Tree Architecture

A shorter post today for those of you who read the entirety of the last one. I frequently find myself thinking about the shape and form of trees. Since I was a child I awed at the tree's ability to withstand most any storm. Granted, the most powerful of Mother Nature's weather will leave the ground bare, but other than those freak occurrences, trees stand up remarkably well to the elements. Why do we not see more buildings with the form and engineering of trees, I often wondered. One may argue the Metabolism movement in Japan created some very interesting tree-like forms.

But the goals of the Metabolites was not to explore how the form of trees might lead to innovative architecture. They were attempting to alleviate the shortage of residential housing in post WWII Japan with limited land. It just so happened the end result of their investigations led to the forms being very much "tree-like." It reminds me of the convergent evolution idea in evolutionary biology. Similar to trees branching to capture as much sunlight, air and water as possible, so too do the clusters of apartments stretch away from the base "trunk" in order to provide the occupants with as much access to environment as those at the floor of the city's "forest." 

Could using trees natural form and strength be utilized unadulterated in construction? 

Whole Trees, an architectural and engineering company out of Wisconsin, seems to be answering that question. Architect Roald Gundersen began using un-milled timbers as structural components in his buildings and the results are truly stunning. Now the so many childhood dreams of living in tree houses like the Swiss Family Robinson can come to fruition. 

What I find most incredible is Gundersen is using what is arguably the most common, most used, building material on Earth, yet is utilizing a nearly unadulterated form. A form that most architects, engineers, contractors, etc., would tell you is suitable for little else but firewood. Could these be the most sustainable structural building elements on Earth? 

Learn more:
Wikipedia entry on Metabolism Architecture
Whole Trees
Building with Whole Trees

English Garden City in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania?

Chatham Village

       In a quiet patch of Mount Washington, overlooking the confluence at the point in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, sits a planned community even few Pittsburghers realize exists. I know because I grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh from the age of 7 until I graduated high school and I had never heard of the tiny community named Chatham Village. Only after enrolling at the University of Colorado to study Environmental Design did I learn of this small patch of homes on Mount Washington and it's incredible significance to the world of comprehensive residential community planning in the United States.

     Near the turn of the twentieth century, Pittsburgh was a major center of coal and steel production and its economy was booming as a result. Beginning in 1910, however, as the coal and steel industries declined, the economy of the Pittsburgh began to follow. After World War I, a nationwide housing shortage intensified the regional shortage with rising construction costs, falling vacancy rates, rising rental rates and purchase prices and the withdrawal of speculative capital. Already suffering from a lack of capital investment in residential housing prior to the war, the city’s housing problems were increased greatly with the national housing shortage and the Great Depression (Lubove 17-22). In the aftermath, a new type of residential neighborhood arose on the hillside overlooking downtown Pittsburgh. Chatham Village, designed by the firm Stein and Wright and funded by the Buhl Foundation, was one of the first residential communities in the United States to be developed using the principles of a new type of community planning. Based on ideas of the English “garden apartment,” the community was designed with row houses separated by gardens, parks, and open green space. Though conceived in 1929 and constructed in 1931, Chatham Village has been deemed successful as both a residential community and a design concept from opening through the modern day. 

A "Garden City"

Ebenezer Howard

       At the end of eighteenth century in London, England, a clerk named Ebenezer Howard, disgusted with the squalor, congestion, and toxicity of the industrialized city, began to investigate alternatives to the crammed, filthy conditions in which the laboring classes lived. The result was the landmark book, Garden Cities of To-morrow, in which Howard describes his ideal “garden city.” Originally published in 1898, and revised in 1902, it drastically changed ideas on land use within cities. Designed to be egalitarian communities, they would enable people to live a balanced life with “all the advantages of the most energetic and active town, with all the beauty and delight of the country” (Howard 10). Incredibly influential on generations of architects and planners, Clarence S Stein and Henry Wright took great interest in Howard’s ideas and began to apply them to American cities. In 1923, Stein founded the Regional Planning Association of America. Suspended only ten years later, the collaboration between “architects, engineers, landscape architects, sociologists, economists, city officials, union leaders and writers” was to study ideas in development, political action, and city building projects (Oberlander & Newbrun). In 1924, Stein and Wright traveled to London, meeting with Howard and his associate Raymond Unwin, and toured the garden cities Howard and Unwin designed. Unwin believed that streets were the worst use of land and that designers must work to group buildings together to leave more room for combined open space for parks, gardens, and recreation areas (Unwin). His ideas for a “garden apartment” were the single most important influence on Stein and Wright’s work in the United States. 

Henry Buhl

      In 1929, as the Great Depression began, the Buhl Foundation had just begun as an endowment from the late Henry J. Buhl Jr., a local retail magnate, with the mandate to be especially concerned with the “well-being of the citizens of the City of Pittsburgh and the County of Allegheny” (Buhl website). Due to the city’s housing crisis, an early mission of the multipurpose foundation was to help fund residential building projects in the area. Led by Charles Lewis, who believed capital investment in decent shelter a moral obligation, the foundation hired the RPAA as consultants for a new model community for Pittsburgh’s middle class residents who had been prevented from finding affordable housing due to the city’s housing crisis and the Depression (Bamberg 6,9). Stein and Wright, along with Frederick Bigger, a member of the Pittsburgh City Planning Commission, worked together to bring the ideals of a new residential community typology to realization in Chatham Village.

