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Valley
News, February 15, 2003
Donald Maurice Kreis
Two
years ago, New Hampshire Public Radio turned to an architectural
metaphor when NHPR wanted to start a new local interview program
that would promote the notion of New Hampshire as a community, of
New Hampshire people as having a shared culture and destiny regardless
of their particular economic circumstances. The radio producers
called their program “The Front Porch.”
Reversing the
metaphorical process – restoring the image of the front porch to
the reality of dwellingplaces – turns out to be a key aspect of
successfully solving a problem that has bedeviled communities in
Vermont as well as New Hampshire in recent years: that of providing
decent and affordable housing for those whose circumstances do not
permit them to buy the pricey real estate in places like Norwich
or Hanover.
Thanks in no
small part to the work of the Upper Valley Housing Coalition, and
the concerns of major employers who find themselves unable to expand
because potential workers are unable to afford the available homes,
affordable housing is very much on the regional agenda. Here,
as elsewhere, it is increasingly being referred to as “workforce”
housing, to convey the shortage’s significance for the local economy.
For those who care about the quality as well as the quantity of
the Upper Valley’s built environment, the question naturally arises:
Is it possible to have good architecture in the context of affordable
housing?
For Len Cadwallader,
executive director of Vital Communities in White River Junction,
the answer is an unambiguous “yes.” And Cadwallader, whose organization
promotes the development of affordable housing as one of its core
missions, is willing to drive a skeptic around the area to prove
it.
“This is the
epitome of what smart growth is all about,” Cadwallader declares
in downtown Lebanon, showing off the former railroad depot and overalls
factory that the Twin Pines Housing Trust has redeveloped into the
20-unit affordable housing project Spencer Square. Schools, recreational
facilities, the local senior center, a supermarket and public transportation
are all within easy walking distance. Architecturally speaking,
Cadwallader admires the details – light fixtures, covered doorways,
big windows, handsome dustpan dormers. “They’ve done some things
that make people so proud of the place where they live,” he notes.
Another project
of which Cadwallader is fond is Anne’s Place, nearing completion
on Route 4 in Enfield. Designed as transitional housing – i.e.,
as a temporary dwellingplace for homeless families – this 11-unit
complex includes a pre-existing home that is being remodeled.
The idea here is to achieve unobtrusiveness – to do the opposite,
aesthetically speaking, of shouting “housing project!” to neighbors
and town officials who might be skeptical about such a development
in their community. Thus, Anne’s Place is clad in white vinyl
siding designed to mimic the clapboard of historic New England homes;
the mass and roof line of the main building imitates the old church
across the street.
“So what if
it’s vinyl siding,” says Cadwallader. “It’s going to make somebody
who’s had a hard knock feel good about themselves again.”
Nobody with
compassion could argue with that. Nor could anybody with a social
conscience fail to appreciate the generous loft spaces inside the
units at Anne’s Place – which have the capacity to make these homes
seem light, airy and congenial. One appreciates this all the more
by talking with Roy Ward, a St. Johnsbury architect who helped design
Anne’s Place. Ward reports that it cost an inexensive $80 a square
foot to construct the buildings at Anne’s Place, but that some of
the government agencies who helped fund the project thought $65
was a more appropriate figure.
“I
haven’t done any projects for $65 a square foot for a long time,”
Ward notes. By way of comparison, Berry Library at Dartmouth cost
upwards of $200 per square foot.
The
residents of Anne’s Place, and Spenser Square, and the thousands
of other affordable units that must be added to the Upper Valley’s
housing stock if our local communities are to continue to thrive
and to grow, deserve not just good but great architecture at least
as much as the users of Dartmouth’s academic buildings do. To
make such a statement pays no disrespect to the Len Cadwalladers
and Roy Wards of Vermont and New Hampshire, who work day after day
just to achieve a beach-head of “good” in the eternal struggle with
penhy-pinching funding sources and local planning boards with a
distaste for anything but single-family homes on one-acre lots.
What would great architecture in the realm of affordable housing
look like?
One
famous example has stood for nearly 36 years, and was joyfully pored
over by millions of people when it was opened on the grounds of
Expo 67 in Montreal. The 158-unit Habitat complex made its architect,
the Israeli-born Moshe Safdie, famous. Twelve stories high, Habitat
became an icon by playing with two elements that are key to beautiful
design: unity and diversity. The unity arises out of the concrete
blocks that appear to make up Habitat’s basic structure, and the
diversity of the design is a function of the blocks’ apparently
random placement – as if the whole complex had been designed by
a playful toddler.
Twelve
stories of stacked blocks would hardly be appropriate for anywhere
in the Upper Valley, but Habitat proved that prefabrication does
not have to mean monotony and ugliness. The concrete modules that
comprise Habitat were each built in a factory and transported to
the site. Likewise, the Neagley & Chase construction firm
that does most of the work for Twin Pines is able to keep costs
down by fabricating whole parts of projects like Anne’s Place in
their South Burlington headquarters and trucking them south.
A generation
later, the architect Samuel Mockbee took up a key affordable housing
question left unanswered by Habitat: Would low-income people accept
the vocabulary of modern architecture and thrive in a home that
did not necessarily resemble those of their neighbors?
