NOTE: Last week (okay, I’m running a little slow here), I wrote up the context and background of Spring Creek Houses, a public-private development in East New York. Today is a discussion about the design proper.
His approach seems to have been a vigorous and idealistic engagement of the process at all levels (even to the point where his firm attempted to coordinate site work so that multiple utilities wouldn’t be digging up streets in succession to run lines, only to find to his dismay that no one in the bureaucratic monster that is New York could alleviate this, or even saw it as a problem). The results cannot be measured in the typical shelter porn press way. That is not to say they aren’t impressive on their merits, but only that there is very little relationship between what you see in the pages of Dwell and what was possible in this context.
And the context, in this case, is all about density. The urban planning discussed last week, the type distribution, the use possibilities, all were driven by a cost-conscious consideration of the number of units possible. Only two of the 700 planned are mixed use. Aside from the practical problem of a somewhat remote site supporting retail, there was no possibility of recommending more retail, since the density necessary to make the numbers work inhibited such a goal. The proximity of the shopping center should help somewhat in practical terms, but it is unfortunate that more couldn’t be supported from a purely local culture perspective.
The theories and strategies that undergird each generation of housing planning all dance around the fact that as a culture we show little interest in taking a communal response to housing — unless of course, it comes to the color of our grass. So the physical type is altered every couple years in response to the presumption of failures of previous ideals. No doubt there are social ills present in public housing, but the physical rarely drives the social. Most times is it siting (developing the least attractive lots of subsidized housing), a lack of programming for the residents or a long-term commitment to institutional support that leads to decay.
That’s not to say that design intervention doesn’t have an impact, but rather that they changes are incremental at best — and are worth pursuing — but that perhaps the vagaries of fashion have a disproportionate impact. The current strategy is the creation of infill housing that mirrors the immediate context, and, when possible, provides direct access to the street from each unit. A minor point, but one found to have important psychological effects (a greater sense of safety and ownership), even though it is hardly the norm in many parts of the city.
Another major site decision was to push the buildings to the front of the lot. Across Brooklyn and Queens, there is a precedent for front or rear yards. Here the decision was driven by the belief that a more unified streetwall would provide long term value — both aesthetically and economically. It was also part of the long-term evolution of the design.
Gorlin toured housing sites in Europe with Nehemiah representatives, researching social housing solutions that weren’t in regular evidence here. The results of which are evident in earlier schemes, with a much stronger horizontal character.
Cost considerations (and, if I recall, manufacturing challenges) obviated this approach. Rather than water down the concept, the units were refashioned as more discrete units. Though there was consideration of the patterning the conjoined units will create, the approach is far more of a traditional townhouse model you find both here and in other older urban areas.
I say manufacturing, because one of the interesting innovations of the project is that all of the units will be pre-manufactured. This strategy has been part of the Nehemiah Houses in previous stages, with Capsys, a local company that manufactures in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, providing 700 units for the last major initiative.
The units will be built floor-by-floor at the factory, trucked to the site, and then craned into place. What is exceptional about these units is their 20-foot wide footprint. One of the more onerous restrictions of manufactured housing is the nationwide limit on oversized vehicles (currently 15 feet) traveling interstate highways. Because transit from the Navy Yard to East New York can be surface streets only, this limitation was removed. Of course, when I asked the Capsys folks about the challenges of shipping a 20-foot wide house section (weighing 70,000 lbs) through Brooklyn, I got a hopeful grin and admission that they haven’t yet tried it (though they have about 2,000 attempts coming to get it right).
While the concept is somewhat original, the process is very familiar. The floors are stick-built (meaning, traditional framing) by teams. The impact of assembly production is somewhat evident. Teams are organized by trade, each working a station, with the floor units move laterally to the next station. This would pretty much happen on site, except the structure would be stationary, with the teams moving down a line.
The advantages of this process are the ability to work year-round with minimal weather impact and some economies of scale in materials, resulting in traditional building standards (meaning a nominal increase in quality over traditional manufactured housing) at a discount to typical construction costs. The Spring Creek houses are targeted in the neighborhood of $145/sq ft (depending in the borough, this is upward of a 20% savings — and Capsys is a union shop).
