Posted Mar 2, 2017, 5:30 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
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How Los Angeles Can Design for Density
Successful Buildings For A Better City
Feb 17, 2017
By Gerhard Mayer
Read More: http://la.streetsblog.org/2017/02/17...a-better-city/
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In L.A., we think of a city as a vast region of single family houses with skyscrapers in the middle, but to the rest of the world, those two building types represent only the extremes to be used in their cities rather sparsely. Those cities mostly consist out of what we call “the missing middle buildings”. This article is devoted to two examples out of the vast catalog of those building types, because they create so much urban fabric elsewhere but do not exist in SoCal; even worse, they may be illegal for us to build at this time.
- A row-house is its own structure with its own structural walls. This means you can tear one house down and the one next to it will remain unaffected. Shared walls are not an implied feature of row-houses. They are the result of late 19th century developers cutting corners. Row houses have one big advantage over the detached houses of our suburbs; they offer palatable solutions to our housing shortage. One can fit many more row-houses into the same amount of land while retaining the look and feel of a residential neighborhood. Row-houses can achieve the minimum density required to run efficient, economically self-sustaining public transit. Once people stop depending on cars, they embrace alternate driving arrangements without vehicle ownership obligations.
- Europeans like sleeping with open windows facing quiet inner semi-private courts; but people also enjoy looking out into their street during the day. Thus, the standard European apartment offers this double exposure, with the living room facing the street and the bedrooms facing the garden interior. The courtyard is precious to people; they accept buildings squeezed tight against the street edge in order to keep the inside as open as possible. US apartment design rarely offers this double exposure. When you choose your apartment you pick on the left or the right side of the corridor, but you cannot have both. If you selected the street side, this then means all your rooms will be exposed to street noise, and you won’t want to sleep with your windows open.
- In typical American apartments air circulates through mechanical systems, which makes the building more expensive to build and operate. Apartments in euro-perimeter blocks are mostly passively cross ventilated through windows on two opposite sides of a building; there is no need for a fan to vent out old stale air; just open the window on both opposing sides, and voila! Passive ventilation used to be common in older, lower apartment buildings; but these days, such buildings are no longer being constructed, unless they are part of an affordable housing project. We do not have a method to build higher buildings while still offering passive ventilation for the apartments; and yet, this is completely possible regardless of building height.
- In typical Chinese housing construction, for instance, passive ventilation is available even in the highest of their towers. It is also the most common form of ventilation for a European city apartment. As a building typology, these block-edge buildings are called “primary vertical circulation types”, and they are fiercely efficient for developers. Without long, monotonous interior corridors, your front door is right off your stair landing; and you will share that landing with 1-3 neighbors. In this more intimate arrangement, people are more likely to know their neighbors and form social bonds than in buildings with anonymous front doors along long corridors. The vertical arrangement has also another advantage – it makes the building footprint quite small. This building type can easily fit an infill lot.
- The public resistance we are feeling against change is partially because we, the design profession, have not offered better ways to live in our cities, in the same ways the suburbs once appealed to the masses. If we want better cities, we will need to create them with different ingredients. There is a whole range of building types out there and we only employ a very small subset of them here locally. Both row-houses and perimeter apartment block buildings are part of the “missing middle”. They are also the core ingredients of cities aiming to solve housing shortages with quality of life and access to open space. We should study what works elsewhere, and if necessary, change our zoning and building codes to allow it here too.
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When we look at a typical built-out US city block, we know that there is little to no open space left inside that block.
But when we compare this to a solid looking European building block, we might be surprised to learn that buildings only line the edges against the streets, but that inside the block there is a green courtyard.
There was a competition for an urban block in Switzerland won by the famous Dutch firm MVRDV. The Urban Hybrid Micro City they propose would be a good solution in any city, even here in L.A.
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