Readings:
Gabrielle Brainard, “Party Walls: Understanding Urban Change Through a Block of New Haven Row Houses, 1870-1979,” Journal of the New Haven Colony Historical Society, 2001.
Douglas Rae, City: Urbanism and its End (Yale Univ. Press, 2004), as much as you can.
Paul Groth, “ ‘Marketplace’ Vernacular Design: The Case of Downtown Rooming Houses,” Perspectrives in Vernacular Architecture, Vol. 2 (1986): 179-191.
J.B. Jackson, “Stranger’s Path” Landscape Journal.
Suggested:
Paul Groth, “Making New Connections in Vernacular Architecture,” Journal of the Society of Architecture Historians, Sept. 1999: 444-451.
Hi everyone, feel free to post comments + replies (under 250 words) in response to the readings. All readings should be either linked or located in Files on Canvas. The January 22 date on this post reflects the day the reading comments are due.
Two points particularly drew my attention after reading this week’s texts:
First, in “Marketplace” Vernacular Design,” Gnoth analyzes a common architectural typology, rooming houses, to encourage a deeper examination of vernacular architecture that moves away from the traditionalist view, which often focuses solely on the individualization or embellishments made by occupants. Instead, he suggests paying closer attention to the underlying systems that are usually visually invisible to redefine the four methodological approaches: focusing, sampling, classifying, and characterizing. For instance, the plumbing ratio can be a helpful indicator when categorizing social classes in hotels. A one-to-one plumbing ratio might represent anything from luxury palace hotels to mid-range establishments, while a ratio of one-to-six or one-to-twelve could indicate a rooming house or affordable lodging for immigrants. Relying only on the building’s facade or overall size would not provide a clear understanding of these distinctions.
Second, in a somewhat similar fashion, in “Party Walls,” Brainard uses a cluster of ordinary dwellings on Court Street in New Haven as a microcosm to reflect on the elasticity of the built environment to withstand industrial transformation while continuing to foster diverse communities and cultures. By examining the morphology of the house’s internal structures, she emphasizes the ability of this typology to accommodate changing demographics and various social dynamics. At the same time, she demonstrates its capacity to withstand the processes of creative destruction, which occur frequently in cities experiencing rapid industrial growth and decline. This adaptability is a testament to the idea that architecture and the built environment can subtly resist capitalism’s relentless, destructive, forward momentum in its pursuit of a larger market and new production modes.
The commonality I see in both is their new approach to cultural landscape studies. By shifting our perception and examining ordinary architectural typologies—those that constitute the majority of the built environment—, we can begin to decipher and piece together a broader narrative of social and cultural change set against the backdrop of our surroundings. This narrative is often overlooked if we only focus on standout structures.
This weeks readings explored the value in the study of the “ordinary” typologies of architecture that exist within the fabric of a city – particularly cities grappling with post-industrial socio-economic transformations. I was drawn to a few moments in the texts.
Firstly, the tension between the terms “city-scape and landscape” in Paul Groth’s “Frameworks for a Cultural Landscape” teases questions of framing nature and culture through the same lens – specifically when the “culture” is that if the everyday and not of monumental forms and moments. The other tension in this text is the difference between the methodologies of designers and geologists specifically when it comes to prioritizing aesthetics vs human concerns and through the discussion of what form of surveys might be the most relevant in capturing the cultural landscape of a place and its place in the world.
Groth’s second text and Brainard’s Party + Walls seem to be two reactions to the idea of studying the ordinary in order to uncover a specific landscape. In these texts we learn about the cities of San Francisco and New Haven through the lens of two typologies of “ordinary” housing solutions in two cities of different scales. Both these texts underscore the value of studying urban projects that fall out of our usual attention due to a lack of monumental historical importance or “pretty privilege”.
While the San Francisco single occupancy Hotel typology is surely vanishing, I was very intrigued by the case study of the Court Street Row Houses – specifically by their resilience and sustainability across socio-political and racial climates that the city has witnessed over more than a century. It is perhaps the middle ground that the row houses tow and the intention of catering mostly to a middle class audience (even though that wasn’t the population that these structures served over time) – allowed a type of preservation we rarely see in such structures – where they aren’t important enough to either price out a diverse community and not enough of a “threat” to the urban fabric – as in the case of the hotels – to fall under imminent domain and urban renewal projects.
Finally, I was also struck by the argument that another preserver of the Row Houses besides policy and typology, is the effort of it’s community.
