AFFORDABLE HOUSING: The Invisible Answer, Part Three

Believe it or not, prior to the late 1930s, people who lived in travel trailers full-time were hailed as adventurous, modern-day nomads, and were widely admired by the public. By the tail end of the Depression, however, vast numbers of impoverished families had resorted to living in broken-down homemade trailers, and the public perception of trailer dwellers completely reversed. Cities and towns passed laws barring them from entering city limits, or else imposed heavy fees to discourage them from staying overnight.  

Today, this sad legacy persists in the unkind treatment of mobile home dwellers as second-class citizens--people whom zoning laws still relegate to living beside tank farms or beneath runway approaches. Little wonder that even the most mortgage-enslaved Americans still recoil at the thought of dwelling in such places. 

Yet if and when America ever develops a true mass-produced form of housing--one that does for the cost of homes what the Model T did for the cost of cars--it will most likely be an outgrowth of the mobile home. For decades, and without the fanfare accompanying the many “affordable” housing solutions proposed by architects and visionaries, mobile homes (or, as the industry prefers to call them, “manufactured homes”) have been providing decent, mass-produced lodging for a fraction of the cost of site-built houses.  

The main reason for this difference is simple. While conventional homes use a few factory-built components such as roof trusses, doors, windows, and cabinets, the lion’s share of the structure remains entirely hand-built. By contrast, the manufactured home industry literally grew up with mass production, thanks to its prewar origins in building travel trailers.  From a modest start--few early trailers exceeded 160 square feet or so--the industry inexorably progressed to larger and more sophisticated units. By the late Sixties, huge, factory-built “doublewides” routinely enclosed areas of around a thousand square feet, which is about the size of an average bungalow home of the 1920s. Along the way, manufactured home builders quietly acquired the sort of mass production techniques that the site-built housing industry still considers revolutionary.

Why all  the fuss about mass production? What’s wrong with the way we build traditional houses? The answer is that, of America’s innumerable consumer products, homes are among the last that are predominantly handmade. This implies the same thing for houses that it does for any other handmade product: High cost. It’s one of several admittedly complex reasons that fewer and fewer middle-class Americans--let alone the poor--can achieve the dream of home ownership these days.  

Still, despite the thrashing we’ve gotten from five years of the Great Recession, many Americans still believe that a “real” house, whether affordable or otherwise, should be built onsite and not in a factory--a perception heartily supported by the building industry, whose livelihood depends upon it. Hence, it’s doubtful that manufactured homes will be accepted by mainstream home buyers until they can unflinchingly compete with site-built homes in appearance, construction quality, amenities, and safety.  

Up to now, the manufactured home industry hasn’t been up to this challenge. For the most part, it remains satisfied with often-haphazard planning and a dubious, two-dimensional aesthetic. Yet an industry that’s ridden out wildly changing fortunes, regulatory discrimination, and decades of public ridicule might still be counted on to provide a few surprises.

AFFORDABLE HOUSING: The Invisible Answer, Part Two

Architects love to start from a clean slate.  It’s inherent in our training, and often, it’s for the best--after all, clean-slate thinking has given us Falling Water, Ronchamps, and countless other architectural triumphs. 

Yet sometimes, incremental improvements on a humble concept are more useful than the grandest plans made from scratch.  This is the case with affordable housing. Consider what architects have done to make homes more affordable during the past eighty years--in practical terms, next to nothing--and compare this with the erstwhile trailer industry, that paragon of gauche design, which has stumbled along unceremoniously only to arrive at affordable housing that really works.   

The trailer story begins in the late Teens, when Americans first piled into their flivvers to go “autocamping” along the nation’s scenic new roads.  At first, campers simply carried tents, but by the early Twenties, many were towing tiny trailers that cleverly unfolded into roomy canvas cabins.  Meanwhile, towns throughout the country opened auto camps--later known as trailer parks--to attract tourist dollars.  

In 1929, a Michigan man named Arthur Sherman got tired of wrestling with his tent trailer and built himself a solid-walled masonite version that didn’t need setting up.  The idea caught on, and Sherman wound up in the trailer business, with hundreds of others soon following.  By the mid-Thirties, trailering and trailer parks were such a huge phenomenon that one expert foresaw half of all Americans living in trailers by 1955.  