Founded on Mount Washington, overlooking the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela and the Ohio rivers, Chatham Village was to be close enough to downtown to allow an easy commute down the incline, a funicular railroad, completed 60 years earlier, and  having steeply undulating topography thought unsuitable for development, was one of the largest untouched and unpolluted areas in the city. This relative isolation, in addition to being adjacent to a city park, gives Chatham Village a large greenbelt on nearly three-quarters of its border. Stein wrote in his book Toward New Towns that the greenbelt was necessary to insulate the “community from neighborhood depreciation and external annoyance” (Stein 85). 

Plan of Chatham Village

      These developments in the design and implementation of Stein and Wright’s ideas on residential communities were deemed quite successful at the time, so much so that on the day phase one  of Chatham Village opened, prior to the landscaping having been finished, twenty thousand people waited in lines to see the houses. Drawn by the new technological features of the houses, including gas heat, electric refrigeration and a private laundry, as well features of the landscaping, including buried utilities, off street parking, and the abundant green space, occupancy rates the first year were over 99 percent (Bamberg 71).  While some of this crowd may have been attributed to a good marketing campaign by the Buhl Foundation, general interest in new model communities and economic timing, the research and design was thorough and took over two years. Charles Lewis, the director of the Buhl Foundation, attributed the success to that painstaking research in economic, sociological, site planning, and architectural studies (Stein 257).

      If one can judge the success of a residential community on the occupancy rates, both then and now, people seem to enjoy Chatham Village. Occupancy rates have been extremely high and tenant turnover rates extremely low, ever since opening. Stein wrote in Towards New Towns in 1951 that for the first 15 years the average tenancy was 7 years and there was always a long waiting list (Stein 257). Bamberg writes sixty years later that “occupancy has never dropped below 97.5 percent and has hovered near 100 percent since 1936” (116). Occupancy rates are not the only indicator of resident contentment however. Anecdotally, present day residents of the homes also seem to take great pride and joy in their neighborhood. Resident Sarah Tencza says, “I don’t think there is a downside” and neighbor, architect David Vater, even nominated Chatham Village for designation as a National Historic Landmark, an honor bequeathed in 2005 (Lowry).  Based on the popularity of the buildings, landscaping, and community services, throughout its history, Chatham Village has remained an extremely desirable place to live.

"Garden" party!!!  Sorry, couldn't help myself.

      While having some detractors, Stein and Wrights design and implementation for Chatham Village has become greatly influential on an entire movement of residential planning. Though criticized by Jane Jacobs in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities as a “sheltered ‘togetherness’ world” insulated and homogenous, many more have found great inspiration and guidance from Chatham Village. While not quite living up to the ideals of Chatham Village, particularly in regards to greenbelts and landscaping, the Federal Housing Administration began to take notice of Stein and Wrights designs and consulted with them to implement some of the ideas into new public housing in the mid 1930’s. Imitations of Chatham Village designed by Stein or Wright or both collaboratively and built by the FHA were Buckingham Village and Colonial Village in Arlington, Virginia, Baldwin Hills Village in Los Angeles, and Hancock Village in Boston (Bamberg 136). Bahaus architect Walter Gropius attempted to merge the modernist International Style with the Chatham Village model at Aluminum City in New Kensington, PA in 1941 (Bamberg 147,148). The City Housing Authority of Pittsburgh also attempted to utilize principles of the RPAA and Chatham Village in public housing projects in the early 1940’s at Bedford Dwellings and Terrace Village. While almost roundly criticized as a failure, Bedford Dwellings and Terrace Village were cheaply constructed, poorly implemented variations of Stein and Wrights principles, but were nonetheless directly influenced by Chatham Village (Bamberg 155-158). Chatham Village and its sister communities designed by the RPAA, Sunnyside Gardens and Radburn, had their greatest influence on the discourse of neighborhood planning beginning in the late 1980’s. During this time new ideas on community planning and design began to spring forth. Led by planners Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, New Urbanism sought to promote the preservation of old neighborhoods and create new ones based on a regular street grid, a distinguishable town center, wide sidewalks, prominent front porches, a mixture of housing types and incomes, and use of regional building styles and materials (Duany and Plater-Zyberk). 

Seaside, Florida. A New Urbanism town.

    
       These design concepts were intended to promote a better sense of community, foster neighborhood relationships, encourage walkability, and most of all, create a sense of place. While having some significant differences, the dense, walkable, mixed-use grid of New Urbanism draws directly from Chatham Village’s clustered residences centered around walkable gardens. Like Chatham Village’s imitators, New Urbanism projects also have their share of successes and failures but the influence on the principles behind the designs are directly correlated to the principles of Stein and Wright and the RPAA. Namely, that a neighborhood deliberately designed can promote civic vitality in the life of the residents (Bamberg 185).