I found Brainard’s reading on “Party Walls” to particularly enticing as I live just down the block from the Court Street apartments in the Strouse Adler building. When I first moved into my apartment last summer, I stumbled upon the Court Street block and I will admit I was quite surprised. Although I was relatively familiar with New Haven, I found the block to be quite unlike any other part of New Haven. It is a block that seems to belong to New York or some other major city. Brainard’s piece helped illuminate for me that even for the time, the rowhouses were decidedly non-contextual architectural interventions. Brainard describes the physical character of Court Street “as a transitional place, a neighbor to both factory buildings and the mansions of factory owners. The rowhouses, neither upscale nor downscale, belonged to both worlds-a factor which would help them adapt to future change.” (8) In our current architectural climate, a building cannot be approved to be built in a city without some concern for contextuality. We are so obsessed with making our buildings “fit” in the “character” of our neighborhoods. Often these concerns of contextuality are really just cover for meaner, more negative attitudes of keeping certain types of residential development out of neighborhoods. But as Brainard so clearly illustrates, this lack of contextuality led to the rowhouses adaptability to changing times. And another key takeaway for me from the Brainard reading was how as the rowhouses were renovated in the 1960s, planners stripped the buildings of their ability to house many different types of people and families. The thinking at the time was that the rooming houses and renters of earlier periods (various densities) encouraged blight and disarray. But today, we are in the midst of a housing crisis and therefore, we should encourage the exploration of all types of housing, not just that which is suburban in character. Even some of the newer developments in Wooster Square still operate a very suburban model of density, primarily because of their ample parking spaces. The Court Street rowhouses provided an excellent example of the successes and failures of urban development in New Haven.
This week’s readings inspired several (somewhat unsynthesized) thoughts from me: Groth’s “Generic Buildings” discusses the idea that a building’s life and value lie behind the facade in the guts of the building (the plumbing system, the interior partition walls, etc.), and also its exterior proximity to other resources (retail, educational spaces, places of work, etc.). This may be quite obvious that the physical building cannot be wholly responsible for the experience of its users, but, as Groth notes, many people tend to evaluate and analyze a building based on its exterior characteristics only.
Similarly, Brainard’s description of the Court Street apartments in their pre-depression peak as an area which existed between many worlds (industrial and high-end mansions) as well as a typology which fostered many interior changes and uses over time highlights the necessity of a building to take advantage of its surroundings (both physical and temporal) in order to be successful.
The mid-20th century urban renewal desire for programmatic segregation in a city has proven many times to lead to failure. I’m thinking about Jane Jacobs’ “Death and Life of Great American Cities” in which she illustrates the value of living close to retail and other non-residential programs which allow the neighborhood to continue running at all times of day, and that spaces are not always only good for their advertised purpose. She gives the example of being able to use a convenience store clerk(?) to hold keys for an expected houseguest while she’s away, again both showing the value of program variety / interconnectedness and also the type of information one might miss if they just studied a building from its exterior facade.
On another note — I’m also thinking about our Housing Connecticut project from last semester which was located in Ridgefield, CT (a very affluent area) which hinged on adding ground floor retail to make the proposal more appealing (not to generate revenue, but purely to entice more activity / “program interconnectedness”). Without it, our housing proposal would be much less appealing.
Lots of thoughts all over the place … but always thinking about how architecture has so much responsibility but also cannot solve everything.
I was most intrigued by the Brainerd “Party Walls” reading due to its contextualizing of Urban renewal as not solely a loss for the American City but as a much larger fight to maintain the essential qualities that allow community to thrive. The anecdote about Bedford and its bisection from this urban renewal speaks to its larger effects. It is not simply the city that suffered but the outlying suburbs as well. With the creation of the 4 lane highway to connect more of the adjacent north east cities to urban centers such as NYC, the once bucolic and quiet Bedford became loud and congested. One resident stated that “When I drive home, it’s not home anymore. We’re not a neighborhood anymore.” This for me brought up the question what is neighborhood? What is Home? What essential nature was lost with this brand of heavy handed urban renewal? I like the analogy of urban fabric because it speaks to its ability to be torn or broken. Drumming up 10’s of millions of dollars to place huge thoroughfares or a parking lots has both sociological and environmental connotations. Previously existing communities, often primarily black and brown are completely destroyed. The surviving adjacent communities now exist in a traumatized border vacuum. Existing within the scar tissue of a once healthy urban fabric. I hope to delve more into this question of what is essential to foster community/neighborhood? Is it about walkability? Small business? Or something more ephemeral?
