Reinventing an Urban Vernacular

Developing Sustainable Housing Prototypes for Cities Based on Traditional Strategies

Terry Moor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134822669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

With increasing population and its associated demand on our limited resources, we need to rethink our current strategies for construction of multifamily buildings in urban areas. Reinventing an Urban Vernacular addresses these new demands for smaller and more efficient housing units adapted to local climate.

In order to find solutions and to promote better urban communities with an overall environmentally responsible lifestyle, this book examines a wide variety of vernacular building precedents, as they relate to the unique characteristics and demands of six distinctly different regions of the United States. Terry Moor addresses the unique landscape, climate, physical, and social development by analyzing vernacular precedents, and proposing new suggestions for modern needs and expectations.

Written for students and architects, planners, and urban designers, Reinventing an Urban Vernacular marries the urban vernacular with ongoing sustainability efforts to produce a unique solution to the housing needs of the changing urban environment.

Chapter 1

Addressing the Future of the Evolving American City

Since the end of the Second World War, American cities have undergone numerous, significant changes that have dramatically impacted their physical development, our way of life, and ultimately, the environment. These changes have come so quickly and dramatically that they may more aptly be described as a revolution or an upheaval. By the 1970s, this transformation was well established. As a result, the current generation of homeowners does not perceive a significant change and accepts the present circumstances as given, but they are far from what their parents knew.

Until the 1940s or 1950s, our cities were places where different functions were blended together, overlapping one another. Housing, commerce, government, education, industry, and entertainment frequently were intermingled or located nearby. But after the Second World War, this model started to unravel. Those previously blended functions became more segregated and distant from one another, connected only by a vast system of roads. Cities expanded ever outward and suburbs became a much more important element in the scheme of urban development. Americans began to live at a distance from their jobs, in these “bedroom communities” far from city centers. As a consequence of this shift, our very way of life took a major turn and cities adapted to the change.

This postwar revolution in the cities was enabled as a result of the fact that automobiles became affordable and readily available to most American families. An infatuation with the car ensued that has not yet ended. Like many love affairs, this one promised much in the beginning, yet over time has begun to show signs of stress, become tired, and may be starting to fray.

While this new model has given most Americans a taste of independence from the problems of cities, it has created other issues that may be even more dire. These new problems have numerous, serious negative ramifications relating to our social fabric and to the environment. Pollution from the daily commute, the consumption of land and natural resources, and the long hours spent away from family and friends in cars are a few such issues that we now must confront. As a consequence, the rapid and overwhelming growth of suburbs could prove to be the cause for its undoing. Its very success may ultimately be responsible for its failure.

If we are to look to the future and suggest new and better ways to build and inhabit our cities, we must first have a clear understanding of our current circumstances. It is important to examine the causes and subsequent ramifications, as well as potential future problems that our current course may present. A better direction for cities in the twenty-first century is predicated on a thoughtful and objective analysis of the situation.

The Development and Transformation of the American City

Early Colonization

European countries seeking to secure a foothold in the New World laid out many of the United States’ most important cities. The Spanish were the first to establish a permanent settlement in 1565 at Saint Augustine on the Atlantic coast in northeast Florida. Much farther to the west Santa Fe, New Mexico (1598) followed, then San Antonio, Texas (1691), as well as hundreds of other smaller towns and villages.

Other European nations followed the Spanish initiative and were also successful in staking their claims to different parts of the future nation. In 1625, 60 years after the establishment of Saint Augustine, the Dutch established New Amsterdam (New York City) at the tip of Manhattan Island. The English followed suit with the development of their own major population centers along the Atlantic seaboard in cities like Boston (1630), Philadelphia (1682), Charleston (1670), and Savannah (1733). Not to be left out of this scramble for colonies, the French established their capital in New Orleans in 1718 at the base of the Mississippi River.

For the most part, these new towns were ports built around commerce and trade with their focus on their waterfronts. Despite the country of origin, all of them contained within their boundaries every aspect of daily life. Government, commerce, and industry functioned side by side and the people lived among them. As a consequence, they were busy places, frequently crowded and full of social interaction.

After the American Revolution, existing cities continued to grow, while the country expanded westward to the Pacific. All along this expansion route, hundreds of small cities and towns were established. American town planning followed rather straightforward and time-proven guidelines. They were almost always laid out on a grid. More often than not, the focus of the town was an important government building, church, or the major commercial activity of the community, such as the railroad station or sea or river port.

Figure 1.1
In The Late Nineteenth Century, The Lower-East Side Of New York City Was Teeming With Street Life, And Many People Often Lived In Overcrowded And Squalid Conditions

Until the mid-twentieth century, city centers, often referred to as the downtown, typically contained a blend of all of the various uses required by a modern society to function. Among other things, the downtown was where one could find employment, entertainment, education, and housing. Families lived in these centers or within a short commute to nearby suburbs and towns.

During the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the population of many of the well-established coastal cities grew much larger. Many served as entry points for a constant flood of immigrants, such as the Italians, Irish, Scots, Slavs, Jews, Chinese, and Latinos, who arrived by ship from across the Atlantic and Pacific. Many of these newcomers chose to stay and take advantage of the opportunities that these crowded cities offered.

In addition to the foreign immigrants, many young adults from farms of the surrounding countryside sought employment in cities, further expanding their populations. Both of these groups were usually composed of the poor, who frequently arrived without any resources and in need of jobs that cities had to offer.

