From the New York Times, an article entitled "Row Houses Gone Wild" by Christopher Gray: "Seventy-First Street from West End to Broadway rises steeply midblock and then, like a roller coaster — wheeee! — hurtles downhill. The architecture has a certain giddy touch, joyously untempered by the good taste of contextualism so often claimed as an urban ideal. Here modern sticks its elbow in the ribs of Victorian, red brick wrestles with white, lugubrious brownstone takes a poke at the lighter colors of the Renaissance, and, in one building, the early 20th and 21st centuries tussle. Across the street runs a string of houses built two at a time, or so it seems. In this case the developer James A. Frame, working with the architects Thom & Wilson, put up a row of 10, made to appear as five independent pairs. Designed in 1892, they came just as the funereal brownstone model was giving way to a lighter palette, and Frame hedged his bets: some pairs are brownstone, and some are light orange brick with cream-colored trim and Renaissance detailing." Full article here. (Photo credit Todd Heisler.)
When Residential Rowhouses Sold Out
From Philly Brownstoner and the inimitable Libby Hawes: "As neighborhoods developed, small commercial districts of rowhouses with first floor store fronts were common. The industrial revolution produced cheaper merchandise, causing a decline in goods made by artisan merchants, but increasing the number of retailers selling factory-made goods. Innovations in storefront designs in the 19th century were due largely to advancements in glass manufacture. Cylinders produced glass up to 4 feet by 6 feet, with fewer imperfections, requiring less framing members. Another revolution in the construction of storefronts was the manufacture of cast iron architectural elements as early as the 1840s." Full post here.
Shophouses Spread from Asia to the Balkans
From a blog called Historic Houses of Romania: "The building above is one of the innumerable end of c19th corner shop establishments (it could have been at one time or another during its existence a grocery, a pub or a restaurant or all of these functions together), provided with living quarters on the first floor. These building can easily find new uses in the today economy, especially in the tourism industry owning to their usually central location and architectural character reflecting the intricate economic and cultural history of this region of Europe, formerly part of the erstwhile Ottoman ream." Full post here.
Townhouse Architect of 2010: Rogers & Marvel?
Thanks to a loyal reader, I learned that the AIA bestowed one of its 2010 National Housing Awards on the State Street Townhouses project in Brooklyn, New York designed by Rogers & Marvel, which also designed its Third & Bond apartment project to look like townhouses. I had the chance to visit the State Street Townhouses several days ago, and added the photos to the Flickr pool. A new entry for the Hall of Fame!
Prototype Housing in St. Louis, Missouri
Joseph Heathcott, currently a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at University of the Arts London, Visiting Fellow at LSE, and Associate Professor of Urban Studies at the New School (and also my cousin), brought to my attention a prototype housing project that he and architect Jo Noero were involved with in the Soulard neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri. Joe wrote: "The challenge was to produce a new housing style for south St. Louis that was neither a boring replicant of the old architecture nor an intrusive eyesore of new conceit. This design scheme came out of a fusion of preservation interests with those of contemporary architecture and real estate development for low/mod income housing." As usual, Joe was hip before I even knew how to try. (Photo credit: Joseph Heathcott.)
Slow Home Design Minute Videos for Townhouses
From the Slow Home Studio, a series of "Design Minute" videos in which founders John Brown and Matthew North discuss efficient design using John's attached house as the example. Video topics particularly relevant to townhouse design include managing overlooking neighbors, "clear" and "poor" floorplan design, staircase design (also above), and entry design.
Field Trip to Cincinnati, Ohio: Part 2
A few weeks ago, I visited Cincinnati and saw many remarkable townhouses in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. Some have been fixed up, and the mix of old and new has produced a vibrant community (mentioned in Part 1). As I understand it, redevelopment efforts are being sustained by the Cincinnati Center City Development Corp. ("3CDC"), which acts as both a developer and capital source; other developers like OTR Community Housing, Eber Development, and Urban Sites; and architects like Schickel Design, whose Martha Dorff graciously gave me a tour of the City Home project and showed me plans for future phases. The area is also promoted by organizations like Urban Living Gateway Quarter, OTR Gateway, OTR Foundation, and OTR Chamber. Check out all the websites for plenty of photos of what urban revitalization should look like.