As a resident of the Wooster Square neighborhood (in a 5 over 1…) I’ve found it impossible to walk to my car parked along the park and not at least think of the same exact sentence that Brainard chooses to open “Party walls” with– “I’ve always wanted to live there”. I’ve been trying to parse out if my interest in the row houses that line Court street is rooted in a sort of nostalgia. As an upper east side native, this typology contains too many signifiers for me to count. In my mind’s eye, these facades enclose pristine interiors, still belonging to a single family. Having occupied these spaces, the vertical circulation through them is critical, usually lining one side of the home and extending upward off of a stair that abuts a hallway. This allows for the long and narrow plan of the dwelling to work. If I were to take the train across the river to visit friends in their converted Carroll Gardens brownstone, my feelings change. While the details are still charming, the fact that the units are separated in a way that removes the vertical circulation from the occupiable living space, effectively turning it into a nightmarish hallway is a giant bummer. As such, plans like these seem perfect for an exploration of communal living typologies within the context of the current housing crisis. Perhaps looking toward maintaining the original plans of these dwellings and gearing them toward the boarding house model of the past is the best of both worlds– considering higher density housing typologies with a reverence for maintaining the plans of the past.
Each of these readings seemed to reinforce the concept of social capital as critical infrastructure to a healthy neighborhood. Gabrielle Brainard referenced this term directly in the text “Party Walls” (p. 25) where she defines it as a type of reciprocal social intercourse between neighbors. This network of interaction creates a supportive environment that is not dependent upon one-to-one transactional relationships. In the context of the Court Street redevelopment, the architectural and urban condition of the street and the rowhouses helped establish a highly cohesive network. The small backyards, narrow street, tightly spaced stoops, and limited vehicular traffic created a community living room of sorts in the street. However, this network was limited to the extents of Court Street due to the erosion of the diverse neighborhood around it. The idea of displacing domestic functions from within the home and, therefore, extending the home into the community sphere seems to be an important piece of this case study. Yet, this displacement finds its full realization in the form of the rooming houses that previously defined Court Street. As Paul Groth mentions in “Marketplace Vernacular Design,” the rooming house creates a condition in which “the ‘house’ is distributed up and down the street: the dining room is at the end of the block, the laundry is three doors down, and the living room and den are at bars, coffee shops, or favorite corners” (p. 185). While Brainard is careful to empathetically describe the dislocation of the rooming house tenants from Court Street upon its redevelopment, the text seemingly fails to properly assess to what extent social capital might have existed in the rooming house era. Douglas Rae’s text provides insight into the hollowing of social capital that may have contributed to the calls for Court Street’s renewal. As is made abundantly clear through Rae’s discussion of “creative destruction,” the rampant forces of capital consolidation have an enormous impact upon the filigree of a neighborhood. Corporate domination has stripped markets of diversity and locality, replacing distinct neighborhoods with a “sameness” that can be found in cities across the country and world. With this consolidation of capital comes a leveling of use-diversity and a leveling of social capital. Large corporate entities have no stake in a community beyond extracting wealth to a distant headquarters, effectively removing blocks of the city from the potential social capital network.
What you mention here on locality, social capital, and governance are topics in the readings that I found really interesting, specifically what Rae calls the “pattern of political integration” that defined urbanism, and the “absentee management” that was the result/cause? of the ensuing years. Citizenship, whether that be economic, political, cultural, or social, seems to be a recurrent method through which to evaluate the urban condition of a place, and it makes me wonder upon the state of YSOA as a case study – in which many of the “leaders” of the school are effectively remote, living in New York or further afield and visiting occasionally. What affect does this condition have on the school’s ability to know itself and improve?