Yet by 1937 the trailer boom had collapsed, the victim of a saturated market and its own overheated rhetoric.  Meanwhile, broken-down trailers became the only homes many Depression-bound Americans could afford, changing the public’s original perception of trailer dwellers as wholesome, fun-living nomads to the more familiar stereotype presuming shiftlessness and poverty.  

World War II  briefly redeemed the trailer’s image.  Faced with an urgent need to house defense workers, the government ordered some one hundred thousand trailers during the course of the war, and in the process helped demonstrate the lowly trailer’s value as a year-round dwelling.

The postwar housing shortage brought many novel ideas for affordable, mass-produced housing, from the all-steel Lustron home to Buckminster Fuller’s aircraft-based Wichita House.  Once again, however, the clean-slate approach created spiraling costs that premempted any chance of affordability.

The trailer industry, on the other hand, simply picked up where it left off, adding homey touches and increasing size, until by the early 1950s some models were over 25 feet long.  These units were now clearly designed for year-round living, though in light of the trailer dweller’s shady reputation, the industry remained loathe to concede this.  

Only in 1954, when a Wisconsin firm introduced a trailer so large it required a special permit to transport, did the industry finally begin to acknowledge that year-round trailer dwellers were its real market.  Twelve-foot-wide, fourteen-foot-wide, and double-twelve-foot wide trailers eventually followed, at prices that nevertheless were a fraction of conventional site-built homes.

Today, the travel trailer’s descendants--now known as manufactured homes--have quietly fulfilled the whole gamut of affordable housing requirements, and have done so through evolution and not revolution.  They are mass-produced and hence affordable; they can be easily customized and rapidly deployed, and they provide the familiar domestic imagery so many homeowners take comfort in.

Yet despite these attributes, manufactured homes remain largely invisible to the architectural profession.  Hence, the question is not whether such homes can provide an affordable housing solution--they already have, and for decades.  The real question is why architects, and much of the public, still seem to wish they hadn’t.  

AFFORDABLE HOUSING: The Invisibile Answer

A while back, I wrote a column on why architects have so often failed at designing affordable housing. It drew a flurry of responses from my colleagues--some thoughtful, some merely huffy and self-righteous. A few architects who’ve spent a good portion of their careers developing affordable housing were understandably offended at being lumped in with the rest of us. Many others missed the point altogether, which was that traditional architectural schooling all but guarantees an architect who’ll design expensive buildings, not affordable ones.

Many respondents cited examples of successful, high-profile affordable housing projects aimed at low income groups. Few acknowledged that the need for affordable housing is no longer limited to the poor--increasingly, it applies to the middle class as well. Over the past ten years, aspiring middle-class home owners have been doubly hammered--early in the decade by the ballooning cost of single family homes, and now, in the midst of the Recession, by declining income. 

In fact, through feast and famine, the median price of homes has continued to rise ahead of any increase in family earnings, despite the increasing reliance today’s families place on dual incomes. Simple arithmetic will reveal the result: More people than ever are now deprived of the American dream of home ownership.  

How can any nation expect to provide affordable housing for its poor when, increasingly, it can’t even house its middle class? And can any place really be called a “community” when its own teachers, firefighters, cops, and librarians can’t afford to live there?  

The reasons behind the rising cost of homes are manifold, as many correspondents pointed out. By heavily favoring loans for conventional housing types, conservative lending institutions help enforce formulaic, cookie-cutter development, while quashing promising housing ideas that fall outside the usual bounds.  

Our nation’s moribund zoning laws have had a similar effect, though they do it by segregating usages and doggedly insisting on low densities and land-squandering building setbacks. Developers--the few that still dare to build in this  economic climate--respond to these limitations by sticking to well-tried formulas, concentrating on the sort of huge, overblown tract homes that used to yield the highest profits.  

Architects have bills to pay too, and perhaps that’s why so many of us in the profession seem unwilling to raise our voices against the idiocies of hyperrestrictive zoning, meddlesome design review boards, and the national appetite for pointlessly oversized home designs.       

Strangely, though, despite the many architects who voiced an opinion on the subject of affordable housing, not one cited the most successful and ubiquitous form of affordable housing there is--possibly because architects have had virtually nothing to do with its development. 

