, or in OMA’s Fukuoka project and at the New Carver Apartments in Los Angeles, fits into the same broad category of spatial strategies, as do the ‘cut out’ voids in a number of projects like Boutique Monaco in Seoul and the Mirador in Madrid. It is not that these are entirely new strategies for they are not. But the sheer élan and forcefulness with which they are deployed and made manifest in contemporary urban housing is novel, at least in degree if not also in kind. Then too, there are other strategies that might be grouped under ‘mixed developments’ of one kind or another, typically involving the co-existence of components of buildings of different scales and their combination through spatial organizational operations like ‘superimposition’, ‘grafting on’, and ‘promoting outbreaks’. These are clearly conspicuous at 100 Wozoco in the Netherlands, with displaced and protruding box-like forms, and at 8 Tallet in Copenhagen, with conscious deployment of different building and unit types within an overall assemblage such that they remain relatively distinctive. In both cases, little attempt has been made to entirely homogenize or resolve the different parts together as might have happened in the past. Complex stacking arrangements of dwelling units and other components produce similar outcomes, often embodying processes of arrangement around production of both diversity within an overall dwelling environment, as well as repetition of certain building features. Substantial variations within plans and section of housing, again as at the Mirador in Madrid among other projects described here, can also produce similar alignments. Similar ends of accommodating dwelling diversity and other related functions are accomplished through interlocking operations between and among building components, as at the Linked Hybrid in Beijing. Again, the outcome is a formal and programmatic cross-mixing within an overall palette of contemporary housing.

Also at stake appears to have been a broadening and highlighting of manners of appreciating dwelling and living circumstances. Here, two kinds in particular stand out. The first involves the amplification of opportunities presented by the sheer verticality and rise of tall buildings through roof gardens, intermediate-level open spaces of various kinds, community sky decks also with allowances for more public participation, and considerable variation in both private and shared balconies, outdoor terraces, void spaces within buildings, and associated façade treatments. If nothing else, the Pinnacle@Duxton in Singapore is an essay in the deployment of such opportunities, although it is not alone in these regards. The second involves willful playing with formal properties of interior spaces, even going so far as sloping floors and wall sections as at Miss Sargfabrik in Vienna. This is clearly a move away from more strictly utilitarian and even poly-functional provision of unit layouts and accoutrements into the realm of systematic ambience creation, presumably to instantiate some modicum of specialness, difference, and uniqueness to dwelling within grouped or mass housing. Again, the presence and appearance of what is non-standard becomes important. At work, throughout this contemporary era of housing, are more marked and celebrated forms of hybridization away from purer typologies of the past. Moreover, this is hybridization that occurs mainly at the level of ensembles of units. It is a middle-ground procedure, so to speak, involving the mixing and fusing of elements such that aspects remain sufficiently coherent to be recognizable, yet others remain open and malleable, enabling yet some other form to emerge. Moreover, it is the emergence of these ‘both-and’ outcomes, formally and expressively, that often gives contemporary urban housing its particular and distinctive look. All told and discussed, few except absolutely core constants of urban housing have remained entirely intact from prior periods, often with considerable fraying at the edges of those that even remained relatively coherent. Beyond these relative constants, there was considerable hybridization and trends away from the substance and even program of urban housing in the past.

Metrics and Measures

With regard to ‘urban intensity’, as used here, its metrics are straightforward. Dwelling density can and is given by the number of dwelling units per hectare of project area. This is not the only measure of diversity that could be used, with, for instance, floor area to site area being another. Nor does it entirely skirt the issue of consistent accuracy implied, for example, given differences between gross and net densities. But, it is a commonly understood measure of at least relative density. As shown graphically here, specific dwelling densities at the immediate project level vary quite dramatically among and across the nine different housing typal-territorial definitions, from lows among the 100 or so projects of below 50 dwelling units per hectare to highs in excess of 700 dwelling units per hectare in the case of ‘big buildings’, ‘tall towers’, and ‘housing for special populations’. Diversity, moving to the second kind of metric of intensity, is given here via two scales for the larger group of projects. The first is the number of different dwelling unit types in a given project, with ranges all the way up to 20 or more, including some like Boutique Monaco in Seoul where almost all units are, in fact, different to some reasonably discriminable degree. In fact, it is precisely the degree of discriminable difference that makes the metric useful or not. Here, however, commonly accepted measures of difference such as numbers of rooms, including bedrooms; numbers of stories; presence or absence of particular services; livable areas of dwelling space; and so on, have been used.