Like the density concerns, prices are very closely watched, since one can track the path from design ideal to monthly mortgage cost pretty easily. The result of this concern is that you won’t find any sleek detailing on the interior: sheetrock, hollow core doors and a monochrome paint finish are the standard. The plans are pretty straightforward, and as much consideration as possible has been given to the window openings and locations, and making the space planning as efficient as possible. But the fact of the matter is that $145/ft doesn’t get you a whole lot. Decisions as fine as wanting to step the units in and out along the streetwall had to be eliminated due to cost. The effect of some of the concepts could be measured in increments as small as dollars, or dollar, per square foot. But when you are trying to make housing available to families of four earning $40,000 yearly, those dollars magnify quickly.
As is typical when value engineering rationalizes the construction methods and materials so rigidly, you maximize your discretionary leverage where it is most profound. Utilizing a consistent window size, by varying size of opening, and exterior color, some dozen plus variants will be achieved, a mix of two, three and four-story units (which have a maximum of three dwellings).
The result is a solid, attractive solution. Another wrinkle in the process has been the formation of a semi-homeowner’s association, designed to regulate some of the finishes. It’s one of those architect diva moves that also ties to extant data: a number of inner city developments have succeeded by aping some of the homeowner’s association gambits you see elsewhere (like lawn color regulation). The logic is that applying the strictures of
what is normally perceived as an affluent housing condition will encourage a similar level of community involvement (a development in urban Dayton manage to reduce crime by making a suburban cul-de-sac’s in the 90’s) .
Where does that leave us? Look, I’m past the point where I can fairly wear the filter of critical analysis of what works. I look at multi-million dollar apartments (online, albeit) all day long. I grew up in a house that rents for a sliver of what you pay, and I have lost the critical lens. Some academic suck telling they still have it is lying. The previous, Amsterdam-influenced scheme resonated more for me (and no doubt it did for everyone else). But if everyone in this city who made $40K had a chance to own a place like this, we would be far better off. The problem is not the detailing of an entrance. The problem is the scarcity of projects like this. Anyone who has done a project where economy is the key driver has myriad regrets. That’s not to say I have evidence of many; rather, the complexity of managing all the components and circumstances means that pinpointing when a particular decision was made ex post facto is pointless. I, like the Nehemiah people, like Gorlin, we all wish they weren’t staring down the barrel at $145. But for those numbers, it’s still quite an accomplishment.
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Housing for the Rest of Us: Spring Creek, Part II
NOTE: Last week (okay, I’m running a little slow here), I wrote up the context and background of Spring Creek Houses, a public-private development in East New York. Today is a discussion about the design proper.
The actual housing units at Spring Creek were designed by Alexander Gorlin, who has maintained a healthy mix of high end residential and commercial work with affordable housing and several school projects (he’s best known, likely, as the designer of Libeskind’s loft on TriBeCa).
His approach seems to have been a vigorous and idealistic engagement of the process at all levels (even to the point where his firm attempted to coordinate site work so that multiple utilities wouldn’t be digging up streets in succession to run lines, only to find to his dismay that no one in the bureaucratic monster that is New York could alleviate this, or even saw it as a problem). The results cannot be measured in the typical shelter porn press way. That is not to say they aren’t impressive on their merits, but only that there is very little relationship between what you see in the pages of Dwell and what was possible in this context.
And the context, in this case, is all about density. The urban planning discussed last week, the type distribution, the use possibilities, all were driven by a cost-conscious consideration of the number of units possible. Only two of the 700 planned are mixed use. Aside from the practical problem of a somewhat remote site supporting retail, there was no possibility of recommending more retail, since the density necessary to make the numbers work inhibited such a goal. The proximity of the shopping center should help somewhat in practical terms, but it is unfortunate that more couldn’t be supported from a purely local culture perspective.
The theories and strategies that undergird each generation of housing planning all dance around the fact that as a culture we show little interest in taking a communal response to housing — unless of course, it comes to the color of our grass. So the physical type is altered every couple years in response to the presumption of failures of previous ideals. No doubt there are social ills present in public housing, but the physical rarely drives the social. Most times is it siting (developing the least attractive lots of subsidized housing), a lack of programming for the residents or a long-term commitment to institutional support that leads to decay.
That’s not to say that design intervention doesn’t have an impact, but rather that they changes are incremental at best — and are worth pursuing — but that perhaps the vagaries of fashion have a disproportionate impact. The current strategy is the creation of infill housing that mirrors the immediate context, and, when possible, provides direct access to the street from each unit. A minor point, but one found to have important psychological effects (a greater sense of safety and ownership), even though it is hardly the norm in many parts of the city.