As a result of this overwhelming flood of newcomers, numerous problems developed. Overcrowding, racial and ethnic inequality, filth, disease, crime, and pollution made some parts of these cities undesirable places to live. They were the slums, the ghettos of the new world. Regardless of the poor living conditions, these people had few choices, as cities were where employment could be found and represented the steppingstone to a better future. As a result of the problems that plagued such cities, they developed a reputation that did not represent the American ideals of freedom, individualism, and resourcefulness, but became something more akin to an American nightmare.

The American Dream

Thomas Jefferson, who articulated the American dream, “envisioned a country ruled by yeoman farmers. Jefferson felt that urbanization, industrial factories, and financial speculation would serve to rob the common man of his independence and economic freedom.”¹ The realization of such an agrarian democracy required space and land.

Typically, cities have never represented the dream of an improved lifestyle. It was the countryside that Americans felt most suited that image. The reality was that the preponderance of Americans did not live in cities or towns. We have been essentially an agrarian society for most of our existence. Immigrants arrived in cities, but many, if not most, quickly moved to the frontier where opportunity beckoned. In 1800, only 3 percent of the Americans lived in cities. Until recently, the country homestead, farm, or ranch represented our nation better than cities did. Currier and Ives best captured this wholesome ideal in their popular engravings of nineteenth century rural life. The charming home, cows in the pasture, clean air, and tranquility made the image compelling. Needless to say, this prospect was attractive to many city dwellers as an alternative to the old, crowded urban centers, but the possibility of escaping cities was not in place until the turn of the twentieth century.

Figure 1.2
A Currier And Ives Vision Of An Idyllic Homestead In Spring, Representative Of The American Dream (C. 1869)

The Move Away from Cities to Suburbs

Prior to the advent of the electric streetcar, which only arrived toward the end of the nineteenth century, cities were very compact because the distances that people could travel quickly and easily were limited. The transition from the slow pace of horse-drawn conveyances to the more rapid and efficient electrical ones happened quickly. “Streetcar lines grew from 3000 miles, all horse-drawn, in 1882 to 22,500 miles of mostly electric lines”² 20 years later. As a result of this innovation, city neighborhoods located functional uses according to the natural economic guidelines relating to the streetcar routes, not zoning. “Apartment houses were almost always built near them to take greatest advantage of the convenience they offered tenants. Streetcars did not carry large amounts of freight, so only less noxious commercial development, such as retail stores, was pulled out of the central city, while heavy industry remained concentrated around wharves and railheads.”³ The concept of mixed-use cities was still very much alive.

Many affluent families, who were now better able to move away from city centers to more spacious, greener environments at their periphery, did so. One of the first planners to begin to satisfy this demand was the landscape designer, Frederick Law Olmsted. He conceived of numerous, innovative developments located just beyond the limits of cities’ urban cores. His creations were naturalistic places such as Riverside, IL, outside of Chicago, which had winding roads and large homes with spacious, shaded yards. They were free from the dirt, noise, and poorer classes of the city. These communities were tranquil, safe, and distant enough to be clearly separated from nearby cities. These early idyllic communities along with others were our first suburbs.

By the late 1920s, the automobile was beginning to affect city life in a major way. The number of cars in the U.S. “soared from 8,000 in 1900 to 500,000 in 1910, 8 million in 1920, and 23 million in 1930.”⁴ By the beginning of the 1930s, New York City had “more cars than the whole of Germany, but it also had fifty thousand horses.”⁵ This multitude of cars began to crowd city streets, competing for space with horses, carts, trolleys, and pedestrians.

Figure 1.3
The Suburb Of Riverside, IL, Designed By Frederick Law Olmsted And Calvert Vaux (1868–1869) Sought To Wed Nature With The Emerging Suburbs

Distant travel and transportation of goods was still mostly done by rail, as roads outside of cities were not well-developed and were rarely paved. “The great, newly built Lincoln Highway—which proudly called itself the first transcontinental highway in the world—was continuously paved only from New York City to western Iowa. From there to San Francisco, only about half of it was.”⁶ During the 1930s and 1940s, this road network would grow exponentially due to the proliferation of cars and the subsequent need to serve their owners’ ever expanding desire to have easy access to any destination. The development of a national system of highways was accelerated with the implementation of public policy that funded the construction of a massive new network, which was to blanket the nation from coast to coast. In 1956, President Eisenhower, reacting to the threats of the Cold War and corporate pressures, signed the Federal Aid Highway Act, thereby beginning the development of the Interstate Highway System. Today, there are nearly 50,000 miles of interstate highways in place, which represent the backbon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Image Credits
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Addressing the Future of the Evolving American City
• Chapter 2 Employing Vernacular Solutions to Future Urban Housing
• Chapter 3 The Northeast: New England and Mid-Atlantic Coasts
• Chapter 4 The Midwest: Eastern Prairies and Northern Woodlands
• Chapter 5 The South: Coastal Plains and Interior Uplands
• Chapter 6 The Great Plains: Western Prairies
• Chapter 7 The West: Deserts and High Plains
• Chapter 8 The Pacific Northwest: Marine Forest
• Chapter 9 Building a Sustainable Future Based on Vernacular Principles
• Appendix
• Index