Baltimore Townhouse Redevelopment: A Profile
From the Baltimore Sun: "[Lloyd] Williams, CEO of the Verde Group, a Baltimore development company, decided that he wanted to help turn around his old neighborhood [known as Oliver]. Williams has helped transform more than 20 vacant and rotting shells, mostly along a two-block stretch of North Bond Street, into energy-efficient homes with granite-appointed kitchens, exposed brick walls and, most important, new homeowners, he says. [Recently] Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake unveiled an initiative to...make it easier for officials to sell city-owned vacant homes, [and] also will include $1.5 million worth of incentives to attract homebuyers. [Williams says that] 'People should consider Oliver to come back home. You don't have to take flight anymore.'" Full article here.
Green Townhouses in NYC: Race to the Top
LEED or Passiv Haus? From the Wall Street Journal: "Developer Teddy Schiff is working to develop a niche in the New York City housing market by building green townhouses. His first project garnered Manhattan's first LEED gold-certified townhouse, a six-story home on the Upper East Side with multiple outdoor spaces and sustainable design features meant to reduce the use of energy, water and natural resources." Full article here. (Photo credit sothebyshomes.com.)
gbNYC Magazine writer David Roth, who proclaims that he is "personally partial to small changes in the way we build and human-scale development", also wrote about this project, and about "Passive House 1 at 174 Grand Street in Williamsburg, a (yes) passive development by Brooklyn architecture firm Loadingdock5" which "would be the first new building in New York City to meet the ambitious and rigorous Passiv Haus standards." Full article with photo here.
Field Trip to Cincinnati, Ohio: Part 1
Townhouses in Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine ("OTR") neighborhood were the subject of two recent posts, and last week we had a random chance to visit Cincinnati. To say that we were impressed would be an understatement. The photos have been added to the Flickr pool, but they tell only a small part of the story. OTR has a vast collection of townhouses built by German immigrants in the 19th century, about which travel writer Arthur Frommer said in 1993: "In all of America, there is no more promising an urban area for revitalization than your own Over-the-Rhine. When I look at that remarkably untouched, expansive section of architecturally uniform structures...I see in my mind the possibility for a revived district that literally could rival similar prosperous and heavily visited areas." Thanks to a partnership among the Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation and neighborhood stakeholders, OTR's buildings are being revitalized and filled with small businesses like Iris Book Cafe, Lavomatic cafe, and Skirtz & Johnston pastries, arts groups like No No Knots and Project Cincinnatus, and most importantly all kinds of residents!
Part 2 coming soon: More specific preservation and redevelopment efforts.
So Much Depends Upon the Stoop
From the Washington Post, an article on the always-relevant topic of stoops and other transitions from private to public space: "Harriet and Dick Melmer don't have a front porch or yard. They step from their 1782 townhouse immediately into the public right of way, a brick sidewalk belonging to the city of Alexandria and heavily used by pedestrians. Like many homeowners who live in urban settings, the Melmers face the challenge of blending private and public spaces when there is minimal distance between the two. 'The sidewalk becomes the public living room in front of the house,' said Al Cox, Alexandria's manager of historic preservation. To soften that transition and create a sense of welcome, some urban homeowners rely on small flourishes of design." Full article here.
Philly Rowhouse Gentrification for Student Housing
From the Philadelphia Inquirer, an article about rowhouses near Temple University: "A long-blighted swath of about a quarter of a square mile is being reinvented, however frenetically, by dozens of developers. [Temple's] five residence halls couldn't absorb the surge, and in 2004 the administration decided that going forward, only freshmen and sophomores could live on campus. 'The strategy was that the private market would provide the housing' for the ousted upperclassmen, said Kenneth Lawrence Jr., senior vice president for government, community and public affairs. Lured by an abundance of barren lots and a guaranteed clientele, an estimated 45 developers have worked on at least 600 mostly bite-size pieces of the neighborhood. Builders continue to woo homeowners such as Bertha Cohen, a great-grandmother who has lived in the neighborhood more than 35 years. They call and write urging her to sell, she said, and 'they're always sticking papers in your door.'" Full article here.
Townhouses and Open Building: It's Elemental
Stephen Kendall, author of Homeworks and director of the Building Futures Institute, emailed us some images of a townhouse project in Chile by Alejandro Aravena. The project is an example of "open building", which promotes the ability to reconfigure and add to a building over time. Townhouses are traditionally added to on the rear, but these allow vertical addition next to an original vertical volume. Check out another view of the project in the TownhouseCenter image pool on Flickr, and add you own images of townhouses, rowhouses, shophouses, brownstones, or other small urban buildings.