I’m talking, of course, about manufactured homes, those boxy, prefabricated units that used to be known as mobile homes and, before that, as trailers.  Despite garnering little more than contempt from the architectural profession during their fifty-plus years of existence, manufactured homes are among the few housing types that actually deliver on the promise of affordability, every day, and in every state of the union.  

Scourge or solution?  We’ll take a closer look next time around.

MY OLD SCHOOL

Change the name, and any Baby Boomer would recognize my old grade school, Crawford Village Elementary. It was one of those flat-roofed, single-story jobs with parallel rows of classroom wings, all linked together by covered outdoor halls edged with pipe columns. At the main entrance was a barren, concrete-paved quadrangle with a flagpole; beyond was an auditorium known--as it was in all such schools--as the Multi-Purpose Room. Inside it were ranks of long lunch tables that folded neatly into the walls, a wardrobe filled with Traffic Patrol uniforms, and an elevated stage. In this vast, asphalt-tiled room, redolent with the smell of countless cafeteria lunches, we were gathered to watch the Bell Labs epic “Our Mr. Sun” at least once a year.   

Thousands of schools just like Crawford Village were built across America from the late Forties through the mid-Sixties to handle the postwar baby boom. Known as “finger plan” schools because of their parallel rows of classrooms, their design was pioneered by the noted architect Ernest Kump (1912-1999). Kump’s first finger plan design, Acalanes High School in Lafayette, California, was enormously influential, and served as a prototype for public schools of all levels well into the Sixties.  

Kump’s basic finger plan scheme could be easily adjusted to a variety of sites--a fact that delighted architects scrambling to keep up with the era’s boom in school-building. As it happened, I eventually served my internship with Reynolds & Chamberlain, one of the four associated firms that designed Crawford Village and dozens of California schools like it during the 1950s. One of the principals used to joke that when he received another school commission, he’d simply take out the same old drawings and change the name of the school on the title sheet.  Although it wasn’t quite that simple, there was more than a passing resemblance among these designs.

Typical of finger plan schools, the classrooms at Crawford Village had a whole wall of windows facing north and a high clearstory that peeked over the hallway roof on the south. The entirety of the room’s artificial light came from six curious ceiling lamps with Saturn-like rings surrounding a silvered bulb. The ceilings and the upper part of the walls were covered in perforated acoustical tile whose holes made a challenging target for pencil-stub projectiles.  

Only in retrospect have I come to appreciate the ingenuity of these schools, whose ubiquitous traits grew out of the need to accomodate a rising flood of schoolkids as quickly and efficiently as possible. The buildings were built on inexpensive concrete slab foundations, with wood-framed walls rendered in stucco; their outdoor corridors obviated walls altogether. The width of those long, narrow “fingers” of classrooms was quite simply determined by the distance a 2x12 roof joist could span.  

Hot water pipes for radiant heating were embedded in the floor slabs, avoiding attics full of ductwork, while still keeping students toasty in winter. The tall walls of north-facing glass gave diffuse daylighting, while those peculiar lamps served to bounce light onto the ceiling, from whence it was evenly reflected to the desktops.  

Today, with the Baby Boom just a fading playground echo, large numbers of the old finger plan schools have been closed, demolished, or converted to other uses. In a sign of the times, Crawford Village Elementary has become a retraining school for adults.  Although the paint scheme has changed and the classrooms are now jammed with computers, somehow I suspect these new students still feel right at home, waiting for that clock up in the corner to tick oh-so-loudly to the school day’s end.

GET WITH THE PROGRAM

Not to lord it over computer geeks, but us architects were programming since long before Wozniac, Univac, Eniac, and even Babbage. Of course, we’ve been doing it with buildings, not computers: “Programming” is  architectspeak for the process of determining and organizing a project’s requirements. There’s no high-tech gear necessary—a pencil, paper, and some careful thought about your lifestyle is all it takes.  

Why should someone pondering a new home or an addition bother with programming? Because, in a sense, the architectural program is the blueprint for the blueprints. Without it, you’ll be floundering in a million possibilities, with no starting point and nothing to guide your design.