Another major site decision was to push the buildings to the front of the lot. Across Brooklyn and Queens, there is a precedent for front or rear yards. Here the decision was driven by the belief that a more unified streetwall would provide long term value — both aesthetically and economically. It was also part of the long-term evolution of the design.
Gorlin toured housing sites in Europe with Nehemiah representatives, researching social housing solutions that weren’t in regular evidence here. The results of which are evident in earlier schemes, with a much stronger horizontal character.
Cost considerations (and, if I recall, manufacturing challenges) obviated this approach. Rather than water down the concept, the units were refashioned as more discrete units. Though there was consideration of the patterning the conjoined units will create, the approach is far more of a traditional townhouse model you find both here and in other older urban areas.
I say manufacturing, because one of the interesting innovations of the project is that all of the units will be pre-manufactured. This strategy has been part of the Nehemiah Houses in previous stages, with Capsys, a local company that manufactures in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, providing 700 units for the last major initiative.
The units will be built floor-by-floor at the factory, trucked to the site, and then craned into place. What is exceptional about these units is their 20-foot wide footprint. One of the more onerous restrictions of manufactured housing is the nationwide limit on oversized vehicles (currently 15 feet) traveling interstate highways. Because transit from the Navy Yard to East New York can be surface streets only, this limitation was removed. Of course, when I asked the Capsys folks about the challenges of shipping a 20-foot wide house section (weighing 70,000 lbs) through Brooklyn, I got a hopeful grin and admission that they haven’t yet tried it (though they have about 2,000 attempts coming to get it right).
While the concept is somewhat original, the process is very familiar. The floors are stick-built (meaning, traditional framing) by teams. The impact of assembly production is somewhat evident. Teams are organized by trade, each working a station, with the floor units move laterally to the next station. This would pretty much happen on site, except the structure would be stationary, with the teams moving down a line.
The advantages of this process are the ability to work year-round with minimal weather impact and some economies of scale in materials, resulting in traditional building standards (meaning a nominal increase in quality over traditional manufactured housing) at a discount to typical construction costs. The Spring Creek houses are targeted in the neighborhood of $145/sq ft (depending in the borough, this is upward of a 20% savings — and Capsys is a union shop).
Like the density concerns, prices are very closely watched, since one can track the path from design ideal to monthly mortgage cost pretty easily. The result of this concern is that you won’t find any sleek detailing on the interior: sheetrock, hollow core doors and a monochrome paint finish are the standard. The plans are pretty straightforward, and as much consideration as possible has been given to the window openings and locations, and making the space planning as efficient as possible. But the fact of the matter is that $145/ft doesn’t get you a whole lot. Decisions as fine as wanting to step the units in and out along the streetwall had to be eliminated due to cost. The effect of some of the concepts could be measured in increments as small as dollars, or dollar, per square foot. But when you are trying to make housing available to families of four earning $40,000 yearly, those dollars magnify quickly.
As is typical when value engineering rationalizes the construction methods and materials so rigidly, you maximize your discretionary leverage where it is most profound. Utilizing a consistent window size, by varying size of opening, and exterior color, some dozen plus variants will be achieved, a mix of two, three and four-story units (which have a maximum of three dwellings).
The result is a solid, attractive solution. Another wrinkle in the process has been the formation of a semi-homeowner’s association, designed to regulate some of the finishes. It’s one of those architect diva moves that also ties to extant data: a number of inner city developments have succeeded by aping some of the homeowner’s association gambits you see elsewhere (like lawn color regulation). The logic is that applying the strictures of
what is normally perceived as an affluent housing condition will encourage a similar level of community involvement (a development in urban Dayton manage to reduce crime by making a suburban cul-de-sac’s in the 90’s) .
Where does that leave us? Look, I’m past the point where I can fairly wear the filter of critical analysis of what works. I look at multi-million dollar apartments (online, albeit) all day long. I grew up in a house that rents for a sliver of what you pay, and I have lost the critical lens. Some academic suck telling they still have it is lying. The previous, Amsterdam-influenced scheme resonated more for me (and no doubt it did for everyone else). But if everyone in this city who made $40K had a chance to own a place like this, we would be far better off. The problem is not the detailing of an entrance. The problem is the scarcity of projects like this. Anyone who has done a project where economy is the key driver has myriad regrets. That’s not to say I have evidence of many; rather, the complexity of managing all the components and circumstances means that pinpointing when a particular decision was made ex post facto is pointless. I, like the Nehemiah people, like Gorlin, we all wish they weren’t staring down the barrel at $145. But for those numbers, it’s still quite an accomplishment.