It's a Small World: Singapore's Shophouse Districts
From Slouching Somewhere, a blog post about a visit to Singapore with colorful photos of shophouses: "Among its attractions, what I was most interested to see were the districts that possessed culture and character in every corner. Singapore had been criticized for the lack of both when it began to prosper back in the 1970s and 80s. But it does have them, albeit too gentrified for some. And the charming shophouses definitely boast both culture and character in its history and architecture." The shophouses featured seem to be from Singapore's Chinatown (Ann Siang Hill), Kampong Glam (Arab Quarter), Emerald Hill, and Little India. Full post here. What could small urban buildings do for your city?
Update: Slouching Somewhere posted more photos from Ann Siang Hill.
Hong Kong Shophouse Preservation Obstacles
From Urbanphoto.net an article celebrating Hong Kong's shophouses and the people who promote their preservation: "What complicates matters is that few individual shophouses are worthy of being considered historic monuments, says Lee [Ho-yin, the director of the University of Hong Kong’s architectural conservation program], who calls them 'the speculative buildings of their time,' not altogether different in purpose from the glossy apartment towers being built today. Many of the worst-preserved shophouses are located where redevelopment pressure is intense and owners can expect a big payout if they sell their building to developers. 'We’re so used to the kind of large-scale development done by big developers or the URA that we take it for granted that this is the only way to do things,' [Lee Ho-yin] says. 'One reason Hong Kong is so weak at historic conservation is the lack of diversity in our land development system.'" Full article here. The article mentions a Flickr photo pool of Hong Kong Shophouses.
Small Urban Building Preservation in Cincinnati, Ohio
I read dozens of web pages every day about small urban buildings (set a Google Alert for "townhouse" and see what I mean), but one that not only caught my eye but also continued to impress upon further investigation belongs to Over-the-Rhine Community Housing in Cincinnati, Ohio. I recently posted about OTRCH's new construction townhouse project, City Home, but the organization has accomplished several redevelopment and preservation projects: 228 East Clifton, 6 Findlay Street (photo above), 145-147 Mulberry Street, and 1225, 1300, 1301, and 1327 Vine Street. Chapeau! OTRCH's work suggests that the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood is full of small urban buildings to preserve and learn from. For example, OTRCH's architect on the City Home project, Schickel Design, also designed the renovation of a building on 14th Street. A field trip to Cincinnati is in order! But these projects provoke a larger question: what do you call such attached urban buildings that are larger than a typical townhouse but much smaller than a "tower"?
Do Townhouses Generate Less Property Tax?
From Fredericksburg.com, we learn that a county in Virginia recently studied some of its urban planning decisions and their possible economic impacts. One of the topics studied was different building types -- houses, apartments, and townhouses -- and how much each would generate in tax revenue and costs in government services. The study concluded that "Each townhouse costs the county $1,368 -- roughly three times as much as a regular house and about $500 more than an apartment. Those figures compare the cost of county services such as schools and fire protection with tax revenue. Essentially, townhouses demand services similar to those required by regular houses, but their lower values mean less tax revenue." Full article here. (Photo of a townhouse in Fredericksburg, credit weichert.com.)
Update: Townhouse Center makes no representation about the accuracy of the above-mentioned study. See comments for counter-example from reader. Thanks, Dan.
Energy-Neutral Townhouse in Amsterdam Is Burned
Several websites and blogs have already written about this net-zero-energy townhouse in Amsterdam, but Inhabitat.com was the first we found that shared photos of the exterior, which is made of charred (i.e. partially burned) wood "according to an old Japanese technique...so that the top layer is preserved and will never need to be treated" with paint or otherwise. The townhouse was designed by FARO Architecten to passivhaus standards, and also includes a wind turbine. Full article here, with photos of the interior as well as sketches and blueprints.
Townhouses Boosted at the Shanghai World Expo
From the Issaqua Free Press we learn that the governor of Washington spoke at the Shanghai World Expo Sustainable Cities Forum and mentioned a zero-energy townhouse project called zHome being built in one of her state's more progressive cities, Issaqua: "Plans call for zHome to include 10 townhouses designed to produce as much electricity as the units consume. By harnessing solar power and using recycled building materials, developers hope the complex causes only minimal impact to the environment. The city spearheaded the development of zHome, and a private joint venture is responsible for construction and financing." Full article here, video of construction here. (Image credit: z-home.org)
No Secret: Attached Buildings Are Green
From the Philly Daily News, a friendly reminder to residents of rowhouses old and new: "You are green. And you don't even know it. If you own a rowhouse in Philadelphia, you have one of the most energy-efficient houses in the nation. It's true. You're green even if you're a Dallas Cowboys guy. Or a Tea Party gal. The walls you share with your neighbors - love 'em or hate 'em - help your entire block keep heating costs down in the winter and air-conditioners humming less frantically in the summer." Taking the message to the people! Full article here.