While reading Paul Groth’s “Marketplace” Vernacular Design”, I was quickly reminded of my background in the architectural profession in relation to what Paul calls “Marketplace Design”. I have spent the last four years designing mostly multi-family residential buildings (including a couple of 5-over-1s…) in which I have found that these types of buildings mostly design themselves through the preconceived capitalistic constraints derived from the client’s monetary pool. The clients already know the number of units, square footage, overall budget, etc. needed to be profitable on a 30-year loan. They hire a real estate company to analyze what sites in certain areas could work for them and provide a market analysis of the neighborhood/city, just to end up maxing out the site with units. These notions were exemplified in the following paragraph, where Paul writes, “Architects might be involved in the design process, but they merely packaged a product already tightly circumscribed by rent prices and the owners’ knowledge of their clients’ preferences or complaints. Like tailors, they adjusted the market patterns so that they would fit on a given site. The most important aspects of the buildings – the size and number of their rooms, bathrooms, sinks, as well as access to daylight and fresh air – were the result of social and cultural pressures hammered out by cash transactions and rent agreements.” With this, the power is in the hands of the client and the cash of the investment, where the architect is solely the middleman packaging the product. While practicing, I’ve found myself repeatedly questioning the power of the architect when designing multi-family housing. Of course, my firm, as well as myself try our best to question the potential greedy decisions of the client and always provide moral design ideas that connect communities, reuse buildings, etc., but I can say that I have definitely been groomed to believe 5-over-1s and increased density are positive changes for cities (and I know a majority of architecture firms operate in the exact same way…). Thus, I am very excited to continue to explore and question these notions throughout the semester.
The readings this week bring up questions of valuation, how we as architects, or a community more broadly, might determine the value, economic or social, of a space or network of social relationships. Brainard’s piece is an excellent study in this dynamic, illustrating how fluid and amorphous “value” is in the case of Court Street. Across sectors and disciplines, there are objective methods to measure value (i.e. property appraisal, spatial analysis, environmental performance, embodied carbon, market price, etc.) all of which are myopic and reductive, but remain indispensable within the framework of a capitalist free market that necessitates such codification for the commodification of property
As architects, we can analyze and quantify an urban space through a litany of spatial qualifiers (stoops, street width, facade regularity, backyard scale, etc.) Yet, the true value of a space emerges as the cumulative residue of generations of cultural, economic, and social investment. This begs the question, then, in lieu of such robust histories like those presented by Brainard, how can we identify successful, valuable urban space and distill the essence down into a repeated spatial pattern. Or perhaps is that even a wise thing to do, because it is evident from this case study that to do so runs the risk of dramatic cultural flattening
Throughout the readings, I was consistently reminded of Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air, particularly in Brainard’s discussion of Wooster’s resistance to the “tear-it-down” ethos of mid-20th-century urban renewal. During this era, the conflation of perceived social and cultural qualities with spatial conditions frequently culminated in the wholesale erasure of urban fabrics. Highway planning and urban renewal projects became instruments for the demolition of spaces that ostensibly embodied social dysfunction—an oversimplification of far more intricate sociocultural issues that eluded straightforward diagnosis or remediation. This phenomenon remains conspicuously relevant today, as our capacity to objectively appraise space appears compromised—or perhaps was never fully developed—by the moralizing rhetoric that continues to suffuse discussions of urban valuation.
Both Brainard’s Party Walls and the few chapters of Rae’s Urbanism brought up a certain amount of internal conflict within my head while reading them – on one hand, I am very ready to dismiss and despair the current state of New Haven and the United States (especially this week) and ‘mourn’ the loss of the rich urban fabric, community, and locality that existed in different forms throughout the last few centuries. On the other hand however, as Rae makes clear after their definition of urbanism that those things that we’ve lost, that I feel angry (even nostalgic?) about, did not make a utopia – in fact, was “no golden age.”(19)
This has forced me to confront the negotiations, compromises, and cycles of destruction and regrowth that make up the urban fabric that we know today differently than I have done in the past. While I have long wanted a “return” to density in living, robust rail networks, and regional production and consumption, there is of course no ideal to return back to – things have always been some wonderful and some awful in their own right. One possible mode of thought moving forward in thinking about this came across in Party Walls very clearly; that is adaptability as being key to survival – for both ‘good’ things and ‘bad.’ An example of this is obviously the Court St Rowhouses and their generality allowing them to morph to fit the changing values of the city. But another example is travel by automobile, which proved so useful in so many different instances that cities began to be designed around them.
I found Groth’s “Frameworks” article to be a useful and thorough overview of the many approaches, methods, and frameworks used in cultural landscape studies. I could see how the various approaches he covered and the evolution of the field mirror broader historical trends in social-scientific and humanistic research – namely, the shift from structuralist approaches to those of the “cultural turn.” The former emphasized large, abstract processes such as “the economy,” treating everyday life and subjectivity as epiphenomenal expressions of the former, which were the fundamental drivers of historical and social development. As a response to this reductionism, the frameworks of the cultural turn, introduced in the last decades of the twentieth century, emphasized personal agency over structural determination, contingency over historical necessity, individual subjectivity versus “objective” social compulsions, the heterogeneity of everyday life versus the homogeneity of abstract, totalizing social forces. The “Berkeley School” seems to be an example of the former, focusing as it does on social and economic history and how those are “played out” in built environments. I can see how such an approach risks overshadowing the actual intricacies and details of the built environments themselves, and so the methodological focus on close description and observation that characterize other approaches make sense to me. It seems to me that both approaches are equally necessary in the analysis of cultural landscape, as one cannot account for the changes undergone in a certain object without reference to the larger historical context – and thus structures – it exists within and is constituted by.