Ergo, some programming basics:

•  First, determine what kind of rooms you need. Make an honest analysis of the way you actually live, without allowing architectural fads or one-upmanship to color your thinking. For instance, if you’re not in the habit of hanging around in your bedroom a lot, it would be a colossal waste to have the sort of gigantic master suite found in most new homes these days. If you’ll actually use the space, fine; otherwise, forget it. 

•  Next, decide how big each room should be. Don’t pull sizes out of the air; instead, measure some similar rooms you’re already familiar with, and then adjust their size up or down to suit your needs. Always allow a little extra for errors, oversights, and just plain generosity--especially in kitchens, bathrooms, and staircases, whose space requirements are chronically underestimated by amateur planners. 

On the other hand, don’t make rooms pointlessly oversized; huge spaces can be just as awkward and difficult to furnish as small ones, and they’re more expensive to boot.  

•  Finally, assign a hierarchy of importance to the rooms on your program, so that when you run into the inevitable planning conflicts, you’ll know which room has the better claim to space, views, sunlight, or your budget dollars.  

Customarily, the largest rooms--living room, family room, master bedroom--get top billing. The kitchen, bathrooms, and secondary bedrooms are usually on the next tier, with the laundry, closets, and the garage bringing up the rear. However, your lifestyle may demand adjustments in these rankings. If you’re mad about cooking, for example, the kitchen should rightly go to the top of the list. 

The only fairly inviolable rankings in this hierarchy pertain to solar orientation. In general, living areas that are occupied throughout the day should face south or nearly so. The kitchen can face east, south, or west, depending on when you use it most, although if it tends to serve as your family’s main gathering place, a southern exposure is probably best. A breakfast room should ideally face east for morning sun, and a dining room west for afternoon light.   

Bedrooms should face either east, for those who like being awakened by direct sun, or west for those who don’t. North-facing bedrooms, and in fact any north-facing living area, will generally be gloomy, cold, and uninviting. Hence, the north side of the houseis best reserved for the garage--if street access allows it--and for storage, mechanical, and other rooms that aren’t inhabited.

Simple, no?  End program. 

WHY DO ARCHITECTS HAVE THOSE THREE-PART NAMES?

Frank Lloyd Wright: Did he start the
fashion for triple-barreled architect names?
(Image: Mike Siegel, The Seattle Times)

At some time or other, you’ve probably wondered why architects take on those strange, pompous-sounding triple names, right?  You know: Edward Durell Stone, William Wilson Wurster, Edward Larrabee Barnes. I don’t think architects adopt three-part names to sound pompous; I think they do it because their first and last names alone would seem too short or too dull.  I mean, how memorable is Edward Barnes without the Larrabee? 

Of course, the most famous triple name was that of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose family, due to some strange consequence of being Welsh, did more than their share of triple-name-juggling.  Wright received part of his mother’s maiden name, Lloyd Jones—why only part, I don’t know—as well as the last name of his father, William Russell Cary Wright.  After that, things got shorter, but not any clearer: Wright’s eldest son, also an architect, was just plain Lloyd Wright. Get it? Neither do I.   

Oakland's fabulous Fox Theater,
a product of Weeks & Day (1928)

Triple-whammies aren’t the most curious names in architecture, however.  There have also been a whole plethora of repeating monikers, from the famous Greene & Greene (the Craftsman kings) to Rapp & Rapp (the brilliant movie-palace-meisters) to Keck & Keck (postwar Chicago Modernists) to House & House (venerable San Francisco-based green building specialists). Other nepotistic firms, like San Francisco’s Reid Brothers, simply called a spade a spade.

Henry Hoare: Why art thou all giggling?

Then there are those serendipitous couplets that seem unnaturally abundant among architects.  For example, the firm of Reed & Stem, whose name sounds like a snack for pandas, helped bring us New York’s Grand Central Station, while Oakland’s Fox Theater harks from the chronocentric office of Weeks & Day.  San Francisco’s City Hall, of course, was whipped up by the scrumptious partnership of Bakewell & Brown. 

There have also been a few, well, unfortunately-named architects, from the English landscape designer Henry Hoare, to Boston’s Gothic Revival master Ralph Adams Cram.  Still, the grand prize must certainly go to that unlucky 18th-century French architect, Eustache Saint-Fart.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe:
Five names is better than three.