       Critically, Chatham Village has also mostly withstood the test of time. Many publications and associations have attached great importance to the lasting influence and legacy of Chatham Village. In the May 1960 issue, Architectural Forum hailed Chatham Village as “one of the earliest, most famous, and in many ways still the most successful of America’s planned ‘garden’ communities.” As stated prior, the entire neighborhood was listed as a National Historic Landmark in 2005, further designating the importance of the village to the history of the United States. Paul Farmer, as executive director of the American Planning Association, wrote in the June 2007 journal issue that Chatham Village is “one of the best examples of great planning” and the APA named it a “Great Neighborhood” as one of America’s Great Places in 2010. 

      Though inspiring some less successful imitations, Chatham Village itself has enjoyed near 100 percent occupancy, extremely high resident satisfaction, and heaps of critical acclaim throughout its 90 year history. The principles of Stein and Wright and the Regional Planning Association of America that were utilized at Chatham Village led to the neighborhood’s success as a residential community and was a watershed in the American planning lexicon. Inspiring dozens of imitators and praising Stein and Wright as godfathers of a new American planning movement, Chatham Village cemented its place in the history of neighborhood community planning.  The successfulness of Chatham Village as both a residential community and a lasting design concept for neighborhood planning has been confirmed through occupancy rates, resident’s testimony, lasting influence on ideas about planning, and critical praise.


Want to learn more? Check the links:

Chatham Village Coop
Chatham Village - Wikipedia Entry
Application for National Historic Landmark Status
Chatham Village - Pittsburgh's Garden City By Angelique Bamberg

I relied heavily on Ms. Bamberg's excellent tome during my research and
writing. Highly recommended reading for those interested to learn more.

Works Cited 

The 2011-2012 Travel and Tourism Market Research Handbook. Richard K. Miller and Associates. 2011. p251-254. Web. EbscoHost.

Bamberg, A. Chatham Village: Pittsburgh’s Garden City. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 2011. Print.

Buhl Foundation website. Located under the “Who are we” link under the heading Objectives. www.buhlfoundation.org “Chatham Village Revisited.” Architectural Forum May 1960, Vol.112. p118-121. (Out of print, referenced in “1930s: Chatham Village.” (2005 March 26) Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Web. www.postgazette.com

Duany, A. & Plater-Zyberk, E. Towns and Town Making Principles. New York: Rizzoli. 1991.
Farmer, P. “Chatham Village Turns 75.” Planning: June 2007, Vol. 73 Issue 6, p6. Web. EbscoHost.

Howard, E. Garden Cities of To-Morrow. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press. 1965. p10. Print.

Jacobs, J. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House. 1961. p64. Print.

Lowry, P. (2012 March 26) “Meadowcraft, Chatham Village become Landmarks.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Web. www.postgazette.com

Lubove, R. Community Planning in the 1920s: The Contribution of the Regional Planning Association of America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 1963. p17-22. Print.

Oberlander, H.P. & Newbrun, E. Houser: The Life and Work of Catherine Bauer. Vancouver, B.C., Canada: UBC Press. 1999. p68. Print.

Stein, C. S. Toward New Towns for America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1951. Print.

Unwin, R. Town Planning in Practice: an Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs. London: T. Fisher Unwin. 1909. p164. Print.

"Modernism" in Architecture

To define Modern architecture as a period of novel architectural development between roughly 1890 and 1960 would be to seriously discount the accomplishments of many great designers. Not to mention that the architectural styles explored during this period have very little in common from an aesthetic perspective. Projects built in arts and crafts style in both Britain and America appear to be the polar opposite of buildings such as Villa Savoye or the Seagrams tower. The defining characteristic of Modern architecture is not one of a particular style or movement, but the summation of many “new” styles, all diverting greatly from the assumptions of architectural history. However, in attempting to divest themselves of the history of architecture, namely Beaux Arts and eceleticism, they were in fact responding to the very movements they were to trying to discount. This period of upheaval in architecture corresponded to a period of global and cultural upheaval and reflected that uneasiness in the myriad “styles” that modern architecture attempted to portray. As new technologies appeared, new solutions of engineering were utilized. With the cultural disturbances of war and urbanization, new architectural forms were generated, in an attempt to humanize the urban environments that so many people were migrating to in search of opportunity. With each new development in the human condition in the early 20th century, a new architecture was developed concurrently to both enhance the good qualities and decrease the bad qualities associated with these newfound urbanities. This dialogue with the current cultural conditions defines “Modern” architecture far more than any particular style, architect or building.

Architecture, Art, and Design

All the best designers write. Extensively. The intension is to hone my writing skills in regards to architecture, art and design in hopes to raise awareness of important work and to reveal and forge new, interesting connections among that work. A place to investigate and hopefully draw conclusions about the most famous works of design and their relation to other works of art, architecture, and design, both modern and ancient. Mostly it will be a place to spew my vitriolic rhetoric (kidding) about various new design projects/products. May also be a forum to display some of my own work. So without further adieu....