arcCA (Architecture California)’s second quarter issue of 2001 is titled “Housing Complex.” In it, John Kaliski reconsiders the production suburbs of the 1950s to 1980s, Kenneth Caldwell interviews Michael Willis, Jacqueline Leavitt critiques the Hope VI program, Sam Davis analyzes London’s housing squares, Erik Lerner parses the market in “architect-designed” homes, Morris Newman casts a light on urban NIMBYism, and Buzz Yudell describes the principles at work in the design of Karow Nord, a new town on the northeast edge of Berlin. In the Coda, Tim Culvahouse takes a look at William Turnbull’s Sea Ranch Employee Housing.
Eighteen years later, for its inaugural issue, arcCA Digest asks noted experts to alert us to today’s most important issues and activities in the housing arena. These are their thoughts.
Ric Abramson, FAIA
Founder & Principal, WORKPLAYS Studio Architecture, Los Angeles
Chair, AIA California Housing Congress, 2018-19
Architects design housing, and even win awards, but when it comes to influencing how cities are made through housing and land-use policy, architects generally do not have a seat at the table. AIACC’s Housing Congress, comprised of delegates from across the state, has been working on crafting “building blocks” to serve as a framework for a comprehensive action plan to influence housing in California. The Congress’s focus is on unearthing driving forces behind the state’s economic, political, social, environmental/climate, and infrastructure decision-making, as it pertains to how architects can more effectively advocate for and offer greater leadership in housing our future city dwellers.
Housing is a fundamental human need, yet the process of designing and producing new housing seems a bit backwards. Policymakers first establish minimal standards and then set city- or county-wide ratios or unit counts based on arbitrary round numbers, without considering actual site context and conditions. Then, design professionals are thought of as merely the implementers and expected to somehow make generalized standards and abstractions fit into reality. Instead, because of their expertise and capacity for visioning, architects and urban designers should be front and center, studying land use options and advising on policy that involves all aspects of city making. Situational thinking makes great cities, especially when architects can craft creative typological and lifestyle-based solutions to make densely urbanized areas more livable. The history of innovation shows that paradigm shifts occur when absent arbitrary and prescriptive constraints. If architects can be positioned more often as partners with policy makers and generate novel situation- and performance-based housing solutions up front, economic models can be tested against real contexts, and the requisite environmentally responsive policies can be meaningfully integrated. I see the Housing Congress as a first step in identifying new ways of shaping housing policy and unearthing how new design, production, and construction strategies might start to emerge through leadership by architects.
Paul Adamson, FAIA
Hospitality Studio Director, TCA Architects, Oakland
Chair, AIA San Francisco Housing Committee
Three hot topics I’ve been following are density, density, and density. Our AIA San Francisco housing committee is anxious to engage the public in the discussion of greater density and volume, and is aiming this year to illustrate prototypical design ideas that reflect policies to address this issue.
Subtopics include construction methods—prefabrication, modularization, Cross Laminated Timber (CLT); lifestyle options—micro-units, co-living, “residentiality” (a term made up by one of our interior designers to describe the trend among high-end apartment developers to provide hotel-style amenities for their residents—think fitness facilities, pool terraces, lobby-lounges with espresso machines and bars, and workspaces); up-zoning and amending general plans to permit more housing density (see above); rising construction costs (about $0.5M per door, at the moment); and development strategies, including transit-oriented development (especially on BART properties) and full-service (design through construction) development companies.
This article describes how Oakland-based developer RAD Urban is putting into practice the full-service development concept, designing and producing modular fabrication—combining two up-to-the-minute strategies in one. Katerra intends to go all the way, to include design for entitlement through on-site construction. This end-to-end method, including design, fabrication and construction by single entities, has the potential to significantly address the housing crisis, while simultaneously posing a threat to mid-sized architecture firms.
In unit design (and building design, for that matter), the best things I’ve seen and experienced are Stanley Saitowitz’s unit designs that virtually eliminate the circulation spaces from bathrooms and kitchens, so that within a narrow module living space is made efficient and flexible. So smart and so attractive. Check out his Octavia building in San Francisco. And now his firm has plans under way for high-rises in LA and Chicago capitalizing on this methodology. From the architect and developer’s perspectives, since the plans are so simplified, documentation is comparatively straightforward and construction standardized. For residents, it might take a bit of getting used to, but the trade-off in spatial quality seems well worth the reduction in privacy.
Philip Bona, AIA
Senior Architect, AVRP Skyport, San Diego
2017 President, AIA San Diego
In 2018, AIA San Diego and AIA Pasadena & Foothill received “Storytelling Grants” through AIA National’s Blueprint for Better initiative. San Diego’s grant supported design studios at the NewSchool of Architecture + Design engaging with Housing the Next 1 Million. AIA Pasadena worked with AIA Central Valley to create resources for homeowners interested in Accessory Dwelling Units. AIACC is also developing an online resource about ADUs for the public, called Plus1House, scheduled to launch this summer. ADUs and Tiny Homes are related but distinct ideas, being developed separately. ADUs can be anything, but Tiny Homes are more often thought of as modular, even though they can be stick built, too. Tiny Homes are mostly defined as being on wheels—built on something like a yacht trailer. They can be taken off wheels at the site, but could be put back on to move later. [Editor’s note: see this article for more on the distinctions between the two.]
