Missing in Action_The Individual Part II

LWPAC’s Roar_one development of stacked homes in Vancouver is a vision of dense urban living. Situated above a shopping district on West 10th Street and resembling a converted warehouse, the complex is designed with an open living concept. Fitted with ten residential units, the model utilizes maximum space efficiency and features natural light and airflow. Roar_one architect Oliver Lang is optimistic about future projects: “We need more flexibility in bylaws to create more height. This [Roar_one] is a worthwhile model, but would be more successful with another set of units built on top.”

www.vancouver.ca/ecodensity

In Vancouver, the attempt to make large numbers of single-family houses cohere by stacking them on top of each other has resulted in the vertical embodiment of the suburban phenomenon – an endless sea of towers upon townhouses in which the desire for individual expression has been perverted into a need to be indistinguishable. For the most part, the complexities that converge in the North American dwelling have been reiterated and exacerbated rather than resolved by strategies that have indeed produced architectural and social order. Once established, this order is visibly and inherently problematic.

A profound issue confronting contemporary architecture is the fact that the cultural importance of the discipline that enabled architecture to take meaningful action was historically derived from a faith in a building’s capacity to produce order – in itself and society. Today, however, the very concept of order has become suspect. The denaturalization of language, context, time, and the human associated with the postmodern condition is increasingly revealing the ideological basis of order in efforts not to equalize but to eradicate difference. Order is rapidly retreating as a means of insuring personal liberty and emerging as a source of social repression and control. This graduation project attempts to demonstrate in different ways the impact on architecture being made by this new understanding of “order” as a social construct with only contingent value.

The traditional solution to growth – densification – is increasingly resisted by community groups because dense buildings are perceived to generate choking traffic and curbside parking problems, packed apartment houses and overburdened sewer lines and street infrastructure are considered physically inappropriate when juxtaposed against existing smaller scale neighbourhoods, and, though rarely articulated, because denser housing types symbolically stand for the rapid intrusion of people of different colours and languages who are perceived to represent a challenge to the hegemony of homeowner values (Unfortunately, the slower growth ascribed by those in opposition to density, ultimately means too few houses and apartments, which lead to the inevitable jump in housing prices. Paradoxically, proponents of density see High-rise living actually reversing the negative effects of automobile traffic such as road congestion, air pollution and gasoline consumption) This latter paranoia is only fed when the newcomers are people of low income and the spectre of dropping land values is raised in anguish-filled community halls and public forums. In order to convince voters that density is vital to sustainability and future prosperity, mayor Sam Sullivan and Director of Planning Brent Toderian have repackaged densification in the form of “EcoDensity”…more on this later.

Missing in Action_The Individual, Part I

Le Corbusier’s housing project in Le Pressac, France attempted to erase class segregation through a fundamental and ordered hegemony of form.

The fusion of social order with the order of individual lodging assigned to architecture the task of negotiating the complex relation between the public and the private. From the moment families began to identify themselves with their houses, the single-family house was burdened with the need to reinforce individual integrity while simultaneously demonstrating the individual’s relation to a larger social continuum. This conflict is reenacted with the design of every dwelling. No house can escape the fact that its sanctity as a private interior in which the most intimate aspects of life are defined will be compromised by the intrusion of public notions of order and reason. Even if physically and psychologically removed from other human beings and their shelters, the interiority of a private retreat inevitably reaches a point where it confronts the public realm. In multi-unit dwellings, townhouses, and other dwelling alternatives to the single-family house, the relation to the street embodies a certain confrontation or alternatively, a consensus on how the connected dwelling behaves in the context of the street, and/or the public realm. Generic spaces such as balconies, steps, patio gardens represent the contribution individual units make in the absence of front or back yards, garages, or the seeming individuality of the single family house.

The nature of this confrontation in the modern world would begin to crystallize when the design of a house was multiplied, conceptually, to produce the design of housing. The modern city is the spatial counterpart to this moment of crystallization, for the urban terrain is where the private order of the individual is most intensely juxtaposed with the social order of the public sphere. As urban populations escalated during the nineteenth century, this intensity burgeoned with two seemingly contradictory results. On the one hand, the “masses” were housed in residences that, with some variations in their urban configuration, were characterized above all by their large number of utterly undifferentiated units. Individuals were housed and thus valued on some level, but differences between individuals and the inequities they revealed were decisively repressed. At the same time, the more mobile classes moved out from urban centers in an effort to preserve the sanctity of their homes. The stylistic expression of this effort, significantly contemporaneous to the uniform dwelling, was historical eclecticism. This apparent celebration of difference and individuality through formal variety revealed only the underlying homogeneity of suburban exclusiveness and thus paralleled the repression of heterogeneity taking place in the city.

The inadequacy of nineteenth-century strategies encouraged the Modern Movement to further erase difference – difference between city and country, between classes, between house and housing. Le Corbusier’s 1929 Villa Savoye and housing project in Pessac of 1925, for example, are designed according to a fundamentally similar order despite their profoundly distinct contextual, economic, and social conditions. The International Style imposed an even more aggressive formal unity in an effort to dissolve the barriers separating public and private space.

More to come in Part II...