My immediate reaction to Brainard’s “Party Walls” is a sense of familiarity. Similar stories of renewal, displacement and demographic change can be found in most cities on the east coast – and we are still facing the same problem in our cities today, albeit on a much larger scale of both the buildings and the capital involved.
Boston’s West End neighborhood comes to mind: before being eradicating in its entirety on the 1950s, the neighborhood experienced a similar gradual shift of population and housing types. Wealthy single-family dwellers moved out/ rented out their houses at the start of 1900s, which made the neighborhood a diverse community of working-class families and immigrants. The West End did not survive the “slum clearance” like the Court Steet did and has been turned into a sparse neighborhood of residential tower, lacking the space sense of community it once held. Additionally, I think the office to residential trend in major cities today is essentially a very similar case that put buildings’ adaptability to the test. Flexibility is key here. Can the bigger office towers in New York be flexible enough adapt to the changing needs?
Similar to some of my fellow classmates these readings got me thinking a lot about the values we prioritize and really how city planners are focused on values that those living in the areas may not necessarily think of as valuable themselves. Personally, I often think about Jane Jacobs work which is referenced in the Branaid reading. Jacobs discuss that what my look like dense urban areas may actually be vibrant places where people are thriving and creating community and meaning. Interesting enough I have been discussing valuation in my other environmental classes focused on trees – what do humans value in trees and what is the economic value of trees. Brainard highlights the importance of change in our environments, things are changing due to city planning, federal policies, economic climate etc. A question that comes to mind is how we can leave space for and welcome change in our urban form. What will become of the highway system that we ripped apart cities for and what will become of coastal cities and towns that may be impacted by rising sea levels.
The Goth readings encouraged me to think more deeply about the history of the buildings and what they may represent. Goth highlights that vernacular building design shows how the marketplace was shaping the built environment. That is, these building reflect the desires of people at the time. I am curious though how these desires are shaped and transformed. Furthermore, I am critic of the buildings that are being constructed now and curious what values people think they may reflect in our society today.
I appreciated Brainard’s attention to a single place, following its movement through time and how social make-up and interactions have ebbed and flowed based on movement of the economy outside the walls of the buildings. The discussion of the transition back and forth from single-family homes to boarding rooms emphasizes a socially modular style of building, regardless of degree of architectures’ intention. Yet the engineering designed to allow contractors to move through the buildings without exiting show a mirroring between architectural adaptability and social adaptability.
I also think about this type of building in the context of adaptive re-use for housing solutions in U.S. cities. What are the building types that could be reconfigured to meet housing needs, and what are the cultural implications of converting such building types? This question implicates the SROs as well, which have rapidly faded out from the urban landscape in U.S. cities, and remain now in mostly character neighborhoods (I think of the SROs that are staples of Chinatown in San Francisco). This type of housing has been nearly eradicated despite a need for shelter. I’m wondering what the fate was of these buildings – demolition? Re-use? What happens when a certain type of housing is deemed no longer necessary, or no longer acceptable?
I found Brainard’s celebration of Ordinary Architecture in Party Walls a thought-provoking piece that led me to rethink the role of architecture in building and maintaining the social fabric of urban places. In my journey studying this field, there are moments, especially those examining the design and maintenance of monumental structures, that imply the power and value of architecture are derived from its ability to withstand the test of time by remaining an unchanged form and silhouette in the skyline. Brainard challenges this narrative with the Crown Street homes and their “flexible” nature. Where half of this project’s influence on the social fabric may be derived from it’s consistent existence and presence within the city block. Here, its stable presence creates (I would argue) a common reference point that allows individuals to situate themselves in space, and becomes a supporting character within the lives of those around it. The second half of the project’s influence is seen through the structure’s ability to adapt to the changing needs of any given time. Where through this analysis, a dualistic system of a rigid exterior form and a flexible program/internal organization, illustrate the value of architecture through the ordinary. Where to be ordinary, is not to be static, but rather a continuously evolving form that learns from the past, and uses those lessons to fulfill the needs for each new generation of residents.