Mockbee,
who died a year ago, had a thriving practice in Mississippi that
allowed him to design expensive homes for clients well schooled
in the latest artistic trends. He came to find this not completely
satisfying and so, in 1992, he founded Rural Studio. Using architecture
students from Auburn University, Mockbee and Rural Studio would
head for Hale County, Alabama – a place populated largely by the
descendants of African American sharecroppers. It is not a wealthy
community. There Mockbee and his students would design and build
homes and various community facilities, using inexpensive and sometimes
recycled or salvaged materials.
Sufficient
to earn Mockbee a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” in 2000, this
Rural Studio work is striking in its use of extravagant building
forms. As Andrea Oppenheimer Dean pointed out in her 2002 book
about Mockbee, his Rural Studio homes have “exaggerated, protective
roofs that appear to float over sturdy walls” – design gestures
that suggest permanence and even opulence to people whose visual
memories revolve around the contrast between stately Georgian or
Greek Revival plantation mansions and the more unassuming roof lines
and walls of sheds, barns and trailers. The most widely photographed
of these projects is known as the “Butterfly House,” so clearly
does its roofline suggest a pair of spreading wings.
Dean
also points out that the homes Mockbee and his students designed
for the rural poor have much in common with dwellings Mockbee created
for clients with million-dollar budgets. There was nothing magic
about getting working class people to accept challenging architecture;
Mockbee and his students would simply take the time to create several
design proposals and allow the prospective occupants to choose their
favorite. Six years after his Rural Studio home was completed,
client Shepard Bryant said to Oppenheimer of his architect-builders:
“I believe the Lord sent them by.”
Excellence
in affordable housing design does not necessarily require such divine
inspiration. Not far from Anne’s Place in Enfield is an example
of an affordable housing design that is, in its way, just as noteworthy
as anything Safdie or Mockbee have produced. The Mill Houses,
built in the 1920s to house workers at the industrial facility for
which they are named, are modestly sized duplexes with a plethora
of humane architectural details – the most noteworthy of which is
that every unit has a front porch.
“Front
porches are great places to watch the neighborhood, but they haven’t
been built on houses for 40 years,” laments Cadwallader. Advocates
like Cadwallader know that in order to be affordable, new housing
developments in the Upper Valley must include a much higher density
than that which is typical for area communities. Instead of minimum
house lots of one acre, homes must be built on plots as small as
1/8 acre, if only to keep the cost of land within reason. Making
places like that liveable requires something of a paradigm shift
so that, instead of driving down a street to confront a parade of
garages, one finds a real neighborhood with pedestrian-oriented
street life. That means front porches, the experts agree.
“Housing
is not a single issue – it’s connected to all parts of our communities
and economies,” argues Norwich landscape architect and planner Robert
White. By that he means that well-designed affordable housing
does not simply benefit its occupants and their employers. It
also allows for sustainable development, the preservation of open
space, diminished reliance on gaz-guzzling automobiles and the nurturing
of real communities as opposed to bedroom suburbs.
White
has been less than fully persuasive oflate, at least insofar as
the plan of his client Alex Iskandar to build at least 300 housing
units on Old Pine Tree Cemetery Road is concerned. The Lebanon
City Council recently voted 7-1 against the requisite zoning change,
which now goes before town voters.
However
one views that controversy, White’s view of the architectural issues
is persuasive. He mentions innovative European designs, that make
use of unusual cladding materials like metal and cement-based fiberboard
and that depart from the traditional building profile. Although
he concedes that “our areas are a little to conservative for Frank
Gehry,” referring to the famous American designer of blob-like buildings,
he is quick to show a picture of an affordable housing design in
Massachusetts by the architect William Rawn, the same designer who
recently created some new housing for Dartmouth College. Rawn’s
affordable housing design is a multi-unit building that in its form
and profile closely resembles the traditional New England connected
farmhouse, with its pleasing variety of shapes and its friendly,
protected dooryard.
Another
building form White believes could gain acceptance here is the so-called
live-work space – a home in which one commutes to work by walking
downstairs. This is a small step, he notes, from the historically
accepted paradigm of mixed-use buildings with commercial space on
street level and apartments above. “It’s a perfect place for a
high-tech company,” he notes, or an independent contractor who would
like both to work at home and have a “public front.”
Great architecture
in the context of affordable housing is within the Upper Valley’s
grasp. There are few, if any, architects in the region who are
incapable of designing such a commission thoughtfully, and most
would savor the opportunity to confront the challenges of using
mass-produced building parts to the maximum extent possible, and
creating a sense of privacy and community for units that are more
tightly clustered than the present norm. It’s the inverse of the
the famous “Field of Dreams” aphorism: They will build it, if we
come and ask for it.
“Upper Valley
residents are willing to buy housing in dense arrangements,” insists
White. “The market for village housing is extremely strong because
people want neighborhoods,” but “bottom line” economics decisions
are creating “monotonous” housing. To change that, he says, it will
take more than just money, community involvement, imagination and
political will. It will also take courage.
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