Some architects packed so much horsepower they only needed one name: Imhotep, Calicrates, Michelangelo. At least one, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, didn’t find his real name arty enough, and so invented his own: Le Corbusier.

The late architect I. M. Pei at age 100:
Bang bang bang—I wish I had a
a moniker like that.
(Image: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine)

For a while during the Seventies, there seemed to be a lawyerly belief among architects that the more partners you had in your firm’s name, the better. Hence, venerable offices that started with one name—say, Walter Ratcliff--grew into impossible clunkers like Ratcliff, Slama, and Cadwalader. My former employers, the relatively mellifluous Reynolds & Chamberlain, briefly transformed themselves into the utterly unmanageable Reynolds, Chamberlain, Leaf, Ruano, Mowry. No wonder business slowed down. Then again, some architects, like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, didn’t have any partners at all, and still had five names.

After the laws forbidding architects from advertising were eased in the Seventies, firm names seemed to get more image-savvy.  You began to hear more hip names like Ace Architects and SITE, or else touchy-feely ones ending in Group, Collective, Collaborative, or Partners.    

Personally, as an architect whose name is rythymically mundane yet impossible to spell, I sometimes yearn for a handle with a little more firepower--something punchy and staccato, like I. M. Pei. I mean, bang-bang-bang--if I had a name like that, maybe I’d be designing skyscrapers too, instead of sitting here writing this.

SAY WHAT?

In Hana, Hawaii a while back, there was a design competition in which architects were supposed to design a treehouse. Sounds like fun, right? Can’t turn that into some heavy-handed philosophical thing, right?

Wrong.

While many of the ideas were fascinating, the sponsor made the mistake of also asking the architects to write about their designs. With their usual aplomb, many managed to turn this endearing concept into another leaden opportunity to proselytize.  

My favorite quote came from an architect who wrote: “A treehouse is neither a tree nor a house. It establishes a symbiotic relationship between the tree and a house.  Our intervention is interwoven within the tree. Its movement allows this relationship to fluctuate, blurring the edges.” 

Bad enough that we have to tolerate the sort of palaver found in both trade and popular magazines about architecture. Now architects themselves seem convinced that, in order to appear sophisticated, they too have to express themselves in gauzy riddles.  

That’s a shame, for one of the marks of a great architect is the ability to explain an  idea with clarity and simplicity--a skill that goes back centuries.    

The brilliant Sir Christopher Wren was charged with rebuilding London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire of 1666. From the outset, Wren found his work being  tampered with by the meddlesome old men who formed the church’s board of commissioners. When construction reached the tops of the walls, he saw to his dismay that the board had once again interceded, substituting a rather fussy parapet with balusters for the plain one he’d designed. Wren coolly responded to this affront by observing: “Ladies think nothing well without an edging.” 

Frank Lloyd Wright, for all his 19th-century-style purple prose, could also express himself with both immediacy and wit. In his autobiography, he described the Queen Anne-style houses he’d found in Chicago shortly after his arrival in the 1880s:

“All had the murderous corner-tower...either rectangular across the corner, round, or octagonal, eventuating in candle-snuffer roofs, turnip domes or corkscrew spires. I walked along miles of this expensive mummery, trying to get into the thinking processes of the builders.  Failed to get hold of any thinking they had done at all.”

In the 1960s, architect Edward Durell Stone spoke along similar lines, although in this case, he was renouncing his own Modernist heritage: “Style has been overemphasized:  There are books devoted to architecture that do not show plans explaining the basic conception...architecture is not millinery. Fashions pass by, buildings remain to become grim reminders of transient enthusiasms.”

In a prescient sentence I wish I’d written, he concluded: “Much of our modern architecture lacks (the) intangible quality of permanence, formality and dignity. It bears more resemblance to the latest model automobile, depending upon shining, metallic finish--doomed to early obsolescence.”

Stone made that statement almost forty years ago. If only more of today’s architects could see that clearly and speak that plainly. Instead, even with a subject as endearingly simple as a treehouse, we get cryptic psychobabble references to “fluctuating symbiotic relationships”, “interwoven interventions”, and movements “blurring the edges.” 

Blurring indeed.