FINAL Review Flashcards
1949 American Housing Act
A landmark, sweeping expansion of the federal role in mortgage insurance and issuance and the construction of public housing. It was part of President Harry Truman’s program of domestic legislation, the Fair Deal. Housing Act of 1949: Urban Renewal○
Federal subsidy plus eminent domain to produce marketable development sites at below cost in central cities to compete for investment with suburbs
Objectives
■ Provision of low-cost housing
■ To improve the housing of the poor
■ To increase construction and stimulate the economy
Drawbacks
-No money set aside for maintenance
Belair at Bowie
A major single family residential development 18 miles outside downtown washington
Builder: William Levitt
Appealed to the middle class; resembled a country club; ads in newspaper
- Open floor plans (family wants to be together, walls are expensive)
- The Colonial: family room right next to kitchen; generally a more open floorplan
- The Rancher: dining room and living room are connected; a wing dedicated to bedrooms; kitchen and family room connected; laundry room far from bedroomsto avoid noise
- The concept of a laundry room was revolutionary in itself
- The Country Clubber: more expensive than the other models; owners didn’t wantto live next to models of half the price, so Levitt made an exclusive area just forthese expensive homes
Bullocks on Wilshire
Located at 3050 Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, California, is a massive 230,000-square-foot Art Deco building.
Completed in 1929 as a luxury department store for owner John G. Bullock (owner of the more mainstream Bullock’s in Downtown Los Angeles).
Significance: One of the first department stores in Los Angeles to cater to the burgeoning automobile culture. It was located in a then-mostly residential district, its objective to attract shoppers who wanted a closer place to shop than Downtown Los Angeles.
Traditional display windows faced the sidewalk, but they were decorated to catch the eyes of motorists. Since most customers would arrive by vehicle, the most appealing entrance was placed in the rear. Under the city’s first department store porte cochere (Henry Sachs-designed), valets in livery welcomed patrons and parked their cars
Defend Boyle Heights
● Anti gentrification organization/activists who are concerned about gentrification and displacement in Boyle Heights.
● They specifically targeted Art Galleries in boyle heights.
● They viewed galleries as a means of bringing gentrification to their community (making it into
more of a high demand “luxury zone”). Artists and art galleries are part of the first stages of gentrification. Artists have often turned empty warehouses into art spaces, which in turn makes the community more popular brings in rich millennials into the area. Eventually this increases rent prices and leads to development projects (creates displacement)
Victor Gruen
Lecture: Cities of the Future
● Father of suburban malls, typifies shopping mall design
● Worked on Master plan for Fort Worth to recreate a Vienna experience, avoid a suburban metropolis with no center ( Highway Circulation and Parking plans tried to take cars out of the CBD and replace w/ Shuttle cars
### 7th St. 2-Level Shopping Center ● Wanted to revitalize CBDs through walking ● Preserve, protect, defend mononuclear city
Urban acupuncture
● The socio-environmental theory that uses small-scale interventions to transform the larger urban context.
● Just as the practice of acupuncture is aimed at relieving stress in the human body, the goal of urban acupuncture is to relieve stress in the built environment.
● In Taipei, there was an urban acupuncture workshop that aimed to “produce small-scale but socially catalytic interventions” into the city’s fabric
Sites are selected through analysis of aggregate social, economic and ecological factors, and are developed through a dialogue between designers and the community.
Irvine Vision
A classic example of being the most innovative mass housing market in US
○ “Metropolitan field”
■ City centers were dotted in a largely urbanized landscape. There are many cores, not just one.
○ Environmental perception and legibility
■ Legible means that an environment’s parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern. A highly legible city will seem well formed, distinct, remarkable and will be valued by both insiders and outsiders
○ Social mix through market segmentation
■Experimented with housing unit designs → achieved mix for reasons of design and sales
○ Planning for the car
■ Early planners created identifiable residential and industrial districts surrounded by a loose grid of landscaped arterials leading to a concentrated and convenient shopping areas. The interiors of villages contained numerous traffic-calming features with fairly extensive pedestrian paths
Landschaftspark
A public park located in Duisburg-Meiderich, Germany. It was designed in 1991 by Latz and Peter Latz,
with the intention that it works to heal and understand the industrial past, rather than trying to reject it.
The park closely associates itself with the past use of the site: a coal and steel production plant. It was the park he showed in class which looked like a coal mine but was meant for kids to use to have fun
William Levitt
Lecture: Community Builders to Master Planners
Reading: Beyond Levittown
Considered the “Henry Ford of Homebuilders”
Innovations:
The delivery of housing materials to the building site waiting for construction
Owned a lumber mill in CA to reduce costs
- First time seeing a model home (evokes a lifestyle, helps
potential buyers picture themselves there, especially
targeting the mother of the home)
- Had great success with his marketing and advertising campaigns compare other home builders because of his access to capital and success allowed him to create big print ads such as a full 6 page ad for his Belair development
-Levitt was successful because his homes were cheaper than competitors because he didn’t provide options for homes besides the different design layouts and his economies of scale from building so many houses
Developments:
Levittown
Federal Triangle
Belair (living rooms start to dominate)
Periphery Development
Lecture: The Beginnings of an Efficient SFR
A scientifically planned community
Examples: Lakewood Cliff May Homes Eichler Homes The Manhattan Project
Frederick Law Olmstead Jr.
●Olmsted was a huge influence in the creation of the National Park Service
●For thirty years he advised the National Park Service on issues of management and the conservation of water and scenic resources
Devoted much of his time to public service, consulting on issues of the conservation and preservation of the country’s state and national parks and remaining wilderness areas.
Radiant City
Conceived by Corbusier.
A vision of a city depicting how cities “should” be (dramatic high rises with low density surroundings)
Considered the “image of the old mononuclear urban area”
Towers in a park with a separation of foot and car traffic;
clustering population and separating economic activities into discrete compact areas –integrating green space, parks and recreation between these dense uses.
Le Corbusier
Swiss architect that was one of the leaders of the modern movement of architecture
-admired the style from Walter Gropius bauhaus
●He created the Radiant City (high density) and saw communal living as a societal plus but his notion to stack people up vertically rather than horizontally was his greatest contribution to utopian thinking
●He preferred to build up rather than out - “build to the sky” density
Row Houses
a group of low-rise residential buildings that share one or both side walls and a roofline with the structures next door
Advantages
Have a natural density to them
● Can get a bunch of them on a block
● Can create a greater sense of community
○ Stoop life in places with lots of row houses and brownstones becomes part of urban life○ Wardman buildings in a way that increases privacy while opening public life
○ When you build a house you build with 4 sides, but with row houses you build only 3 sides
● Really great affordable housing
Drawbacks
Tactical Urbanism
A collection of low-cost, temporary changes to the built environment, usually in cities, intended to improve local neighbourhoods and city gathering places.
○ It is very deliberate, very local, and very short term.
■ Example: Dumpsters being turned into pools in NY; Public sidewalk parkways in downtown LA
Broadacre City
An urban or suburban development concept proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright
○Decentralized city
○Focus on individualism
○Non-urban, agricultural existence
■Each family gets a plot of land
■Similar to Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City○High reliance on automobiles
■Exact opposite of transit oriented development
■Embracing suburbia○Continuous growth is a fundamental
Micro Units
A small studio apartment typically less than 350 square feet with a fully functioning and accessibility compliant kitchen and bathroom
● Often associated with high density, overcrowding and transient populations