The second metric is the relative presence of non-residential uses in a housing complex, described as relatively ‘high’, ‘medium’, and ‘low’. These uses include community services, commercial stores, and other functions, as well as recreational or other facilities present within a complex. Certain uses, like car parking, entrance ways, and lounges, were almost always present and classified projects, in the absence of other non-residential uses, as being ‘low’ in mixed use. Other projects, by contrast and as can be seen from more specific data sheets, incorporated a range and relatively numerous non-residential uses. The Unité d’habitation in Marseilles, for example, included some 26 stores, gymnasium facilities, an outdoor auditorium, and a kindergarten. In fact, all submultiples, by definition, presented this kind of array of mixed uses.

Connectivity, a third metric of urban intensity, was given by physical proximity or distance to surrounding and neighboring non-residential functions, including shops, institutional facilities, and available open space, as well as to modes of transportation, like transit. Layouts of the numbers of outlets by category within a walkable radius were used, together with a rough assessment of the likely quality of the walkable experience. The results for the cases central to the chapters are depicted here in the form of pictographs of project environs. In almost all of them, at least proximal association with non-residential uses nearby was relatively high, as was access to public transportation. The likely quality of these environs, as might be expected across such a range of project types and purposes, does show variation. Outside of these examples, the area around the New Carver Apartments in Los Angeles, for instance, is not overly inviting and the deliberate isolation of hospice and elderly care facilities, as at the Kenyuen Home for the Elderly, renders such metrics to be largely irrelevant.

Looking at composite measures, such as the relationship between dwelling unit density and numbers of floors of building rise, there is wide variation particularly beyond thresholds of 100 or more units per hectare. Among the 100 or so project points plotted, there is also clearly not a linear relationship at either the lower or upper ends of the distribution, even if higher-rise buildings are denser in dwelling units than lower-rise structures, as might be expected.
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Compared to both average and localized ‘core’ densities of the cities in which most of the projects are located, they are above those magnitudes. Moving on to specific projects of given eras seen in relationship to dwelling density and numbers of unit types, as well as to relative levels of mixed use for each category of types and territory, results are mixed. Nevertheless, they do tend to show contemporary projects as bundles to the higher ends of the two measures of diversity, as well as often being if not entirely denser then comparable in density to others in the same typal-territorial category. More specifically, the ‘urban block shapers’ tend to exhibit this characteristic, although projects from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s show as much if not more use mixture. The category of ‘housing and landscapes’ by contrast shows contemporary projects to be more dense than examples from prior eras on both measures of diversity as do ‘indigenous reinterpretations’, whereas contemporary ‘tall towers’ generally outstrip precedents with regard to density and numbers of unit types but lag behind with regard to use mixture, perhaps suggesting that examples from earlier eras arose out of city contexts rather than being integral through separable parts. For ‘big buildings’, contemporary projects are more diverse with regard to unit types than the other precedents, with the exception of the Unité d’habitation of the 1950s, and more or less mirror projects from prior eras with regard to relative mixtures of other uses. As with the ‘housing and landscapes’ category, ‘superblock configurations’ show contemporary projects to be more mixed on both counts of diversity, although while the same holds for ‘infrastructural engagements’ with regard to the number of unit types, it does not entirely for the relative mix of uses. For both ‘infill and puntal interventions’ and ‘housing special populations’, diversity measures are less relevant due to infill projects being almost entirely about single units of housing here, and examples of special populations bringing with them relatively non-comparable needs with respect to housing diversity. On the whole, however, the examples of contemporary urban housing discussed are more diverse than their precedents and generally as dense or denser. Given that all those examined also fall into the category of being well connected to their larger urban circumstances, the role of contemporary housing in the service of creating conditions of urban intensity also seems to hold, at least empirically.

Looking further forward in time, another phase in the broader turning point referred to here seems to have been reached with the decline of neoliberal orders and the new normals of downturns and slow economic growth, persistently high unemployment, and dampened expectations of further rises in standards of living across the board in most if not all developed countries. While the developing world pushes on, it does so with less of a rush, particularly as it enters middle-income ranges and mounting social pressures with regard to environmental quality, social justice, and economic parity. Indeed, as others join into a club there is likely to be a convergence of interests. Apart from exacerbating adequate provision of housing for all, these sorts of trends would seem to point towards maintaining and increasing dwelling densities and relatively moderate sizes of units for many, including ease of accommodation for life-cycle changes. Changes in household formation and living arrangement, although now relatively stable, seem likely to persist at current levels, sustaining pushes towards diversity among housing units and related uses. All told, if anything ‘urban intensity’ seems likely to rise objectively, even as making more with less in housing continues to create a more variegated urban residential and architectural landscape.

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Originally published in: Peter G. Rowe, Har Ye Kan, Urban Intensities: Contemporary Housing Types and Territories, Birkhäuser, 2014.