There is a lot of talk now suggesting that modular housing factories should be built at 500 miles on center up and down the state, to facilitate building housing in an OSHA-safe facilities.
AIACC and AIA National have committed to injecting AIA into the conversation on permanent housing for the homeless. National will be focusing this year on partnering with allied organizations, to address these themes with a common agenda. One possible partnership being explored is with Pathways Housing First (formerly Pathways to Housing). One of Pathways’ five principles is Choice—consumer choice and self-determination—because it’s not just a matter of housing individuals; there are a lot of couples and single-parent families with several kids, which you can ‘t cram into a micro-unit. So we’re looking at using local components to come up with a variety of activities, such as charrettes to demonstrate how we might build different typologies of housing units.
Hank Koning, FAIA
KoningEizenberg, Santa Monica
It would be great to wake up one morning and find that codes were applied consistently and all the dumb rules had been erased.
Julie Eizenberg, FAIA
KoningEizenberg, Santa Monica
It’s easy to be distracted by the myriad issues to be addressed in the design of housing these days. For me it is key not to lose track of how it feels to come home and how each building has the potential for community and connection.
We have accepted that providing housing for the very poor needs government support — tax credits, inclusionary zoning, and other strategies. I think we need to accept that, in many US cities, similar incentives are needed to overcome the shortage of attainable housing for regular wage earners.
Michele Hottel, AIA
Michele Grace Hottel, Architect, La Mesa
Chair, AIA San Diego and Palomar CRAN (Custom Residential Architecture Network) Knowledge Community / Chair, AIA California Housing Forum
The AIA California Housing Forum, which is taking place March 29, 2019, will focus on attainable housing. Not all custom homes are for high-end projects with limitless budgets, and architects can be of value in all housing markets; we just have to make sure that we remain part of the equation.
As a planning commissioner in my third term, I hear from the general public when they feel that their “rights” as single-family homeowners are being violated or compromised. I have always responded that people have rights to build and to live in various types of housing. I wasn’t quite sure, however, if those rights were documented or were just an implicit part of “The American Dream.” In fact, there are various internationally recognized agreements, including Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which recognizes the right to housing as part of the right to an adequate standard of living. It states: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” The UN Habitat United Nations Human Settlements Programme (known as the UN-Habitat) was started in 1978 to “promote, protect and ensure the full and progressive realisation of the right to adequate housing.”
Of course, we architects face our own challenges as far as the places we live and our critical analysis of housing. As Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote, “You can’t always get what you want / But if you try sometimes you just might find / . . . / You get what you need.”
[Editor’s note: Michele’s blog is i’ve never met a woman architect before . . . .]
Michael F. Malinowski, FAIA
President, Applied Architecture Inc., Sacramento
Past President, AIA California
The closer I’ve looked at the housing crisis in California, the more complex and intractable it appears. The degree of challenge, of course, makes it akin to any number of very complex design challenges those in the trenches of our profession face. Here are some of the clichés that bounce around in my mind as I mull it over:
- To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. I don’t think the housing crisis is a “building design” challenge at it root, as much as I would like it to be.
- In many parts of California, a building that could be constructed with no labor cost and free materials would still be unattainable due to high land cost.
- There are many houses that can be had for almost nothing in many urban areas where housing is in critically short supply. When made habitable to meet our modern standard, using typical approaches, even a “free” house in very poor shape does not result in low-cost housing, however. Tents don’t meet our modern standards for housing either, and yet they are being considered among the possibilities. That implies that changing rules, definitions, expectations, and what we regard as “normal” may be on the table as part of the discussion.
- Many of the ideas being bandied about – like “factory built housing” – have been around for many decades, never quite reaching the promise that logic might foretell. I often see architects get very excited about the potential of new means of production, new materials, and new design patterns, but I’m not convinced any of these are going to help much.
- The number of issues that affect cost are mind numbing – and I’ve yet to find a comprehensive analysis of how they all come together in “typical cases.” Studies I’ve seen so far seem to make major errors in separating labor and materials (like treating anything subcontracted as “labor”); don’t account for land, financing, or impact fees; don’t consider the ancillary costs, like having roads built to serve garages; etc.
- The housing crisis is not really a “California crisis” alone – it extends all over the country. The “housing crisis” is related to, but not the same as, the “homeless crisis,” however. In my own community, I see real and everyday connection between homelessness and mental health, drug use, and attitudes about social norms, etc.; and these issues may or may not be addressed by “more housing,” per se.
- In the end, I’ve come to a tentative conclusion that what we’re looking for is something akin to the next Velcro . . . something very simple once you see it, indispensable once you’ve been exposed to it’s potential, but almost impossible to imagine until it’s been invented.
Joyce Polhamus, FAIA
Vice President, SmithGroup, San Francisco
In the senior living / senior housing world, “age friendly cities” or “healthy cities for the aging” are important themes. They tie into the conversation about equity and equitable housing for all ages. Public policies need to support age friendly cities. San Mateo County is an example of a jurisdiction that has policy elements that support design for older adults. Good housing design promotes active engagement with the outdoors and other community members, is walkable, accessible, and affordable, and is in close proximity to necessary amenities like hospitals, parks, and transportation.
